3IRD NOTES 

 NEWS. 



*P 



collar letter issuetr ^pcriobicalliJ bjr tljz j^oriet|i for t(je 

 l^roiBXtion of giroa. 



CONTENTS. 



The Biograpliy of a Lie. 

 Bird Protection in Ireland. 

 Notes— H.M. Coastguard. 



Egg Lifting in Scotland. 

 Sparrow Clubs. 

 Goring League. 

 Army and Navy Stores. 



2.— JULY, 1903. 



County Council Orders. 



Cork Exhibition. 



Bird Protection in the West Indies. 



Plovers' Egps. 



News from Branches. 



Lectures. 



In the Courts. 



Picture Postcards. 



Next Issue. 



London, 3, Hanover Square, 



PNH 



THE 



OF 



BIOGRAPHY 

 A LIE, 



HEN the history comes to be written 

 — and it will be a long one — of the 

 crazes and follies of fashion, there 

 will be no more remarkable story in 

 the whole collection than that of the 

 "osprey " plume. 



Fifty years hence, when the egret 

 has been practically exterminated, or its plumes are 

 no longer considered fit wear for civilized women, 

 our descendants will read with amazement that, at a 

 period when woman was loudly claiming to be 

 intellectual, rational, and cultured, she became 

 possessed of a passion for ornamenting her head- 

 gear with a certain tuft of plumes ; that to procure 

 this she had distant lands ransacked and beautiful 

 harmless birds ruthlessly slaughtered in their 

 breeding time, and nestlings by the hundreds of 

 thousands starved to death ; that she was deaf 

 to the appeals of the humane against the wide- 

 spread and wanton cruelty involved, deaf to the 

 invective of the naturalist as he looked forward to 

 the extirpation of a noble species, deaf to the 

 contempt and disgust of the thoughtful, expressed 

 plainly enough by the Press of the day ; careless 

 as to how the creatures were done to death, or 

 what the world lost of life and loveliness. 



They will further read that when the voice of pro- 

 test became too loud to be ignored, and threatened 

 to interfere with business interests, the trade — at 

 the very time that the plumes of tens of thousands 

 of herons and egrets were being sold annually in 

 London auction-rooms, and cries of indignation and 

 expostulation at the massacres of the plume-hunters 

 were going up from Florida, Mexico, Venezuela, 



India, China — at this very time the trade denied 

 again and again the familiar scientific fact as to 

 the origin of the plumes, and declared them to be 

 artificial, " manufactured " out of all manner of 

 material other than egret feathers. 



In 1896, when these plumes were being sold as 

 artificial, in order to satisfy the scruples of bird- 

 lovers, Sir William Flower, then Director of the 

 Natural History Museum, wrote to the Times to 

 protest against the use of this " glaring falsehood" 

 to bolster up a fashion by which one of the most 

 beautiful of birds was being swept off the face of 

 the earth. In the spring of the present year the 

 same falsehood was circulated in fashion journals 

 and told in milliners' shops, with extraordinary 

 eagerness. The Society for the Protection of 

 Birds, anxious to obtain samples of the "imitation 

 ospreys," of which so much was heard, but of which 

 it had never been able to procure a single example, 

 again investigated the matter. Its representatives 

 purchased specimens, which were sold and invoiced 

 as artificial, at leading drapery and millinery esta- 

 blishments in the West End and elsewhere. Appa- 

 rently there was no difficulty in procuring the 

 article ; every shop visited professed to supply it, 

 though at two (and two only) the assistants, when 

 questioned, admitted that "imitation'' was simply 

 a trade name, and that no such things as artificial 

 " ospreys " were to be had. The specimens were sent 

 to the Natural History Museum for examination, 

 and the Society has the authority of Professor Ray 

 Lankester and Dr. Bowdler Sharpe for stating that 

 one and all are genuine — the nuptial feathers of the 

 egret. Other " ospreys" from different parts of the 

 country have been submitted to the same authori- 

 ties ; these, too, were all sold as artificial ; these, too, 

 all proved to be real. The Society has also asked 



