BIRD NOTES AND NEWS. 



69 



gratulate our Audubon brethren heartily upon their 

 enterprise and vigour, and will hope that cause for 

 mutual congratulation may increase as the years 

 go on. 



OSTRICH PLUCKING. 



The Audubon Societies' Educational Leaflet No. 

 13 deals with the Ostrich, with especial reference 

 to ostrich farms and the wearing of ostrich 

 feathers, to which these Societies, like our own, 

 offer no objection. In the course of some details 

 of the industry in America, it is added : — 



" Probably there are no wild Ostriches now 

 killed for plumage. The feathers of the domesti- 

 cated bird are very much finer and better than 

 those of the wild Ostrich. 



" Plucking is done by putting the Ostrich in a 

 V-shaped corral just large enough to admit its 

 body, with room for the workman. A hood, 

 shaped like a long stocking, is placed over the 

 head of the Ostrich, when it becomes perfectly 

 docile. The workman then raises the wings and 

 clips the feathers that are fully ripe. Great care 

 is exercised at this time, as a premature cutting of 

 the feathers deteriorates the succeeding feather 

 growth. 



"There is no possibility of inflicting pain in 

 plucking an Ostrich ; not a drop of blood is 

 drawn, nor a nerve touched. The large feathers 

 are cut off, and in two months' time, when the 

 quill is dried up, it is pulled out. By taking the 

 feathers in this way it causes the bird absolutely 

 no pain at all." 



THE EXTERMINATION OF 

 THE EGRET. 



In Country Life in America for April, 1905, Mr. 

 Herbert K. Job, an American naturalist, gives an 

 account, illustrated by photographs, of an egret 

 rookery he discovered in a southern State, happily 

 unknown to the hunter and rigorously protected. 



"A long sail up a series of narrow tortuous 

 creeks, between walls of impassable mud and 

 through immense salt marshes, found us anchored 

 at the desired locality. Even before the anchor 

 took the mud, late in the afternoon, I had seen the 

 sun glance on the dazzling whiteness of several 

 dozens of egrets as they flew to and from the 

 marsh, immaculate amid the southern mud which 

 sticks like glue. After one false start, we found a 

 man who knew the location of the rookery, in 

 a great cypress swamp. First we tramped a mile 

 over a woodland trail, when we came to an arm of 

 muddy water under high, over-arching trees, and 

 a small flat-bottomed skiff. Working two paddles 

 we glided along, and soon emerged in a great area 

 of cypress trees growing out of the water. Alli- 

 gators and turtles splashed before us, and buzzards 

 and ospreys wheeled overhead. From the cypress 

 branches, with their delicate needle-foliage of pale 



green, hung the streaming grey moss. Pairs of 

 wood-duck started up now and then from the 

 water with resounding wing-beats. . . . First 

 we met, as we continued to navigate this cypress 

 sea, scattered nests with eggs of the yellow- 

 crowned night-heron. Then we began to meet 

 individuals of the familiar black-crowned night 

 heron of the north, also breeding, and soon 

 emerged into a more open area where the trees 

 grew more sparsely and not so tall. At every rod 

 of progress dozens and scores of egrets and the 

 smaller, dark-coloured little blue heron, with num- 

 bers of the bluish but white-breasted Louisiana 

 heron, kept springing into the air. Then, as the 

 abundance began to lessen, we returned to the heart 

 of the rookery to spend the day 



" It was a wonderful sight, well worth travelling 

 far to see. Upon any sudden noise, hundreds of 

 these different herons would spring from trees 

 everywhere about. Then they would return and 

 alight upon the tree tops, the delicate snow-white 

 plumes from the backs of the egrets straying out 

 bewitchingly in the breeze. Nearly all day long 

 we paddled about the lacustrine forest, and I 

 revelled in the sights and sounds of this wonderful 

 place, which is probably the largest and perhaps 

 the only egret rookery in North America. The 

 only reason that it exists to-day is because it is 

 guarded by armed wardens who will arrest or, if 

 necessary, shoot any person found upon the 

 property with a gun. And where is it ? May my 

 tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I betray 

 the egrets' secret. 



" The whole business of the slaughter of the 

 white herons for their plumes for millinery purposes 

 is one that every lover of Nature and every person 

 of humane feeling who understands the case will 

 regard as no less than infamous. This is one of 

 the moral questions — to be classed with the opium 

 traffic and the slave trade — to which there is but 

 one side. The origin of the trade is ignorance on 

 one side and greed for money on the other, and 

 there is not one true word which can be said in 

 its defence. 



" It should be understood at the outset that these 

 plumes — which are variously called by milliners 

 ' aigrettes,' ' stubs,' or ' ospreys,' and dyed to what- 

 ever colour is fashionable — are borne by herons, 

 and that only during the nuptial season, and can be 

 secured only by shooting the birds when they have 

 assembled in colonies to breed, when their usual 

 shyness has departed, owing to the strength of the 

 parental instinct. Returning to their nests, they 

 are shot down and their young are left to starve. 



" Let it be nailed as a trade lie that these plumes 

 are secured in any other way. In all my explora- 

 tions of these rookeries I have found but one solitary 

 'aigrette' feather, badly worn at that. It is incon- 

 ceivable, impossible, that anyone could find them 

 in paying quantities, scattered about in these 

 morasses and jungles. Neither are they manu- 

 factured. Manufactured aigrettes and hens' teeth 

 belong to the same class. 



" This traffic has almost exterminated the two 

 plume-bearing species of white herons found in the 

 United States — the snowy heron, a small species 



