FEATHERED FORMS OF OTHER DAYS. 363 
known during its life period to naturalists 
as the long-billed parrot ( Nestor productus ) , 
standing between the true parrots and the 
cockatoos. The causes of its destruction are 
unknown to me. 
And thus we see how it is: different species 
of birds are being eliminated in all parts of 
the earth, just as their predecessors were dur- 
ing the various geological epochs, and this 
elimination is constantly and unceasingly at 
work. The island that we now call England, 
Scotland, and Wales once reckoned among 
her avifauna ostrich-like birds of no small 
size; and as ages have rolled over her head, 
and all manner of forces have been acting 
and reacting, that have slowly changed the 
surroundings of her fauna, we find many of 
her types disappearing, while others have 
become more prevalent. In more recent 
times gamekeepers and legislation are two 
elements that have been at work, and taken 
no small share in some of these changes, 
as instances of which we find that certain 
game birds and birds of prey have been com- 
pletely extirpated in Great Britain. Who has 
a doubt in this country what the fate of our 
wild turkey is to be ? In more remote times 
it was physical causes among others that 
acted to destroy certain types of birds, though, 
as they gradually acquired their power of 
flight through the development of wings, they 
must have been more fortunate in this regard 
than other animals, as by this means they 
could often escape the great convulsions that 
took place in nature, such as fire, floods, land- 
slides, and the like, which certainly entombed 
other creatures or utterly destroyed them. 
The power of flight, however, did not exempt 
birds from that still more important force, so 
incessantly at work, the mutual reaction of 
one organism upon another, which through 
all time has operated to the improvement 
of some, and beyond all doubt to the extinc- 
tion of many a form of exquisite beauty. 
In the United States to-day, the birds that 
make up our fauna, so far as we now know 
them, number nearly nine hundred species. 
Many of these species have their millions of 
representatives, and an instant’s thought will 
afford an idea of how immense the entire host 
must be ; and yet let me ask you, inveterate 
ramblers, how often do you find the body of a 
dead bird in your path ? The writer has been 
a collector and observer of birds from Mexico 
to the peaks of the Rockies for about twenty 
years, and can cite but comparatively few 
instances, a number so small that, if compared 
with the living, need not be taken into con- 
sideration at all, or, as they say in mathematics, 
it would be an unassignable quantity. Yet 
from all causes millions of birds do die every 
year, and when they die what becomes of 
them ? Eliminating those that perish as ob- 
jects of prey, we find that such birds as are 
blown into sheets of fresh water, by storm 
THE PIED DUCK. (DRAWN BY R. W. SHUFELDT, AFTER SPECIMENS IN THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION AND THE AUDUBON PLATE.) 
