33^ ^Tbe TOHa^eibe 
OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE WISCONSIN AND ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETIES. 
One Year 25 Cents ILLINOIS NUMBER Single Copy 5 Cents 
Published by the Wisconsin Audubon Society at Appleton, Wisconsin 
Entered as second class matter, May 16, 1904, at Appleton, Wis„ under the act of Congress of Mar, 3. 79. 
VOL. XL MAY, 1908. No. 1 
The Reappearance of the American Egret 
Near Chicago. 
In June of the past year I learned 
with the greatest pleasure of the return 
of the beautiful American Egret to one 
of its old nesting sites within fifty miles 
of Chicago, and realize that as they in¬ 
crease this locality must necessarily be 
discovered before manv vears. 
I wish that our laws and the sympa¬ 
thies of the unfeeling woman who per- 
I sists in wearing egrets may be aroused to 
prevent the destruction of the new col¬ 
ony of birds who are making so brave an 
attempt to regain a foothold in our region. 
I cannot conceive how an intelligent 
people can willingly exterminate an en¬ 
tire species of such a beautiful and bene¬ 
ficial bird just to satisfy a vagary of 
fashion. 
On my Bird Study trips in 1895 I al¬ 
ways looked forward with extreme de¬ 
light to watching and studying these 
grand birds along the marshes and ponds 
in northern Indiana and the Southern 
part of Cook County. 
Through the persecution of the bird 
by the egg and plume hunter and par- 
[ ticularly by the demand for the plumes 
by the fashionable woman the bird has 
not been seen for years, and the cause 
given for their disappearance by the men 
who slaughtered them has been that the 
nests were destroyed by the fires which 
swept through the Kankakee region in 
the fall of 1895. A poor excuse, as I am 
certain the birds had all, or nearly all, 
been killed by that time. This would 
be an easy matter as the birds will not 
leave their young and all are congregated 
in a few large colonies. 
The egret in our region nests in the 
tall trees in company with the great blue 
heron and as the birds are continually 
shot at they select the most secluded 
portion of a swamp and place the nests 
as high as they can find support for them 
in the trees, often building ten or twelve 
nests in one tree. The illustration given 
with this article gives a fair idea how 
they appear. 
The birds, as in the South, only have 
the plumes during the season when the 
nests are sure to contain voung, which 
die of starvation and, cold on the death 
of the parent birds. 
I wish the readers of this article could 
feel the pity of this as I have, and could 
have seen me following in the wake of a 
party of plume hunters in a Texas swamp 
who are killing the white-faced Glossy 
Ibis for the wings; they are paid ten cents 
each for them. These birds nested in 
the heavy growth of rushes surround¬ 
ing the inland ponds as there were no 
trees for miles. 
I found one spot where there were the 
dead bodies of thirty of these birds and 
going into the rushes found nests of the 
young birds, cold and almost dead, and 
I was compelled to put them out of their 
misery. 
(Continued on page 3) 
