MURDEROUS MILLINERY. 
5 
and droop over the sides and tail. They are 
developed only in the breeding-season, and 
hence the atrocious practice of choosing that 
time to kill the birds. How many eggs or 
chickens would be produced in a poultry-yard, 
if the hens were all swept off, just as they 
began to lay, or before the young birds could 
feed themselves ? 
Several eye witnesses have described the 
devastation of heronries, but no one with 
deeper feeling than Mr. W. H. Hudson. He 
shows how the lovely birds form communities 
in the breeding season, and build nests close 
together on low trees or reeds growing in the 
water, sometimes to the number of three or 
four hundred. Then, when the young birds 
are fully fledged, but not yet able to fly, the 
plume-hunter comes, and the parent birds who 
will not desert their nestlings are shot down 
easily, the handful of coveted feathers torn 
off”, and they and their offspring left to perish. 1 
Mr. Gilbert Pearson gave a detailed 
account of his experience among heronries, to 
the members of the Ornithological Congress 
held at Chicago in 1897. Revisiting places 
in Central Florida where he had seen several 
hundred pairs of herons nesting, he found not 
a single bird, but only shattered nests and 
crumbling bones. A few miles north of 
Waldo he came upon a little swamp and 
heard the screaming of young birds and the 
buzzing of green flies. Heaps of dead herons 
festered in the sun, the back of each bird 
being raw and bleeding where the plume¬ 
bearing patch had been torn off. The 
smouldering embers of a camp fire bore 
1 " Ospreys or Egrets and Aigrettes,” by W. H. 
Hudson. Society for Protection of Birds, Publication 
No. 3. 
