28 i) HES ALU De BO Ne sbi lee TaieN 
SHOREBIRDS, especially sandpipers and plovers, fell heavily to hunt- 
ers’ guns. In three years one man shot 4,093 Lesser Yellow Legs. In the 
1880s the going rate was fifty cents per bird. Eskimo Curlew, the cover 
picture on the fabulous edition, “Shore Birds of North America,” migrated 
in thousands and were shot in the same numbers ... today nearly 
extinct. Need we add... the long-tailed, graceful Passenger Pigeon, 
(once numbering three billion) whose favorite food was forest nuts, and 
whose nesting cities were sometimes 40 miles long by 2 miles wide, were 
shot to extinction, the last of the species, “Martha,” dying in the Cin- 
cinnati Zoo in September 1914. For dining car menus, fashionable hotels, 
restaurants and shops woodcock, grouse and quail were shot and shipped 
systematically, one state supplying another. 
ff ‘il a 1 
ENOUGH OF FOOD: let’s talk of fashion. In the last decades of the 
19th century, the epidemic to wear feathers swept the U.S. like a plague. 
In 1896, the year before the Illinois Audubon Society was founded, natural- 
ist Frank Chapman, on two walks in New York, counted 542 hats trimmed 
with feathers from over forty different species, including Wilson’s warb- 
lers, Pileated Woodpeckers, Acadian Owls, Bluebirds, and even Pine Gros- 
beaks, ostensibly for their lovely plumage. In one year, five million north 
American birds were killed for fashion. 
MILLINERS AGENTS “employed hundred of gunners on a piecework 
basis.” The going price on birds included 50 cents for Pelican skins in 
Paris, 25 cents for the Least Tern, $10 for the Great White Heron, and 
$25 for Flamingo skins. By 1900, egret plumes cost $32 an ounce (requiring 
four herons), which was “TWICE THE PRICE OF GOLD.” The Roseate 
Spoonbill “with its sumptuous plumage of white, pink, and carmine, in- 
vited extermination,” dipped to 20 to 25 nests in ail the U.S. in the early 
1900s. The Reddish Egret dropped to 200 birds, most saved in the Ever- 
glades National Park. That the Snowy Egret survived at all was due 
largely to a big private refuge in Louisiana created in 1892 by E. A. 
MclIlhenny of the tabasco fortune. (It was a refuge often visited up to the 
1940s by my father, who had the tabasco advertising account.) McIlhenny’s 
small gem of a book on the Snowy Egret and his private huge refuge is 
a prize in our family collection. 
a fl f 3 
BEYOND KILLING WILDLIFE or food and fashion, another blow 
struck when the great American forests were ruthlessly and stupidly 
hacked bare and converted into ugly flatlands, towns and cities, even in 
Illinois. Increasingly, settlers set fire to vast forests “to clear the land.” 
Ignorant farmers burned huge stands of forests just to get rid of snakes. 
(Five times as much lumber was burned as used.) Loggers felled forests 
for fortune makers from Maine to the Great Lakes, even wiping bare vast 
stands of pines covering one-third of northern Illinois, leaving us now with 
300 pitiful acres in White Pines Forest State Park. Systematically, loggers 
moved to the pine stands in the South, then across to the Pacific. 
EVERY YEAR Congress dreamed up new bargains to wreck the wilder- 
ness, letting in settlers and miners to ravage the good earth. When Govern- 
or Sterling Morton of Nebraska proclaimed the first Arbor Day 100 years 
ago in 1872, he was attacked viciously by the “forestry people.’ Congress 
