Page 48 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

—
26
OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
SAGE GROUSE
The First of the Upland Game Birds that will Become Extinct
may be however, that like New York with the heath hen, they will arouse and vir- tuously lock the stable door after the horse has been stolen
The Snowy Egre AND American E- GRET, (Egretta candi- dissima and Herodias egretta).—These un- fortunate birds, curs- ed for all time by the commercially valu-
"
able *' aigrette plumes that they bear, have had a very narrow escape from
total extinction in the United States, despite all the efforts made to save them. The "plume-hunters " of the milli-
nery trade have been, and still
are, determined to have the last feather and the last drop of egret blood. In an effort to stop the slaughter in at least one locality in Florida, Warden Guy Bradley was- killed by a plume-hunter, who of course escaped all punishment through
the heaven-born "sympathy" of a local jury.
Of the bloody egret slaughter in Florida, not one-tenth of the whole story ever has been told. Millions of adult birds,—all there were,—were killed in the breeding season, when the plumes were ripe for the market; and millions of young birds starved in their nests. It was a common thing for a rookery of several hundred birds to be attacked by the plume- hunters,andintwoorthreedaysutterlydestroyed. Thesamebloody work is going on to-day in Venezuela and Brazil; and the stories and
"affidavits" stating that the millions of egret plumes being shipped an- nually from those countries are "shed feathers," "picked up off the ground," are absolute lies. The men who have sworn to those lies are perjurers, and should be punished for their crim.es. (See Chapter XIII).
By 1908, the plume-hunters had so far won the fight for the egrets, that Florida had been swept almost as bare of these birds as the Colorado' desert.
Until Mr. E. A. Mcllhenny's egret preserve, at Avery Island,, Louisiana, became a pronounced success, we had believed that our twO' egretssoonwouldbecometotallyextinctintheUnitedStates. ButMr. Mcllhenny has certainly saved those birds to our fauna. In 1892 he- started an egret and heron preserve, close beside his house on Avery Is-
!