Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 109, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 May 1910 — EXTERMINATING THE BIRDS [ARTICLE]

EXTERMINATING THE BIRDS

The blood lust of man is insatiable. Created lord of the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, he kills his servants ruthlessly for food, for personal adornment, for mere sport:-Only such animals as he can profitably domesticate are spared. The list of creatures which have bee/n wholly or nearly exterminated by man is appalling. At present it is'the birds which -are suffering most severely—unless the fur-bearing animals can' dispute that sad pre-eminence. From an article by Franklin Clarkin in Everybody’s Magazine these statements are taken: Those who shoot the wild fowl are three: the pot-hunter, the plume-hunt-er, and the collector, whether private or employed by a museum. The pothunter has already done <his worst, ftiost Of the species which are very valuable for food have been wiped out or thinned almost to extinction. In 1848 the passenger-pigeon came down the Hudson in such numbers that the then owner of “Claremont” on upper Manhattan Island shot a hundred from his roof in one .morning. In 1876 a pigeon “nesting” in Michigan occupied an area twenty-eight miles long by four wide. That season many million birds were killed _in Michigan’ and shipped to the city markets. They were sold in New York for a cent apiece. Nobody has seen a passengerpigeon in a state of nature, and proved it, since 1900. Being good enough to eat, he was too good to live. No specimen of the quail has bfeen seen for five years. The Labrador duck, once numbered by millions, is so nearly extinct that collectors—if they have the .money—are glad to give a thousand dollars for a single specimen. And so with a dozen other species of edible birds.

Sometimes It seems as if the collectors were responsible, for a part of the •lame. One man in the United States has a collection of thirty thousand specimens, and a member of the Rothschild family has three or four times as many. The American Museum of Natural History has ninety thousand skins; the British Museum over a hundred thousand. But these figures are trivial, when compared with the slaughter occasioned by 'the demands of the milinery trade.' The collectors alone could never threaten the existence of a sin gle species, but one plume-hunter in Florida in a single season killed a hundred and twenty-five thousand birds. More than two hundred million skins are used annually In the manufacture of boas, hats and feather trimmings, fdr women who must follow the fashion. Several million dollars’ worth of feathers are Imported every year into the United States, besides the birds which are killed here and neverleave the country. „ The killing is done with unnecessary brutality. The hunter in search of pimped heron or egret pushes his boat into the swamp, and lies in wait among the nests he finds there. Overhead the parent birds, bringing food to their nestlings, arrive and stop, spread their beautiful plumes and drop upon their nests. But the plume-hunter has an unerring “drop” on them. After he has slain say two hundred, he goes at them with an open knife. He scalps the plumes from the dead birds, leaving them to rot, and their helpless young to starve in the nest. The plume-hunter Is of course an ignorant and insensitive man, a poor v

“cracker,” perhaps, who knows no other way of making so good a living. The responsibility for the slaughter wnich has almost or quite exterminated scene of the most beautiful creatures in the world lies beyond him, beyond the feather merchant, beyond. the women even who wear the ornaments got by such bloody means. The men in the millinery ateliers of Paris, who •make the fashions, and impose them subtly, irresistibly on women; are perhaps the chief sinners—at least, they are the only ones who actually have it in their power to put a stop to the murder. If it only were nbt the fashion to wear feathered hats! #