United States or Gabon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is to be doubted whether, up to this hour, any man has made a list of the species of North American birds that have become extinct during the past sixty years. The specialists have no time to spare from their compound differential microscopes, and the bird-killers are too busy with shooting, netting and clubbing to waste any time on such trifles as exterminated species.
The birds are waited for at some point where they are accustomed to slip in at dark, and one keeper told me that on one evening alone assisted by a friend he had succeeded in shooting thirty birds. On Winterbourne Bishop Down and round the village the magpies are not persecuted, probably because the gamekeepers, the professional bird-killers, have lost heart in this place.
Schlemmer the Slaughterer bought a cheap vessel, hired twenty-three phlegmatic and cold-blooded Japanese laborers, and organized a raid on Laysan. With the utmost secrecy he sailed from Honolulu, landed his bird-killers upon the sea-bird wonderland, and turned them loose upon the birds. For several months they slaughtered diligently and without mercy.
The result was exactly what we predicted it would be; and this year, it is reported over and over that ducks are more plentiful in New England than they have been in twenty years previously! The result is wonderful, because so quick. Beyond all question, the feather merchants of London, Paris and Berlin absolutely control the bird-killers of Venezuela, China, New Guinea. Mexico and South America.
In the fall of 1912 an appeal to the Police Commissioner resulted in a general order to stop all hunting and shooting in the Borough of the Bronx, and a reform is now on. The war on the bird-killers in New York City began in 1900. It seemed that if the Zoological Society did not take up the matter, the slaughter would continue indefinitely.
Whenever the people of a particular race make a specialty of some particular type of wrong-doing, anyone who pointedly rebukes the faulty members of that race is immediately accused of "race prejudice." On account of the facts I am now setting forth about the doings of Italian and negro bird-killers, I expect to be accused along that line. If I am, I shall strenuously deny the charge.
Word Of The Day