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He was looking at one of the rarest sights beheld by men, a great egret rookery with its countless beautiful birds settling upon their nests for the night. He was about to turn his glasses elsewhere when an interruption seemed to take place in the snow-white patch. A cloud of gray smoke belched explosively up through its center.
Plumed Egret MESOPHOYX PLUMIFERA. White Egret HERODIAS TIMORIENSIS. White-fronted Heron NOTOPHOYX NOVAE-HOLLANDIAE. Reef Heron DEMIEGRETTA SACRA. Little Mangrove Bittem BUTORIDES STAGNATILIS. Yellow-necked Mangrove Bittem DUPETOR GOULDI. Lesser Frigate Bird FREGATA ARIEL Pelican PELICANUS CONSPICILLATUS. Black-throated Grebe PODICIPES NOVAE-HOLLANDIAE.
To offset as far as possible the absolutely true charge that egrets bear their best plumes in their breeding season, when the helpless young are in the nest and the parent birds must be killed to obtain the plumes, the feather trade has obtained from three Frenchmen Leon Laglaize, Mayeul Grisol, and F. Geay a beautiful and plausible story to the effect that in Venezuela the enormous output of egret plumes has been obtained by picking up, off the bushes and out of the water and mud, the shed feathers of those birds!
The reader should understand that this egret is between four and five feet in length, and measures nearly five feet from wing tip to wing tip, and that its plumage throughout is of spotless white. It is pitiful to think how constantly a bird of that size and color must be in danger of its life.
They stood close and hid the men with their skirts, until the Spaniards came up, and then parted. So the last men of Mobila took their last shots and died fighting." "Is that the end?" said Oliver, seeing the Princess gather up her pearls and the Egret preparing to tuck her bill under her wing. He did not feel very cheerful over it.
He remembers, as he goes his rounds among the birds day by day, or lies in his tent at night, that a little way to the south, on a lonely sand key, lies buried Guy Bradley, who was done to death by plume hunters while guarding for the Audubon Society the Cuthbert Egret Rookery. On Orange Lake, northward, the warden in charge still carries in his body a bullet from a plume gatherer's gun.
A surge of brown and pink and cream, and a dozen rainbow tints flashed past her; a long boot brushed her saddle on the off side. There was a sickening sound, as something hard swished and whicked home; her pony reeled from the shock of a horse's shoulder, and none too gently none too modestly the prince with the egret and the handsome face reined in on his horse's haunches and saluted her.
Fastened on sidewise, head downward, on one was a magnificent scarlet tanager, his body half concealed by folds of tulle, his fixed eye staring into vacancy. On another was the head and breast of a beautiful yellow-hammer; it was surmounted by the tall sweeping plumes of the egret, which this bird produces only at breeding time. Oh, how much joy and beauty the world had lost by that cruel deed!
A magnificent sight they were, with their white fighting-shields, their gleaming spears, their otter-skin caps, their kilts and armlets of white bulls' tails, and the snowy egret plumes which they wore upon their brows. We rode to the head of them, where I saw Maputa, and as I came they greeted me with a cheer of welcome, for in those days a white man was a power in the land.
"Yes, to be sure; there are two more that will interest you the Snowy Egret or Bonnet Martyr, and the Great Blue Heron or Blue Giant." "Bonnet Martyr? What a strange name for a bird! Why do you call him that? Do they live about here?" asked Nat. "They do not live so far north as this, though they sometimes stray through the Middle and Northern States.
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