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In the destruction of wild life, I think the backwoods population of Florida is the most lawless and defiant that can be found anywhere in the United States. The "plume-hunters" have practically exterminated the plume-bearing egrets, wholly annihilated the roseate spoonbill, the flamingo, and also the Carolina parrakeet.
In other words, I was looking for the little white egret, a bird concerning which, thanks to the murderous work of plume-hunters, thanks, also, to those good women who pay for having the work done, I must confess that I went to Florida and came home again without certainly seeing it.
All the known rookeries accessible to plume-hunters had been totally destroyed. Two years ago, the secret discovery of several small, hidden colonies prompted William Dutcher, President of the National Association of Audubon Societies, and Mr. T. Gilbert Pearson, Secretary, to attempt the protection of those colonies.
To-day the snowy herons have all but vanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finley, on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon, where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested.
The men who have sworn to those lies are perjurers, and should be punished for their crimes. 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.
It is the custom of all those who hunt for the millinery trade, and is recognized by the natives as the usual method." Here is the testimony of Mr. Julian A. Dimock, of Peekamose, N.Y., the famous outdoor photographer, and illustrator of "Florida Enchantments": "I know a goodly number of the plume-hunters of Florida. I have camped with them, and talked to them.
Now the Plume-Hunters did not have bodies like crocodiles and leather wings, you know; but they were dragons of a sort, for all that, for they carried brutal things in their hands that belched forth smoke and pain and death, and they were cruel of heart, and they had sold themselves to do evil for the sake of the dollars that covetous men and women would pay them for feathers.
The Soldier believed in Ardea's right to life, believed in it so deeply that he stood alone before the Plume-Hunters and told them that, while he lived, the birds of his camp should also live. And that is why they killed him the dragons who were cruel of heart and had sold themselves to do evil for the sake of dollars that covetous men and women would pay for feathers.
It was a common thing for a rookery of several hundred birds to be attacked by the plume-hunters, and in two or three days utterly destroyed. The same bloody work is going on to-day in Venezuela and Brazil; and the stories and "affidavits" stating that the millions of egret plumes being shipped annually from those countries are "shed feathers," "picked up off the ground," are absolute lies.
It has taken a long time to awaken the American people to the fact that the wild and beautiful creatures of earth and air and sea are a precious part of the common inheritance, and that their needless and heedless destruction, by pot-hunters or plume-hunters or silly shooters who are not happy unless they are destroying something, is a crime against the commonwealth which must be punished or prevented.
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