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Updated: May 11, 2025
They are all handsome, the smallest not so large as the English water-hen. In the savannas, too, you will sometimes surprise the snow-white egret, whose back is adorned with the plumes from which it takes its name. Here, too, the spur-winged water-hen, the blue and green water-hen and two other species of ordinary plumage are found.
Roger leaped into the dugout and paddled down the river toward Garman's house. The place seemed dead and deserted as he stepped onto the dock, and his heart sank with dismay. The Egret was gone. In the boathouse a young sailor was loading several huge trunks into a small launch. "Closing up for the season?" asked Roger as casually as possible. "I dunno what they're doing," grumbled the man.
"When half a dozen of them begin to circle together," said the Snowy Egret, "turn round and look toward the wood." At the right moment the children turned, and between the gray and somber shadows of the cypress they saw her come. All in white she was white cloth of the middle bark of mulberries, soft as linen, with a cloak of oriole feathers black and yellow, edged with sables.
As we approached, we were warned of the proximity of each ghastly spectacle by the hideous buzzing of green flies swarming over the lifeless forms of the parent birds. At one place, beneath a small palmetto bush, we found the body of an Egret which the hunters had overlooked. Falling to the ground sorely wounded, it had escaped its enemies by crawling to this hiding-place.
There comes a ferocious animal to chew you up!" A white poodle of tiny size with a bark like a piping bird came bobbing out of the house. "Here, Nero!" called Higgins. And then the dark slender woman who had been on the Egret stepped out from behind a palm. "Flossy!" she said with a stamp of the foot, which twinkled the pendants in her ears. "She won't bite you." "I was worrying," said Roger.
"That was how the Spaniards saw her for the first time, and found her so lovely that they forgot to ask her name; they called her 'The Lady of Cofachique, and swore there was not a lovelier lady in Europe nor one more a princess. "Which might easily be true," said the Egret, "for she was brought up to be Cacica in Far-Looking's place, after the death of her son Young Pine."
"There are. Who do you suppose got them their jobs? Garman in Washington. How do you suppose they guard? They guard so carefully that nobody can get into the rookeries, not a soul except Garman's gang. Officially the egret shooting is stopped. Actually it is an industry and is in Garman's hands.
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.
There were the golden eagle and the white-headed eagle, the gray pelican and the white pelican, the blue heron and the white heron, the egret, the ibis, ducks of various sorts, the whooping crane, the black vulture, and the cormorant; and when at sunset the voyagers drew their boat upon the strand and built their camp-fire under the arches of the woods, the owls whooped around them all night long, and when morning came the sultry mists that wrapped the river were vocal with the clamor of wild turkeys.
Carl Hagenbeck wrote me only three months ago that "the condors of the Andes are all being exterminated for their feathers, and these birds are now very difficult to obtain." The egret and heron plumes, known under the trade name of "osprey, etc., feathers," form by far the most important item in each feather sale. There are fifteen grades!
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