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Updated: June 8, 2025
I think that any man who really knows the habits of egrets and herons, and the total impossibility of any quantity of their shed feathers being picked up in a marketable state, must know in his heart that if the London and continental feather markets keep open a few years longer, every species that furnishes "short selected" plumes will be utterly exterminated from off the face of the earth.
I saw plenty of water-birds, including white egrets and a long-necked diver which is called the "snake-bird," owing to its long neck projecting lout of the water and thus greatly resembling a snake. I shot several of each kind of bird, plucking the fine plumes from the backs of the egrets. We ate some of the divers that evening and found them first-class food, tasting much like goose.
Soon afterwards we left this place, crossed the channel, and, paddling past two islands, obtained a glimpse of the broad river between them, with a long sandy spit, on which stood several scarlet ibises and snow-white egrets. One of the islands was low and sandy, and half of it was covered with gigantic arum-trees, the often-mentioned Caladium arborescens, which presented a strange sight.
Out of the sun-shot sky a cloud of tiny specks, white as the driven snow, were fluttering downward and settling upon the dark tops of the trees. Fascinated he watched the spectacle until the white patch had doubled in area and only a scatter of specks continued to add their mite to the countless number which had preceded them. "Egrets!" he cried aloud. "Millions of them. What a sight!"
The birds killed were all caring for their young in the nests at the time he and his hirelings shot them. There was a few years ago, in a Georgia city, an attorney who accepted the aigrette "scalps" of twenty-seven Egrets from a client who was unable to pay cash for a small service rendered. He told me he had much pleasure in distributing these among his lady friends.
Of course it was the egrets and their presence here explained their absence in the treetops. But, why were they all so motionless? Before, he had been unable to approach to within a dozen paces of them! Now, not one stirred although he was less than half that distance away and the slight wind that blew ruffled their feathers in a most peculiar manner. He drew still nearer.
For example, he says that no species of bird of paradise has been diminished in number by slaughter for the feather trade; that Florida still contains a supply of egrets; that the decrease in bird life should be charged to the spread of cities, towns and farms, and not to the trade; that the trade was "in no way responsible" for the slaughter of three hundred thousand gulls and albatrosses on Laysan Island!
Once before he had come upon the same tracks and scent; and it came to him in a flash that it had been along the border of the marsh and near the stream flowing out of it where the dead egrets lay in heaps and rows, their feathers ruffled by the wind. And the recollection also came of the illness he had suffered as the result of eating of the birds.
Here, too, the Moscovy duck is numerous; and large flocks of two other kinds wheel round you as you pass on, but keep out of gun-shot. The milk-white egrets, and jabirus, are distinguished at a great distance; and in the æta and coucourito trees you may observe flocks of scarlet and blue aras feeding on the seeds. It is to these trees that the largest sort of toucan resorts.
A crow and a white egret once made their nests in the same tree, and when the nestlings began to grow up the crow saw how pretty and white the young egrets were, and thought them much nicer than her own black young ones. So one day when the egret was away, the crow changed the nestlings and brought the little white egrets, to her own nest.
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