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"My attention has been called to the fact that certain commercial interests in this city are circulating stories in the newspapers and elsewhere to the effect that the aigrettes used in the millinery trade come chiefly from Venezuela, where they are gathered from the ground in the large garceros, or breeding-colonies, of white herons.
As a sweeping refutation of the fantastic statements regarding "garceros," published by Mr. Downham as coming from Messrs.
According to the story, Venezuela is full of egret farms, called "garceros," where the birds breed and moult under strict supervision, and kindly drop their feathers in such places that it is possible to find them, and to pick them up, in a high state of preservation!
They are worth locally not over three dollars an ounce; while the feathers taken from the bird, known as "live feathers," are worth fifteen dollars an ounce. "My work led me into every part of Venezuela and Colombia where these birds are to be found, and I have never yet found or heard of any garceros that were guarded for the purpose of simply gathering the feathers from the ground.
Let the English people make no mistake about this, nor be fooled by any fairy tales of the feather trade about Venezuelan "garceros," and vast quantities of valuable plumes picked off the bushes and out of the mud. Those carefully concocted egret-farm stories make lovely reading, but the reader who examines the evidence will soon decide the extent of their truthfulness.
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