with shooting, netting and clubbing to waste any time on such trifles as
exterminated species. What does a market-shooter care about birds that
can not be killed a second time? As for the farmers, they are so busy
raising hogs and prices that their best friends, the birds, get scant
attention from them,--until a hen-hawk takes a chicken!

Down South, the negroes and poor whites may slaughter robins for food by
the ten thousand; but does the northern farmer bother his head about a
trifle of that kind? No, indeed. Will he contribute any real money to
help put a stop to it? Ask him yourself.

Let us pause long enough to reckon up some of our expenditures in
species, and in millions of individuals. Let us set down here, in cold
blood, a list of the species of our own North American birds that have
been totally exterminated in our own times. After that we will have
something to say about other species that soon will be exterminated; and
the second task is much greater than the first.

* * * * *

ROLL CALL OF THE DEAD SPECIES OF AMERICAN BIRDS

THE GREAT AUK,--_Plautus-impennis_, (Linn.), was a sea-going diving bird
about the size of a domestic goose, related to the guillemots, murres
and puffins. For a bird endowed only with flipper-like wings, and
therefore absolutely unable to fly, this species had an astonishing
geographic range. It embraced the shores of northern Europe to North
Cape, southern Greenland, southern Labrador, and the Atlantic coast of
North America as far south as Massachusetts. Some say, "as far south as
Massachusetts, the Carolinas and Florida," but that is a large order,