at least one locality in Florida, Warden Guy Bradley was killed by a
plume-hunter, who of course escaped all punishment through the
heaven-born "sympathy" of a local jury.

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. 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. The men who have sworn to those lies
are perjurers, and should be punished for their crimes. (See Chapter
XIII).

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. E.A. McIlhenny's egret preserve, at Avery Island, Louisiana,
became a pronounced success, we had believed that our two egrets soon
would become totally extinct in the United States. But Mr. McIlhenny has
certainly saved those birds to our fauna. In 1892 he started an egret
and heron preserve, close beside his house on Avery Island. By 1900 it
was an established success. To-day 20,000 pairs of egrets and herons are
living and breeding in that bird refuge, and the two egret species are
safe in at least one spot in our own country.