My observation leads me to the conviction that the shooting
law is not in the least respected on these islands, except
perhaps by the residents themselves. In some cases the
outsider is obliged to wait for the fall migration of the
ducks and geese and so comes within the law, but there are
plenty of early migrants that arrive during the close
season, only to be quickly picked up by the summer hunter,
who realizes that he is too far away to incur the law's
force.

As far as the shore birds are concerned, it is not the
occasional hunter that does the real damage. The islands are
becoming widely known to students of birds, and it is the
bird student, the member of the Audubon Society, (in most
instances, I regret to say, men of my own country) who are
guilty of ruthless slaughter of the shore birds for their
skins, and particularly for their eggs; all this in the
protected season.

The situation is even worse on the Bird rocks. That is a
protected area and yet is subject to fearful attacks from
the egg hunters. I do not mean the commercial "eggers," but
the member of the Audubon Society who has a collection of
birds' eggs and skins and wants duplicates in order to enter
into exchange with his colleagues. I met there on one of my
visits an American "student" who had taken 369 clutches of
eggs of each of the seven or more species of waterfowl there
breeding, thus destroying at one swoop upwards of two
thousand potential birds. It is no wonder that, with such a