We learned that one bird man handled thirty thousand bird skins that
season. Another firm shipped seventy thousand to the city, and still
the market called for more and yet more. The appetite of the god could
not be appeased.

I am sure this account of the loss of bird life must have seemed
appalling to my mother, for I heard her moan sadly when it was talked
about.

It was during my stay in the Southern islands that I first saw the
white egret, whose beautiful sweeping plumes, like the silken train of
a court lady, have so long been the spoils of woman, that the bird is
almost extinct. As these magnificent feathers appear upon the bird
only through the mating and nesting season, the cruelty of the act is
still more dastardly. The attachment of the parent birds for their
young is very beautiful to witness, yet this devotion, which should be
their safeguard, is seized upon for their destruction, for so great is
the instinct of protecting love they refuse to leave their young when
danger is near, and are absolutely indifferent to their own safety.

Never shall I forget one sad incident which occurred while I was there.
Overhanging the water was an ancestral nest belonging to a family of
egrets which had occupied it for some seasons. Unlike the American
human species, in whom local attachment is not largely developed, and
who take a new house every moving day, the egret repairs and fixes over
the old house year after year, putting in a new brace there, adding
another stick here, to make it firm enough to bear the weight of the
mother and the three young birds which always comprise the brood.

The three pale-blue eggs in this nest had been duly hatched, and the