He is about the most wearisome and profitless creature in existence.
With his piles of skins, his cases of eggs, his laborious
feather-splitting, and his outlandish nomenclature, he is not only
the enemy of the birds but the enemy of all those who would know
them rightly.
Not the collectors alone are to blame for the diminishing numbers of
our wild birds, but a large share of the responsibility rests upon
quite a different class of persons, namely, the milliners. False taste
in dress is as destructive to our feathered friends as are false aims
in science. It is said that the traffic in the skins of our brighter
plumaged birds, arising from their use by the milliners, reaches to
hundreds of thousands annually. I am told of one middleman who
collected from the shooters in one district, in four months, seventy
thousand skins. It is a barbarous taste that craves this kind of
ornamentation. Think of a woman or girl of real refinement appearing
upon the street with her head gear adorned with the scalps of
our songsters!
It is probably true that the number of our birds destroyed by man is
but a small percentage of the number cut off by their natural enemies;
but it is to be remembered that those he destroys are in addition to
those thus cut off, and that it is this extra or artificial destruction
that disturbs the balance of nature.
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