ΑΝ TABLE TALK. A TALE TO BE TOLD TO THE MARINES. N apologist, feminine of course, for the practice of adorning human beings with the feathers of scarce and beautiful birds has appeared, and has in "Nature Notes" given to the world some sufficiently startling assertions. She signs in full a name, presumably her own, on which, however, I will inflict no further publicity, and she writes, I am bound to state, in apparent sincerity. For years she has, as she states, worn egret feathers, and she cannot understand the pain which the sight of these lovely plumes inflicts on a certain number of civilised, humane, and, as she will hold, supersensitive beings of her own and the opposite sex. Her suggestion is that the feathers are cast by the birds themselves after the breeding season is over, and she establishes this view by the statement that she has received from a female missionary a quantity of egret plumes in good condition which have been gathered "on the walls in China!" From the same source she can obtain an indefinite supply. No cruelty whatever is thus, she holds, inflicted upon these exquisite birds. As egret feathers command a high price in the market, one is a little astonished, if the plumes are indeed in the condition she describes, that she does not make arrangements to secure constant consignments. It would, from the financial standpoint, be well worth while to establish an agency for their collection, or, if the writer herself is independent of all considerations of the kind, it would at least furnish a revenue for the Christian missions of which she is presumably a supporter. THA REFUTATION OF THE STORY. HAT feathers are shed by these birds is true. The whimsical exaggeration involved in the statement to which I have drawn attention has, however, been exposed by writers of scientific eminence. Professor Newton, than whom no better authority exists, speaks of the account given as hardly worth notice, adding that "Whatever number of egrets' feathers the lady missionary in China may have picked up, it is certain that 'cast' feathers do not find their way into the market, which is undeniably supplied with them from birds which have been killed during the breeding season. I should doubt whether 'cast' feathers have any value at all in the plume trade, and my belief is that no one concerned in it would look at them." More boldly still another authority-Mr. W. H. Hudson-declares without hesitation that the statement is not true. The tuft of elongated dorsal feathers is, it is known, a nuptial ornament shed shortly after the breeding season. Mr. Hudson has seen them on the bird in all stages, and has picked them after incubation in the swamps amidst which, in search of its chosen prey, the egret resides. The feathers thus "cast" are no longer beautiful objects, "slender recurved plumes white as driven snow, with all their hair filaments intact." They are, on the contrary, dirty white in colour, out of curl at the tips, and with many of their filaments broken. Mr. Hutton continues: "The story that these nuptial feathers are shed in some places in such amazing quantities that it would be false economy to shoot the birds to obtain them; and that probably thousands, nay millions, of such cast feathers are supplied to the London shops, is preposterous. The birds are not excessively abundant. They subsist on fish, crabs, and such creatures, and can live only in swamps. Each bird produces only a small number of these valued feathers, and when he sheds them he does not shed them altogether in some spot where a feather hunter will be sure to find them. He drops them one by one at odd times, some falling in the water where he fishes, some among the trees and rushes where he roosts, and some being shed when he is on the wing going from place to place." AN AMERICAN APPEAL TO WOMEN. HESE facts, supplied me by my esteemed correspondent, Mrs. E. Phillips, of Vaughan House, Croydon, ever eager in the preservation of bird life, are in themselves sufficient to dispose of the wild story of the "lady" missionary. By a chance, however, I am able to supply from an American source a picture widely different from that which is presented of collecting in China. The picture in question appears in a publication entitled "Forest and Stream." We have first a description of the egret, or, as it is technically called, the white crane roost, things once common in Florida, whence they have now all but disappeared, and still with some difficulty--for they are scarce to be found in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The plumage hunter-he is called for convenience sake Thomas Jonespitches his camp in the neighbourhood of the roost, shoots a bird occasionally to see how the plumage shows, until he discovers it is fit, and then sets to. This fitness, it must be observed, is reached just at the time when the helpless young are in the nest. The rest must be told in the writer's own words. I feel disposed to apologise to my readers for bringing before them such a scene of carnage, but the task must, in the interest of mercy, be executed. Men have begun to learn the lesson of kindness to animals, and woman, though I have more than once pronounced her unteachable, may perhaps in time be shocked into accompanying him on his humane errand a short way. DESTRUCTION OF THE WHITE Crane. HERE, then, is the description, which, though I would rather give it in full, I have been compelled by considerations of space to abridge : Thomas Jones pushes quietly into the edge of the nesting ground, ties his boat firmly within easy range of the tall snag he saw the day before, and takes out his rifle. There is an egret on the tall snag. Taking a steady aim, he fires, and the bird whirls down, dead. One or two other birds start on their perches in the same tree, but settle back. One by one they, too, whirl out and lie in a white tangled mass at the foot of the tree. An egret raises herself up above the rim of the nest on which she sits, and the tiny bullet pierces her. She whirls down, lying white and motionless. The little ones gape and cry, but no food comes. The father was killed on the tree near by. One by one, out of the nests, off from the limbs of the trees, here, there, anywhere-for the birds are all about, and so stupid with the breeding fever that they will not leave-the slender white birds meet their doom. That tall snag has yielded twenty victims. Jones has not moved from his boat. He has over 200 birds down. He can tell by his cartridge boxes, for he rarely misses a shot. It is easy shooting. After noon he gathers up his spoils. A cut of the knife and the clump of plumes is off. Two hundred carcases of egrets are left lying. That many more to-morrow. Many more than that the next day, for by that time the wailing of the dying young of the first day's victims will have ceased. From then on, day by day, increasing in threefold ratio, the harvest of death goes on, steadily, pitilessly, on the sowing grounds of life, out in the silent wilderness where the birds have tried to hide their homes. In less than a month it is over. The long white lines no longer cross the country going to and from the feeding grounds. The white forms no longer appear on the naked trees. Doubly naked the forest stands in silent desolation. Sodden and discoloured, the once white forms below the trees are sinking into the slime. From beneath the trees and from the nests up in the trees a great stench goes up. Not a bird, young or old, is left alive. The old ones stayed till death came, bound by the great instinct of nature to remain with their young. WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE Slaughter of Birds? IT is, I fear, the want of imagination in the fair sex that renders women callous even when scenes such as this are brought before them. They could not, many of them, that is, could not watch the destruction, though womanhood is not greatly changed since the days when the Court ladies of France after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew turned over with their dainty toes the corpses of the men lying in the street with whom the night before they had danced. Englishwomen, meanwhile, console themselves with the illogical and delusive notion that these things are not done expressly for them. Yea! but they are. It is neither my métier nor my disposition often to preach. We are in a so-called Christian country, and the God we nominally worship has declared that not a sparrow, two of which are sold for a farthing, falls to the ground without His knowledge. If that Divinity, mind I say if He looks with disfavour upon the destruction of life through vanity or wantonness, it will be vain for the fair one to hide behind the pretence that she did not order the carnage. In his "Biglow Papers" my brilliant friend James Russell Lowell puts the matter squarely. The illustration is different, but the analogy is adequate. He says to the soldiers of Congress : Ef you take a sword an' dror it, An' go stick a feller thru, It is only, I believe, the European woman who is capable of conniving at actions of such transcendent cruelty. There are at least millions of those under our own government in India who would regard such proceedings with horror and abhorrence. IN DISAPPEARANCE OF FLOWERS. N relation to what I said lately concerning wild flowers and their gradual disappearance, Mr. J. A. Crawley, M.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge, writes: "Honeysuckle grows plentifully in Epping Forest; perhaps as well as anywhere in that part called Hawk Wood. The lesser celandine is much rarer there, and I know of only one place where I've hitherto found it every spring. There is a green glade, a continuation of Davis's Lane (see map in Buxton's 'Guide to the Forest,' p. 34), which leads you along the western edge of Bury Wood to the 'Woodman,' and here on the left hand side is where I've found it." Very unlikely are these pages to come under the eye of despoilers of the woods, amateur or professional, otherwise I should hesitate before publishing directions so precise as those given in the case of the lesser celandine, the Ranunculus ficaria, a delicate little flower immortalised by Wordsworth, which, according to William Turner's "Names of Herbes," 1538, "groweth under the shaddowes of ashe trees." Concerning the larger celandine, Cheldonium majus, the same authority quaintly says, "Groweth in hedges in the spring and hath yealowe luce." These smaller wild flowers run little risk except from children. A very limited experience shows that before an hour is past they die in the hand that clasps them, and that attempts to transplant them to other spots never succeed. It is otherwise with honeysuckle, which maid and matron pursue relentlessly in order to transplant it into their own gardens. It is even worse with primroses, blue-bells, and ferns. So soon as the early spring rains are over and the woods can be traversed, these are rooted up in numbers. I have seen a dozen women at a time armed with trowels in the fair woods at Battle digging up the primroses that, with their roots on the cool banks of the rivulets, bloomed like eyes wide-open with beauty and delight, and which when removed would linger a year or two pale shadows of themselves and then die. To me the sight of these hunters of plant life is not much more tolerable than that of the snarer of the song-bird, who, in spite of legislation, haunts most parts of wooded and pastoral England. SOME WANTON DESTRUCTION OF BEAUTY. COME there will doubtless be who will regard this as sickly and mawkish sentimentality. Let them bethink them that that beauty-loving people, the Greeks, filled the woods and fields and the rivers and seas with divinities, and assigned to every tree its dryad. Puritan as he became, Milton favoured that belief when he spoke of the twilight groves Of pine or monumental oak, Where the rude axe with heavèd stroke, Was never heard the nymphs to daunt, and Keats sighs after the days When holy were the haunted forest boughs, I may scarcely in cold unimpassioned prose vex a practical world SYLVANUS URBAN. |