atively easy to shoot. Ten cents apiece
was the price paid, and so lucrative a business did the shooting of
these birds become that many baymen gave up their usual occupation of
sailing pleasure parties and became gunners. These men often earned as
much as one hundred dollars a week for their skill with the shotgun.

[Illustration: A Christmas dinner for the birds. Note the Song Sparrow
on a Sunflower head and a Chickadee weighing himself. Photographed by
Mrs. Granville Pike]

It is not surprising that at the end of the season a local observer
reported: "One cannot help noticing now the scarcity of Terns on the
New Jersey coast, and it is all owing to their merciless destruction."
One might go further and give the sickening details of how the birds
were swept from the mud flats about the mouth of the Mississippi and
the innumerable shell lumps of the Chandeleurs and the Breton Island
region; how the Great Lakes were bereft of their feathered life, and
the swamps of the Kankakee were invaded; how the White Pelicans,
Western Grebes, Caspian Terns, and California Gulls of the West were
butchered and their skinned {146} bodies left in pyramids to fester in
the sun. One might recount stories of Bluebirds and Robins shot on the
very lawns of peaceful, bird-loving citizens of our Eastern States in
order that the feathers might be spirited away to feed the insatiable
appetite of the wholesale milliner dealers. Never have birds been worn
in this country in such numbers as in those days. Ten or fifteen small
song birds' skins were often sewed on a single hat!

_What the Ladies Wore._--In 1886 Dr. Frank M. Chapman walked through
the shopping district of New York City on his way home, two afternoons
in succession, and carefully observed the feather decorations on the
hats of the women he chanced to meet. The result of his observation,
as reported to _Forest and Stream_, shows that he found in common use
as millinery trimming many highly esteemed birds as the following list
which he wrote down at the time will serve to show:

Robins, Thrushes, Bluebirds, Tanagers, Swallows, {147} Warblers,
Waxwings, Bobolinks, Larks, Orioles, Doves, and Woodpeckers.

In all, the feathers of at least forty species were discernible.

In commenting on his trips of inspection, Doctor Chapman wrote: "It is
evident that in proportion to the number of hats seen, the list of
birds given is very small, for in most cases mutilation rendered
iden