icken!

Down South, the negroes and poor whites may slaughter robins for food by
the ten thousand; but does the northern farmer bother his head about a
trifle of that kind? No, indeed. Will he contribute any real money to
help put a stop to it? Ask him yourself.

Let us pause long enough to reckon up some of our expenditures in
species, and in millions of individuals. Let us set down here, in cold
blood, a list of the species of our own North American birds that have
been totally exterminated in our own times. After that we will have
something to say about other species that soon will be exterminated; and
the second task is much greater than the first.

* * * * *

ROLL CALL OF THE DEAD SPECIES OF AMERICAN BIRDS

THE GREAT AUK,--_Plautus-impennis_, (Linn.), was a sea-going diving bird
about the size of a domestic goose, related to the guillemots, murres
and puffins. For a bird endowed only with flipper-like wings, and
therefore absolutely unable to fly, this species had an astonishing
geographic range. It embraced the shores of northern Europe to North
Cape, southern Greenland, southern Labrador, and the Atlantic coast of
North America as far south as Massachusetts. Some say, "as far south as
Massachusetts, the Carolinas and Florida," but that is a large order,
and I leave the A.O.U. to prove that if it can. In the life history of
this bird, a great tragedy was enacted in 1800 by sailors, on Funk
Island, north of Newfoundland, where men were landed by a ship, and
spent several months slaughtering great auks and trying out their fat
for oil. In this process, the bodies of thousands of auks were burned as
fuel, in working up the remains of tens of thousands of others.

On Funk Island, a favorite breeding-place, the great auk was
exterminated in 1840, and in Iceland in 1844. Many natives ate this bird
with relish, and being easily captured, either on land or sea, the
commercialism of its day soon obliterated the species. The last living
specimen was seen in 1852, and the last dead one was picked up in
Trinity Bay, Ireland, in 1853. There are about 80 mounted and unmounted
skins in existence, four skeletons, and quite a number of eggs. An egg
is worth about $1200 and a good mounted skin at least double that sum.

THE LABRADOR DUCK,--_Camptorhynchus labradoricus_, (Gmel.).--This
handsome sea-duck, of a species related to the eider ducks of arctic
waters, became totally extinct about 1