, the one most easily found, and the biggest mark for
the gunner. Those who have seen this bird in its native sage-brush well
understand how fatally it is exposed to slaughter.

Many appeals have been made in behalf of the pinnated grouse; but the
open seasons continue. The gunners of the states in which a few remnants
still exist are determined to have them, all; and the state legislatures
seem disposed to allow the killers to have their way. It may be
however, that like New York with the heath hen, they will arouse and
virtuously lock the stable door--after the horse has been stolen!

[Illustration: SAGE GROUSE
The First of the Upland Game Birds that will Become Extinct]

THE SNOWY EGRET AND AMERICAN EGRET, (_Egretta candidissima and Herodias
egretta_).--These unfortunate birds, cursed for all time by the
commercially valuable "aigrette" plumes that they bear, have had a very
narrow escape from total extinction in the United States, despite all
the efforts made to save them. The "plume-hunters" of the millinery
trade have been, _and still are_, determined to have the last feather
and the last drop of egret blood. In an effort to stop the slaughter in
at least one locality in Florida, Warden Guy Bradley was killed by a
plume-hunter, who of course escaped all punishment through the
heaven-born "sympathy" of a local jury.

Of the bloody egret slaughter in Florida, not one-tenth of the whole
story ever has been told. Millions of adult birds,--all there
were,--were killed _in the breeding season_, when the plumes were ripe
for the market; and millions of young birds starved in their nests. It
was a common thing for a rookery of several hundred birds to be attacked
by the plume-hunters, and in two or three days utterly destroyed. The
same bloody work is going on to-day in Venezuela and Brazil; and the
stories and "affidavits" stating that the millions of egret plumes being
shipped annually from those countries are "shed feathers," "picked up
off the ground," are absolute lies. The men who have sworn to those lies
are perjurers, and should be punished for their crimes. (See Chapter
XIII).

By 1908, the plume-hunters had so far won the fight for the egrets that
Florida had been swept almost as bare of these birds as the Colorado
desert.

Until Mr. E.A. McIlhenny's egret preserve, at Avery Island, Louisiana,
became a pronounced success, we had believed that our two egrets soon
would become totally extinct in the United