y,
on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a
single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon,
where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested.
He found heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally lovely
plumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; the
family of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenly
swept off the world, annihilated, and was no more.

A few men with guns--for money--had done it. And the wild areas of the
world, especially of our part of the world, have grown so limited now
that a few men could easily, quickly destroy, blot out from the book of
life, almost any of our bird and animal families. "Thou madest him to
have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things
under his feet"--literally, and he must go softly now lest the very
fowl of the air and fish of the sea be destroyed forever. Within my
memory the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm perhaps, has apparently
become extinct; and the ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latter
by the hand of man, for I knew the man who believed that he had killed
the last pair of these noble birds reported from the Florida forests.
So we thought it had fared also with the snowy heron, but recently we
have had word from the wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnant
has escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been discovered along the
Gulf coast--so hardly can Nature forgo her own! So far away does the
mother of life hide her child, and so cunningly!

With our immediate and intelligent help, this family of birds, from
these few pairs can be saved and spread again over the savannas of the
South and the wide tule lakes in the distant Northwest.

The mother-principle, the dominant instinct in all life, is not failing
in our time. As Nature grows less capable (and surely she does!) of
mothering her own, then man must turn mother, as he has in the Audubon
Society; as he did in the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who
saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten him, that, while
extinction of the larger forms of animal life seems inevitable in the
future, a little help and constant help now will save even the largest
of our animals for a long time to come.

The way animal life hangs on against almost insuperable odds, and the
power in man's hands to further or destroy it, is quite past belief
until one has watch