It will be noticed that the breast of the grebe has almost wholly disappeared from the feather market and from women's hats. The reason is that there are no longer enough birds of that group to hold a place in the London market! Few indeed are the Americans who know that from 1900 to 1908 the lake region of southern Oregon was the scene of the slaughter of uncountable thousands of those birds, which continued until the grebes were almost exterminated. When the wonderful lyre-bird of Australia had been almost exterminated for its tail feathers, its open slaughter was stopped by law, and a heavy fine was imposed on exportation, amounting, I have been told, to $250 for each offense. My latest news of the lyre-bird was of the surreptitious exportation of 200 skins to the London feather market. In India, the smuggling outward of the skins of protected birds is constantly going on. Occasionally an exporter is caught and fined; but that does not stop the traffic. Bird-lovers must now bid farewell forever to all the birds of paradise. Nothing but the legal closing of the world's markets against their plumes and skins can save any of them. They never were numerous; nor does any species range over a wide area. They are strictly insular, and the island homes of some of them are very small. Take the great bird of paradise (_Paradisea apoda_) as an illustration. On Oct. 2, 1912, at Indianapolis, Indiana, a city near the center of the United States, in three show-windows within 100 feet of the headquarters of the Fourth National Conservation Congress, I counted 11 stuffed heads and 11 complete sets of plumes of this bird, displayed for sale. The prices ranged from $30 to $47.50 each! And while I looked, a large lady approached, pointed her finger at the remains of a greater bird of paradise, and with grim determination, said to her shopping companion: "There! I want one o' them, an' I'm agoin' to _have_ it, too!" Says Mr. James Buckland in "Pros and Cons of the Plumage Bill": "Mr. Goodfellow has returned within the last few weeks from a second expedition to new Guinea.... One can now walk, he states, miles and miles through the former haunts of these birds [of paradise] without seeing or hearing even the commonest species. When I reflect on this sacrilege, I am lost in wonder at the apathy of the British public." Mr. Carl Hagenbeck wrote me only three months ago that "the condors of the Andes are all being exterminated for their feathers, and these birds are now very difficult to obtain."