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 States. But Mr. McIlhenny has certainly saved those birds to our fauna. In 1892 he started an egret and heron preserve, close beside his house on Avery Island. By 1900 it was an established success. To-day 20,000 pairs of egrets and herons are living and breeding in that bird refuge, and the two egret species are safe in at least one spot in our own country. [Illustration: SNOWY EGRETS IN THE McILHENNY EGRET PRESERVE It is at This Period That the Parent Birds are Killed for Their Plumes, and the Young Starve in the Nest Photo by E.A. McIlhenny]