EGRETS AND OSPREYS.
THE heron, though no longer a "royal bird," but too often regarded as an outlaw to be shot at sight, is, by reason of its size and stately dignity, one of the noblest of the few great fowls that yet survive among us, and seems still to command something of the respect that belongs to fallen greatness. It has a near relation; which is invested with a special interest at this time by Lord Avebury's Bill to prohibit the importation of the plumage of birds into Great Britain. the egrets are a collateral branch of the heron family, 3iffering in little from the head of the house except their vesture, which is of spotless white. There are several species, scarcely distinguishable but by their sizes. The largest of them (Ardea alba), commonly called the great white heron, has been " obtained " eight times in this country, and the smallest (Ardea garzetta) is also ranked among British birds. The latter, whether its claim to a place in our list be admitted or not, is a widely distributed bird, being found throughout Southern Europe, Africa, and Asia as far as China and Japan. It is exceedingly common in India, where Englishmen
have most opportunity of becoming intimate with it. In size it about equals a curlew, though the figures of the two birds make the comparison seem a little absurd. In colour it is snowy white, save the beak and bare shanks, which are black. As to its gait and attitudes and manner of life, there is not much need to describe them to any one who knows the common heron. Its haunts are the banks of river and lake, reedy marshes and tanks, gay with the crimson and white flowers of the lotus, and, most of all, the broad, mangrove-fringed shores of the creeks and back- waters of the sea-coast. In such situations, knee-deep in water and ankle-deep in oozy mire, it stands, like Patience on a monument, but not smiling at grief, not smiling at any- thing, nor frowning, nor evincing any emotion at alL The piercing yellow eyes are as expressionless as those of a snake. The beak points down, like an arrow aimed at a mark, and the long neck is slightly bent like an " S." Nothing has happened
- that we can see, when suddenly some inward trigger is pulled, or some spring touched, and the weapon darts forth and snaps upon an unsuspecting mud-fish, or wandering frog, or tadpole. Once, when the writer was looking on, it was a young water- snake, whose frantic wriggles had to be quieted with much banging about before it would submit to be taken by the. head and induced to glide quietly down a channel not so long as . itself and scarcely wider.' At other times the egret wades with slow and solemn steps, its neck stretched out and its head held high, scanning the muddy bottom on all sides for any game that the feet may put up. At the sight of a fugitive mud-fish its solemnity occasionally forsakes it, and it performs a hop, skip, and jump with quite surprising nimbleness. It has lucky days, too, when it can join in a battue, as, for example, when a cordon of cormorants have hemmed •in a dense shoal of small fry in a corner of a creek, and are plunging into the seething and glittering mass and swallowing and plunging again with all the gluttonous fury of their tribe. In a few seconds a crowd of egrets will hurry down to the bank and begin plucking the shiny morsels out of the shallow water as a chicken picks up corn. When the labours of the day are over and the sun is setting, the egrets gather into parties of from five to fifty, and wend their way to some distant roosting-tree. At such times they fly low, almost touching the water. There are few pleasanter reminiscences connected with snipe-shooting in the East than the rest and smoke on the bank of a broad and peaceful creek, while the eye feasts on the play of sunset hues upon the glassy expanse bounded by the dark, inverted landscape, and watches the approach of the long, white, wavy lines until each bird stands out distinctly to the view, with its head resting on its shoulders and its legs stretched out behind, and its long wings beating with a slow and steady stroke which only reveals its power by the rate at which they sweep past into the dusk.
The little egret is not shy when unmolested, and all its ways may be watched without much precaution. But, alas! it is in few places unmolested now. No one has concerned himself
much to inquire whether it does more harm or good to the fisheries ; but Mohammedans and those castes of Hindus that eat flesh, and especially the Goanese, or native Christians, consider all herons as very superior table fowls. So at one time did we. We are grown fastidious and call such birds "fishy," but in the fifteenth century a State banquet was not complete without egritles, or herashaws. India has not reached the fastidious stage of civilisation yet; and if there is a shikaree, or a man' who owns a shooting-iron of any kind, in the village, the egrets learn to be a little wary. But India is not a carnivorous country upon the whole, and those who seek the egret for its flesh would have comparatively little effect upon its numbers or its happiness. It is not the poor man of India, but the rich woman of Europe, who is exterminating this beautiful bird. In order to explain the revolting wickedness of this business, it is necessary to refer to the breeding habits of the egrets. Like all of their tribe, they gather together into large companies to bring up their young. Why a bird which is so solitary and silent when about its ordinary avocations should choose to celebrate its domestic affairs with society and noise is a question for the philosopher-naturalist; the fact is certain that not only herons and egrets, but storks, cormorants, gulls, pelicans, and most of the other birds that make their living on the sea and its shores, found great communities for the breeding-season, and batch their eggs and rear their young in the midst of riot and confusion. From sunrise till sunset the incessant coming and going, the flapping of wings, the clamour of hungry youngsters and the wrangling of angry parents, at these settlements, keep 'up a tumult which can scarcely be described. Different kinds of birds are often mingled in these communities, and night-herons and cor- morants may be seen sharing the same tree. The one lot set out to forage as the other come home to rest, so that neither can get leave even to sleep in peace. The little egret often chooses for its nesting-place a great tree situated in the very middle of a fishing village, and gains a measure of protection thereby, for the fishermen fear ill-luck to the village if the birds are molested. The nests are generally slight, consisting of a few sticks loosely put together. The eggs, of which there are about five, are of that bluish-green tint, borrowed from the sea, which is the fashion in the whole family. Just before the season begins the birds put on a wedding-dress. The colour is still all white; but a bunch of fine plumes hangs down from the breast, a crest of two long hairs crowns the head, and the back is adorned with a train which curls gracefully over the tail and can be raised at will. This consists of " decomposed " feathers,—that is, of feathers in which all the fine barbs are loose and separate from each other like threads. A small spray or aigrette of these constitutes that ornament for ladies' hats which milliners call an " osprey." "Aigrette" is only a form of the word "egret," but how the thing came to be called an osprey is not told in the dictionary. Call it what they will, the ladies demand it, the milliner's order it, the trade offers high prices for it, and thousands of guns are out in Asia, Africa, and America to procure it. As the bird doffs its wedding-dress at the end of the season, it must be shot or snared while the season lasts, while it is sitting on its eggs or feeding its helpless young. And each life yields as much as you may hold between your finger and thumb. But the price is high and so lucrative is the sport that along the railway lines in outlying parts of India guards and firemen are said to make a practice of taking a few days' leave in the season to go out egret-shooting, forfeiting their pay, if need be, for they can make it up many times over. In populous places and along the coast the slaughter is, of course, carried on in the way of business. The birds have for years been getting more scarce and wary; but as the difficulty of pro- curing the feathers increases, higher prices will stimulate effort. A few years ago the Government of India decided that the time had come for taking action to protect the egrets, and also many other beautiful and useful birds. Inquiries elicited the fact that the value of the plumage exported from India in a year amounted to Rs. 749,670, or about £41,000. This is, of course, a mere fraction of what they are sold for in London. A proportion of this quantity consisted of the feathers of peafowls, which are mostly picked up where the birds shed them, without injury to the birds themselves, and which are largely exported' to China for Mandarins' hats, 8m. Of the remainder, the plumes of egrets formed the principal
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item, kingfishers, rollers, and other brilliant birds making up the balance. To make the killing of these birds in India illegal would only have resulted in affording larger oppor- tunity to the avaricious policemen, to deprive whom of opportunity is one of the chief problems of administration in that country, and it was finally decided that the only feasible measure was to prohibit the exportation of feathers and skins of birds, excepting bond-fide specimens for purposes of natural history," and this was done. But the prohibition is almost inoperative because, as there are no export-duties in India on general merchandise, goods brought to a Custom House for exportation are seldom examined, and an article of which the value is so great in proportion to its bulk can be smuggled out of the country without the slightest difficulty. One tin box, about the size of a two-pound biscuit-box, which was brought to a post-office for despatch as a parcel, proved to contain egrets' feathers valued at £40. The Bill now being prepared by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds will, if it becomes law, compel the nefarious traffic to run a second risk at the British Custom Houses, and must do some good, not in India only, but in China, Africa, South America, and wherever egrets are still found. In Florida they have already been practically exterminated. And it will afford such protection as legal measures can to many other birds, the wholesale slaughter of which is almost more painful to think of; for example, those living gems, the humming-birds of America, of which eleven thousand four hundred and forty-three were put up at one of the regular auction sales in London not long ago. But it seems almost vain to hope that this inhuman traffic will ever be stopped until the taste of the women of Europe and America is so far refined as to make them recoil with disgust from the idea of tricking themselves out with any portion of a dead body. The fashion is only a sublimated form of that which makes the savage delight in wearing a necklace of the teeth of his enemies. The ladies of the Royal family have set a worthy example in this matter, and a good influence is undoubtedly at work, for milliners are often found labouring to remove the scruples of customers by assuring them that the ospreys which they offer are artificial ones, made of split quills, slips of whalebone, or other substances. It ought to be widely known that Sir W. H. Fowler, Sir Ray Lankester, and other eminent ornithologists have examined scores of these "artificial ospreys," and have found them to consist of genuine egrets' plumes, and they have emphatically recorded their opinion that imitation is impossible.
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