[Illustration:  NORTHERN ROBINS READY FOR SOUTHERN SLAUGHTER 195 Birds at Avery Island, La. in January 1912, Photographed Daring the Annual Slaughter, by E.A.  McIlhenny]

No:  these people were not Apache Indians, led by a Geronimo who knew no mercy, no compassion.  We imagine that they were mostly poor white trash, of Tennessee.  One small hamlet sent to market annually enough dead robins to return $500 at five cents per dozen; which means 120,000 birds!

Last winter Mr. Edward A. McIlhenny of Avery Island, La. (south of New Iberia) informed me that every winter, during the two weeks that the holly berries are ripe thousands of robins come to his vicinity to feed upon them.  “Then every negro man and boy who can raise a gun is after them.  About 10,000 robins are slaughtered each day while they remain.  Their dead bodies are sold in New Iberia at 10 cents each.”  The accompanying illustrations taken by Mr. McIlhenny shows 195 robins on one tree, and explains how such great slaughter is possible.

An officer of the Louisiana Audubon Society states that a conservative estimate of the number of robins annually killed in Louisiana for food purposes when they are usually plentiful, is a quarter of a million!

The food of the robin is as follows: 

Insects, 40 per cent; wild fruit, 43 per cent; cultivated fruit, 8 per cent, miscellaneous vegetable food, 5 per cent.

SPECIAL WORK OF THE SOUTHERN NEGROES.—­In 1912 a female colored servant who recently had arrived from country life in Virginia chanced to remark to me at our country home in the middle of August:  “I wish I could find some birds’ nests!”

“What for?” I asked, rather puzzled.

“Why, to get the aigs and eat ’em!” she responded with a bright smile and flashing teeth.

“Do you eat the eggs of wild birds?”

“Yes indeed!  It’s fine to get a pattridge nest!  From them we nearly always git a whole dozen of aigs at once,—­back where I live, in Virginia.”

“Do the colored people of Virginia make a practice of hunting for the eggs of wild birds, and eating them?”

“Yes, indeed we do.  In the spring and summer, when the birds are around, we used to get out every Sunday, and hunt all day.  Some days we’d come back with a whole bucket full of aigs; and then we’d set up half the night, cookin’ and eatin’ ’em.  They was awful good!”

Her face fairly beamed at the memory of it.

A few days later, this story of the doings of Virginia negroes was fully corroborated by a colored man who came from another section of that state.  Three months later, after special inquiries made at my request, a gentleman of Richmond obtained further corroboration, from negroes.  He was himself much surprised by the state of fact that was revealed to him.

In the North, the economic value of our song birds and other destroyers of insects and weed seeds is understood by a majority of the people, and as far as possible those birds are protected from all human enemies.  But in the South, a new division of the Army of Destruction has risen into deadly prominence.