For some unaccountable reason there is, or was for many years, a very prevalent idea that the enormous number of skins which have poured into the London market were from birds bred in the vicinity of Calcutta.  When we remember the intense heat of that low-lying city, and learn from the records of the Calcutta Zoological Garden that impeyans and tragopans are even shorter-lived than in Europe, the absurdity of the idea is apparent.  In spite of numberless inquiries throughout India, I failed to learn of a single captive young bird ever hatched and reared even in the high, cool, hill-stations.  The commercial value of an impeyan skin has varied from five dollars to twenty dollars, according to the number received annually.  In 1876 an estimate placed the monthly average of impeyans received in London at from two to eight hundred.

In such a case as Nepal, direct protective laws are of no avail.  All humane arguments are useless, but if the markets at the other end can be closed, the slaughter will cease instantly and automatically.

[Illustration:  DEADFALL TRAPS IN BURMA A Long Series set Across a Valley, by the Kachins of the Burma-Chinese Border.  A Wholesale Method of Wild-life Slaughter, Photographed by C. William Beebe, 1910]

As a contrast to the millinery hunter of fifty years ago it is refreshing to find that at last sincere efforts are being made in British possessions to stop this traffic.  I happened to be at Rangoon when six large bales of pheasant skins were seized by the Custom officials.  A Chinaman had brought them from Yunnan via Bhamo, and was preparing to ship them as ducks’ feathers.  Two of the bales were opened for my inspection.  The first contained about five hundred Lady Amherst pheasant skins, falling to pieces and lacking heads and legs.  The second held over four hundred silver pheasants, in almost perfect condition.  The chief collector had put the absolutely prohibitive fine of 200 pounds on them, and was waiting for the expiration of the legal number of days before burning the entire lot.  They must have represented years of work in decimating the pheasant fauna of western China.

Far up in the wilderness of northern Burma, and over the Yunnan border, we often came upon some of the most ingenious examples of native trapping, a system which we found repeated in the Malay States, Borneo, China and other parts of the Far East.  A low bamboo fence is built directly across a steep valley or series of valleys, about half way from the summit to the lower end, and about every fifteen feet a narrow opening is left, over which a heavy log is suspended.  Any creature attempting to make its way through, treads upon several small sticks and by so doing springs the trap and the dead-fall claims a victim.  When a country is systematically strung with traps such as these, sooner or later all but a pitiful remnant of the smaller mammals, birds and reptiles are certain to be wiped out.  Morning after morning I have visited such a runway and found dead along its path, what must have been all the walking, running or crawling creatures which the night before had sought the water at the bottom; pheasants, cobras, mouse-deer, rodents, civets, and members of many other groups.  In some countries nooses instead of dead-falls guard the openings, but the result is equally deadly.