The range of this species once covered the eastern two-thirds of the continent of North America.  It extended from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains, and from Great Bear Lake to Florida and Texas.  Eastward of the Mississippi it has for twenty years been totally extinct, and the last specimens taken alive were found in Kansas and Nebraska.

[Illustration:  WHOOPING CRANES IN THE ZOOLOGICAL PARK Very Soon this Species will Become Totally Extinct.]

THE TRUMPETER SWAN.—­Six years ago this species was regarded as so nearly extinct that a doubting ornithological club of Boston refused to believe on hearsay evidence that the New York Zoological Park contained a pair of living birds, and a committee was appointed, to investigate in person, and report.  Even at that time, skins were worth all the way from $100 to $150 each; and when swan skins sell at either of those figures it is because there are people who believe that the species either is on the verge of extinction, or has passed it.  The pair referred to above was acquired in 1900.  Since that time, Dr. Leonard C. Sanford procured in 1910 two living birds from a bird dealer who obtained them on the coast of Virginia.  We have done our utmost to induce our pair to breed, but without any further results than nest-building.

The loss of the trumpeter swan (Olor americanus) will not be so great, nor felt so keenly, as the blotting out of the whooping crane.  It so closely resembles the whistling swan that only an ornithologist can recognize the difference, a yellow spot on the side of the upper mandible, near its base.  The whistling swan yet remains in fair numbers, but it is to be feared that soon it will go as the trumpeter has gone.

THE AMERICAN FLAMINGO, SCARLET IBIS AND ROSEATE SPOONBILL are three of the most beautiful and curious water-haunting birds of the tropics.  Once all three species inhabited portions of the southern United States; but now all three are gone from our star-spangled bird fauna.  The brilliant scarlet plumage of the flamingo and ibis, and the exquisite pink rose-color and white of the spoonbill naturally attracted the evil eyes of the “milliner’s taxidermists” and other bird-butchers.  From Florida these birds quickly vanished.  The six great breeding colonies of Flamingoes on Andros Island, Bahamas, have been reduced to two, and from Prof.  E.A.  Goeldi, of the State Museum Goeldi, Para, Brazil, have come bitter complaints of the slaughter of scarlet ibises in South America by plume-hunters in European pay.

I know not how other naturalists regard the future of the three species named above, but my opinion is that unless the European feather trade is quickly stopped as to wild plumage, they are absolutely certain to be shot into total oblivion, within a very few years.  The plumage of these birds has so much commercial value, for fishermen’s flies as well as for women’s hats, that the birds will be killed as long as their feathers can be sold and any birds remain alive.