Ornithic Atrocities

The poor puffin! The poor gannet, poor razorbill, poor gull, guillemot, cor morant, tern and albatross! Ships that pass in the day or night vomit over the oceans the black waste of their oil-burning engines. Puffin, gannet, razor bill, gull, guillemot, cormorant, tern or albatross, dipping in their wake to gobble up some bilge morsel, floats flapping and crippled among the sliding sea hills, unable to rise for a cloying anointment that lays his feathers flat, seals his wings. He wearies, starves, sickens, dies, is flung ashore by the tides to testify in flyblown silence to the tyranny of man.

The world was, last week, called to account for these ornithic atrocities by one Henry de Vere Stacpoole, British writer:

"We see birds trying to clean one another of this filth that defies description, and we see birds made tame by terror of it. We find tangled on the sea wrack masses of black filth that are still living birds, and we have seen in oil, when it has concentrated into long black lines, the horrors of black, croaking phantoms that were still birds."

Mr. Stacpoole was not bitter about it. "There is no use," said he, "abusing ships. They are up against hard times and new conditions." But Governments could "end this terrible business," he thought; and he forthwith called for an international conference "to thresh it out." He offered no suggestions as to how the high seas might be made safe for aviculture, nor did he estimate what leagues of ocean are still unpolluted by the oily skirts of commerce