ur
car-loads of wings, and the carnage was half finished, William A. Bryan,
Professor of Zoology in the College of Honolulu, heard of it and
promptly wired the United States Government.

Without the loss of a moment the Secretary of the Navy despatched the
revenue cutter _Thetis_ to the shambles of Laysan. When Captain Jacobs
arrived he found that in round numbers about _three hundred thousand_
birds had been destroyed, and all that remained of them were several
acres of bones and dead bodies, and about three carloads of wings,
feathers and skins. It was evident that Schlemmer's intention was to
kill all the birds on the island, and only the timely arrival of the
_Thetis_ frustrated that bloody plan.

The twenty-three Japanese poachers were arrested and taken to Honolulu
for trial, and the _Thetis_ also brought away all the stolen wings and
plumage with the exception of one shedful of wings that had to be left
behind on account of lack of carrying space. That old shed, with one
end torn out, and supposed to contain nearly fifty thousand pairs of
wings, was photographed by Prof. Dill in 1911, as shown herewith.

[Illustration: ACRES OF GULL AND ALBATROSS BONES
Photographed on Laysan Island by H.R. Dill, 1911]

Three hundred thousand albatrosses, gulls, terns and other birds were
butchered to make a Schlemmer holiday! Had the arrival of the _Thetis_
been delayed, it is reasonably certain that every bird on Laysan would
have been killed to satisfy the wolfish rapacity of one money-grubbing
white man.

In 1911, the Iowa State University despatched to Laysan a scientific
expedition in charge of Prof. Homer R. Dill. The party landed on the
island on April 24 and remained until June 5, and the report of
Professor Dill (U.S. Department of Agriculture) is consumedly
interesting to the friends of birds. Here is what he has said regarding
the evidences of bird-slaughter:

"Our first impression of Laysan was that the poachers had stripped the
place of bird life. An area of over 300 acres on each side of the
buildings was apparently abandoned. Only the shearwaters moaning in
their burrows, the little wingless rail skulking from one grass tussock
to another, and the saucy finch remained. It is an excellent example of
what Prof. Nutting calls the survival of the inconspicuous.

"Here on every side are bones bleaching in the sun, showing where the
poachers had piled the bodies of the birds as they stripped them of
wings and fe