five years after the disappearance of its cousin the lesser koa finch, a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seenthe one shot for Rothschild's collection. Altogether during the decade or so of Rothschild's most intensive collecting,at least nine species of Hawaiian birds vanished, but it may have been more.Rothschild was by no means alone in his zeal to capture birds at more or less any cost.Others in fact were more ruthless.In 1907 when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos,a species of forest bird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with "joy."It was, in short, a difficult age to fathoma time when almost any animal was persecuted if it was deemed the least bit intrusive.In 1890, New York State paid out over one hundred bounties for eastern mountain lionseven though it was clear that the much-harassed creatures were on the brink of extinction.Right up until the 1940s many states continued to pay bounties for almost any kind of predatory creature.West Virginia gave out an annual college scholarship to whoever brought in the most dead pestsand "pests" was liberally interpreted to mean almost anything that wasn't grown on farms or kept as pets.Perhaps nothing speaks more vividly for the strangeness of the times than the fate of the lovely little Bachman's warbler.
