Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. Ill 



the next. They fed them all fall and in a few days they had 

 them so tame they would come up and feed from their hands. 

 The ducks stayed until the pond froze over and they had to go 

 south, and by that time there were over two hundred of them. 

 They were shot at all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. They were 

 shot at down there all winter. They were shot at all the way 

 back the next spring, because they were passing over heathen 

 territory where men still claim the right to shoot birds even 

 when on the way to their nesting grounds. 



Of the two hundred birds that left that little pond in Novem- 

 ber only a paltry thirty lived to get back the next spring; but 

 they remembered where their friends lived. They remembered 

 that little haven of rest, and they made a bee line for it when 

 within twenty miles of it. The family was down there to meet 

 them again and had grain for their breakfast. The ducks 

 gathered around them and ate from their hands again, though 

 they had been persecuted all winter and had been as wild in the 

 south as any other ducks. It is a long story. I cannot tell you 

 all of it. That first picture was made eight years ago. Those 

 ducks have been coming there every year ever since, and have 

 been increasing in numbers from year to year in spite of all the 

 slaughter elsewhere, until last fall over two thousand of them 

 came there, and they stayed until the pond was frozen over 

 again. 



Now do you see what you can do with a little remnant of 

 bird life if you will take care of it? 



A farmer over in Illinois, the president of the Illinois Corn 

 Growers' Association, Harvey J. Scouse, has a farm of two 

 thousand acres. A pair of prairie chickens migrated down into 

 Illinois five years ago, one cold winter. In the spring most of 

 them went back, but one pair stayed and nested on his farm. 

 He has taken good care of them, has not shot at them, although 

 he is an ardent sportsman and president of the Illinois State 

 Sportsmen's Association. He has not fired a shot on his land 

 and has not allowed anyone else to do so, and today he has over 

 three hundred prairie chickens there. 



Now, I beg of you, take care of the quail you have on your 

 farm. If they nest and raise a covey next summer don't let 

 anybody kill them. Feed and care for them as this man did of 

 the ducks that came into his pond, and you will soon have 

 plenty of them. 



