The IValer-fowl of the Pacific Coast 533 



he could lounge away the middle of the day, his 

 home was quite ideal. And when thousands of 

 acres of grain began to shine upon the plain it 

 only meant for many a year more feed and more 

 geese. Hence the goose was found here, espe- 

 cially in California, in numbers quite incredible 

 even to those who saw geese in Minnesota and 

 Illinois forty years ago. As late as 1875 the 

 plains and slopes about Los Angeles were dotted 

 as far as I could see, not with geese, but with 

 flocks of them. It was the same down through 

 the handsome plains of Orange County and down 

 the coast table-lands through Santa Margarita and 

 far into Lower California. In the San Joaquin 

 Valley they covered thousands of acres of huge 

 lakes like Tulare, while the sloughs and ponds 

 in the sinks of the different streams shook be- 

 neath myriads of wings. Where the grain-fields 

 covered tens of thousands of acres, as in the 

 Sacramento Valley and Lower San Joaquin, bands 

 of armed horsemen were regularly employed to 

 scare them off the grain by riding about and 

 shooting at them, until "goose cavalry" became 

 almost as much a part of a huge grain ranch as 

 the threshing-machine. 



THE CANADA GOOSE 



Chief among them all was the Canada goose 

 or " honker," robed in gray and dusky hues with 



