122 FOREST PLANTING. 



wants of his young that will take no other food for the 

 first weeks of their life. An excess of their multiplica- 

 tion should be checked by the gun or trap. Either 

 fried or boiled, for soup or stew, they make an excellent 

 meal. 



C. The Injurious Animals. 



Animals of prey such as bears, wolves, catamounts, 

 wild-cats, etc., should be unmercifully persecuted and 

 killed off as they devour the nobler kinds of game and 

 also animals useful in promoting the forest-growth. 



Of the mammals, the rodents are the most obnoxious 

 animals, especially the leaver one of them alone being 

 able to cut down in one night a tree measuring 12 inches 

 in diameter. In the State of Kew York (hey are now 

 nearly exterminated, but their pernicious work can still 

 be seen on streams and creeks in the Adirondack region 

 on the so-called "beaver meadows." The beavers built 

 their dams across the streams causing long back flows by 

 which the surrounding trees and bushes were water killed 

 or drowned in the ponds formed through the dams. 

 These ponds became, in time, filled by the decaying wood 

 material and other debris of the forests, a 1 id furnished 

 the aquatic plants the soil in which they found not only 

 root, but such rich plant food that the whole pond soon 

 was overgrown with coarse grasses. After the extinction 

 of the beaver the lumbermen have resumed this work of 

 destroying trees by water. For in order to cheaply 

 transport the logs through the Adirondacks, dams are 

 now built, causing back flows that annually kill more 

 trees than ever have been there destroyed by fire. 



Mice are very obnoxious to forest-growth. They feed 

 upon tree seed, gnaw off the tender bark of young trees, 

 and bite entirely through small seedlings and saplings. 

 Folia-i'd trees are the principal object of their ravages ; 

 but they do not spare conifers, especially when the 



