PRIVATE GAME PRESERVES 213 



cooperate to the fullest extent with the state and 

 private preserves to encourage their development, 

 and furnish, practically at cost for services and 

 expenses, a consulting expert to enable the begin- 

 ner to start intelligently, avoid serious mistakes, 

 correct unavoidable errors, prescribe against sick- 

 ness and help enforce sanitary conditions by empha- 

 sizing at all times the importance of the great cardi- 

 nal principle, hygiene. The New York Zoological 

 Society is already doing much along this line. 



The Response of Wild Fowl to Man's Protec- 

 tion. It is far more interesting to tame a wild 

 bird by coaxing it to feed on your window-sill every 

 morning than it is to look after a thrush that is 

 eating his heart out in a small cage as he watches 

 through the bars of his prison the chickadees on the 

 window-sill. 



It is this growing not humanizing, but animaliz- 

 ing instinct that is turning us with something akin 

 to disgust away from the ill-smelling, poorly kept 

 cage collections of the often misguided individual 

 enthusiast to the free out-of-door range, where the 

 birds that have been migrating over those acres for 

 countless generations are glad to drop down out of 

 the sky and feed, eager to accept protection from 

 their most deadly enemy, man. 



Practical Suggestions. It is astonishing what 

 can be accomplished in two or three seasons from 

 the smallest beginning, provided a few fundamen- 

 tals are observed. A successful game preserve and 



