1891.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 45 



lowing birds and mammals : hawks, owls, other than the 

 saw-whet (JVyctea acadica), foxes, minks, weasels and 

 wild cats. Wild cats were paid for at the rate of two dollars 

 each, foxes commanded one dollar a head, and the remainder 

 of the animals specified in the law were worth each fifty 

 cents. 



Under this act, within a period of about one year, Penn- 

 sylvania paid probably not less than one hundred and fifty 

 thousand dollars for the destruction of birds and mammals. 

 Of this large sum of money, more than one- half — nearly 

 eighty thousand dollars, as near as we can learn — was paid 

 for the killing of hawks and owls, the greater part of which 

 were species that fed principally on mice and different kinds 

 of destructive insects. It was impossible to learn, positively, 

 the exact number of hawks and owls slain by the provisions 

 of the act of 1885, as some officers in the Keystone State 

 were imposed upon in various ways by the " scalp hunters " 

 In several counties premiums were awarded for night-hawks 

 ( Oliordeiles Virginianus) Bounties were also given for the 

 heads of common domestic fowls, partridges (Bonasa umbel- 

 lus), cuckoos and butcher-birds ; and, strange as it may 

 seem to many of you, I was shown by the late Prof. S. F. 

 Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution, the heads of two Eng- 

 lish sparrows, on which premiums had been paid by officers 

 who believed them to be the heads of blood-thirsty, fowl- 

 devouring hawks or owls. Impositions were also practiced 

 in other ways. In one county upwards of two thousand dol- 

 lars were paid to a party of hunters (three or five in num- 

 ber) for a mule's skin and a buffalo robe, which were cut 

 into pieces and "fixed up" so that they passed for the 

 " heads" or "ears" of predatory mammals, or possibly the 

 wise (?) magistrate accepted a portion of them as the heads 

 of hawks and owls. A red fox was slain in one of the 

 mountainous districts, and its pelt was cut into sixty-one 

 parts, from which, it is stated, the enterprising hunters real- 

 ized sixty-one dollars for their work. Birds of prey, as 

 well as other animals on which bounties were allowed, were 

 shipped to Pennsylvania from neighboring States ; in this 

 way large amounts of money were fraudulently obtained. 

 Crawford County, one of our western districts, joining the 



