Part II.] NATURAL ENEMIES OF BIRDS. 257 



eggs and young of birds than most persons believe. Where these are abun- 

 dant, no ground-nesting birds will be found. Weasels and even foxes 

 feed chiefly on rodents such as mice and rats, and also rabbits. Only 

 occasionally do they find their way to the poultry yard. 



Bounty laws never have exterminated any wide-ranging ani- 

 mal, and in most cases where the smaller species were concerned 

 bounties have not even reduced their numbers permanently. 

 On the Island of Bermuda, with an area of less than twenty 

 square miles, an attempt to exterminate the English sparrow 

 by bounties cost $2,500, and was abandoned as impracticable. 

 Similar efforts in several American States have caused the ex- 

 penditure of large sums of money without producing as much 

 reduction in the numbers of the sparrow as has followed a single 

 severe winter. If a standing price sufBciently large could be 

 offered for an animal throughout its entire range its extinction 

 might ensue because of continuous persecution everywhere, in 

 the same way that birds have been extirpated when followed 

 throughout their range by hunters working under the stimulus 

 of a continually rising market price, or as the fur seal may yet 

 be exterminated, despite the efforts of the United States govern- 

 ment to protect it; but local or State bounty laws, even if 

 effective within prescribed limits, do not reduce greatly the 

 numbers of a species throughout its range. When a bounty 

 law works effectively in any one State it soon gets to be so 

 expensive that its repeal becomes a necessity and then the 

 persecuted species again increases in numbers. Bounties alone 

 have never brought about the extermination of any species in 

 the United States, and they have never secured results com- 

 mensurate with the expenditure involved. Several States have 

 paid premiums on bears for many years without much decrease 

 in their numbers. If an animal as large as a bear can survive 

 under a bounty system, how can such a system be expected to 

 extirpate smaller animals? Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, 

 Washington and Montana have expended very large sums in 

 bounties on small rodents, but have made little impression on 

 the multitude of these creatures. 



