Photo by George Shiras, 3rd 



A TOM-CAT ON A HUNT FlR^S FLASH Se:T FOR RABBITS, IN FLORIDA 



No animals more destructive to birds and small game exist than stray cats, for they possess 

 all the cunning of their wild ancestors and much more, acquired through domestication 



early every night the flashlight was fired 

 by several varieties of opossum, and it 

 mattered not how high the bait was hung 

 or its variation in kind. . 



While on St. Vincent Island, off the 

 gulf coast of Florida, instead of coons I 

 only got razor-back hogs, and on the 

 main shore, on a rabbit runway, the 

 flash was fired by a big tomcat seeking 

 a bunny for his supper. During two 

 trips after wild cats in a southern swamp 

 hogs took the bait in the daytime and 

 skunks the bait at night. Stray hounds 

 hunting for pleasure and sledge dogs of 

 the North, supporting themselves in 

 summer, will eagerly follow up wind to 

 the spot where the scented bait is in 

 front of the camera, but, fortunately, 

 these canines seldom return again after 

 one bombardment of the flash. 



But domestic animals are not the only 

 source of trouble. In the wildest por- 

 tion of Newfoundland a camera set in 

 daytime, with a string across a trail used 



by caribou migrating in the fall, was 

 walked into by a French trapper, who, 

 on feeling the pressure of the string on 

 his leg and hearing the click of the shut- 

 ter, jumped back with a yell, thinking 

 his life had only been saved because a 

 set gun, the most diabolical device of the 

 pot-hunter, had missed fire. 



Again, a camera and flash set for deer 

 and peccaries, on a supposedly disused 

 trail at the edge of a Mexican sugar 

 plantation, might have resulted in an in- 

 ternational complication, because two 

 Mexican girls, who walked into the 

 string when groping their way to a canoe 

 landing, thought they had been fired at 

 from ambush by our party, camping 

 near by, and fled shrieking through a 

 jungle of palmetto and thorns to the 

 nearest cabin, where the additional cries 

 of the children and barking of the dogs 

 made such an uproar that I was quite 

 concerned. 



My two estimable companions, Messrs. 



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