96 COMMISSION OF CONSERVATION 



came to a place where there were enough caribou to justify killing. 

 I said to my companion, an old mountain man, who had been in the 

 Fraser River country for eighteen years: Is there not some nearer 

 place to get them so as to avoid carrying them this long distance ? He 

 answered that, until the railway came through, the Tonikwa moun- 

 tains, just north of the Fraser river, were the best caribou range in the 

 whole country but were no good now, that he would not advise me to 

 depend on getting one there. Probably at this very moment there are 

 men hunting caribou in the Tonikwa mountains and selling them to 

 the railway men. I could give you names, but I do not think I ought 

 to do so. My informant is a resident there, and he states that, if it 

 were known that he had told, it would go hard with him among his 

 neighbours. So you see our big game are in a very precarious state. 



Dangers Threatening Wild Fowi, 



Turn to the wild fowl. Passenger pigeons once covered the sky 

 and made it black with their countless numbers. In 1857, the Senate 

 of the state of Ohio instructed a committee to investigate the propriety 

 of protecting the wild pigeons. The committee reported that there 

 was no need of protection, that they were in such countless numbers 

 that they could not possibly be exterminated. The last passenger 

 pigeon died last year in the Cincinnati zoological park at the age of 

 twenty-two years. The Eskimo curlew, another example, is abso- 

 lutely extinct. A bulletin of the United States Department of Agri- 

 culture says with regard to this question that the golden plover, the 

 willet and the black-necked stilt are in order for extinction very soon. 

 I wonder how many of you gentlemen have ever seen one of these 

 birds outside a museum; yet they used to breed in Canada in very 

 large numbers. The Labrador duck is another extinct species, and I 

 might mention numerous others that are in very grave danger. The 

 prairie chicken is very much in need of protection or it, too, will be 

 exterminated. Recently, I was talking to a man from Saskatchewan 

 who said that the prairie chicken is being killed by gopher poison. 

 That is the viewpoint of the ardent sportsmen ; it is not gopher poison 

 that is killing the prairie chicken. The simple fact is that it lives in 

 the open, it is a large bird, a conspicuous mark for the gunner, and it 

 cannot stand the slaughter. 



„ „. I do not think it necessary to go further to demon- 



Remote Dis- , , - , . 



tricts Being strate my proposit4on that the time is passed when 



Made Accessible ^ji^ game was a legitimate part of our food supply, 

 except in a very few very remote districts — ^and it must be borne in 



