CONSERVATION OF GAME BIRDS. 513 



two hundred Ducks each daily, during the season. Some of 

 them quit when the Ducks had decreased to such an extent 

 that they could not get this number daily, as then they could 

 earn more money at rice farming. He states that a wealthy 

 man, who secured control of a lake frequented by wild-fowl, 

 formerly shipped Ducks enough to return him from ten thou- 

 sand to twelve thousand dollars a year. Mr. C. E. Brewster 

 talked with a half-breed market hunter at High Island, Texas, 

 in 1910, who, with his partner, had just come in to the railroad 

 station with a day's bag of birds. They had killed two hun- 

 dred and five Ducks that day. One of them said that for six- 

 teen years he had hunted every week day during the season, 

 when the Ducks were there. He received $872.30 for the game 

 that he killed in the winter of 1909-10. These Ducks were 

 mainly shipped to northern markets. He "loafed" during 

 the remainder of the year. The sale of these birds was illegal, 

 as the law forbade shipment out of the State, and it was illegal 

 for any man to kill more than a limited number of birds in 

 a day; but so long as markets for wild game are open, men 

 will be found to supply them. This hunter said frankly that 

 the diminution of the game was very marked, and that he be- 

 lieved that at the present rate of decrease the Ducks would be 

 practically extinct within the next decade. Nevertheless, he 

 was doing all that he could to exterminate them, because, by 

 breaking the law, he could get more money with less exertion 

 than in any other way. To-day, by means of automatic guns, 

 live decoys and "batteries" or blinds, market hunters, under 

 favorable conditions, sometimes make enormous kills. Mr. 

 T. Gilbert Pearson, secretary of the National Association of 

 Audubon Societies, informs me that in one week in November, 

 1909, two men killed fourteen hundred Blue-bills on Currituck 

 Sound, and another shot four hundred from his battery in 

 one day. 



Mr. Henry T. Phillips of Detroit, Mich., a former market 

 hunter, asserts that in his camp a party consisting of three 

 men shot seventy-two pounds of powder in thirty days, and 

 that two of them killed twelve barrels of Ducks in four days. 

 He himself in one week shot one hundred and two, one hundred 



