CONSERVATION OF GAME BIRDS. 517 



out most of the region now known as the United States. 

 Twenty-four species still nest within our borders, but they 

 are now very few and far between in the east as compared to 

 their former abundance, which they can never approach until 

 market hunting and spring shooting are prohibited throughout 

 the length and breadth of the land. 



Audubon (1835) says that he found Wild Geese breeding 

 sparingly about the lakes within a few miles of the Mississippi 

 and Missouri rivers and their tributaries. He believed that 

 they bred abundantly in the temperate parts of North America 

 before the settlement of the country, and his opinion was 

 founded on the statements of many old and respected citizens. 



Gen. George Clark, one of the first settlers on the banks 

 of the Ohio (about 1760), said that Wild Geese were then so 

 plentiful at all seasons of the year that he was in the habit of 

 having them killed to feed his soldiers, then garrisoned near 

 Vincennes, Ind. Audubon's father corroborated this state- 

 ment, and Audubon himself and many other persons residing 

 at Louisville, Ky., well remembered that about the first of the 

 nineteenth century it was quite easy to procure young Geese 

 in the ponds of that district. He found the nests, eggs and 

 young of the species near Henderson, Ky., as late as 1819. ^ 



Mr. A. W. Butler, in his Birds of Indiana (1898), states 

 that "thirty years ago" it was not uncommon to find on the 

 upland meadows of Franklin and other southern counties, 

 where great flocks of Geese had stopped during the March 

 migration, numbers of eggs dropped by them. Hon. George 

 Bird Grinnell asserts that in years gone by the Wilson's Snipe 

 and many species of water-fowl bred in all the northern tier 

 of States in great numbers.^ Prof. W. W. Cooke says that 

 one hundred years ago the Canada Goose bred commonly in 

 all the northern third of the Mississippi valley. It has been 

 known to breed of late years in Tennessee and Kentucky. 

 It formerly bred in Kansas and still breeds in Colorado and 

 Utah.^ Even now wild-fowl nest in many parts of the country 

 where conditions are favorable. 



' Audubon, J. J.: Ornithological Biograpliy, 1835, Vol. Ill, pp. 6, 7. 



2 Grinnell, George Bird: American Duck Shooting, 1901, p. 589. 



» Cooke, W. W.: Bull. No. 26, Biol. Surv., U. S. Dept. of Agr., 1906, p. 72. 



