250 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING. 
tached to grassy patches near streams, and tidewater 
marshes, as they may be found in such places when they 
are scarce on the plains. 
The snow goose, or white-brant (Anser hyperboreus), 
covers the West in such vast flocks that millions may be 
found there during the autumn and spring. They are 
not welcome, however, as they are very destructive to 
crops, and eat up everything in the form of a cereal they 
can find. The result is, that farmers wage war on them 
with batteries, shot guns, and strychnine, and decimate 
them by the thousands. Market hunters, pot-hunters, 
and punters also prey upon them night and day, and 
slaughter them by every device known to man; yet their 
numbers do not apparently diminish in the West, for 
they arrive in hordes as regularly as the migratory sea- 
son comes round. This species may be readily distin- 
guished from its congeners by its pure-white color; its 
red legs and bill, and silvery-bluish primary quills. It 
is readily susceptible to domestication, as several instances 
are known in which it alighted to the barn-yard geese, 
and remained with them, notwithstanding the numer- 
ous calls it had from its wild congeners to rejoin them. 
A man may ride up to a flock of these geese in re- 
gions where they have not been pursued much, and 
shoot them down, or even knock them over with a stout 
stick. It is no uncommon thing to bag from forty to 
seventy in a day by stalking them behind docile oxen or 
horses; and the number that can be killed on the sand 
bars at night can only be estimated. 
The horned wavy (A. rossiz), which is a miniature copy 
of the preceding species, is very common in parts of 
British America, and is slaughtered in large numbers on 
the streams and tarns scattered throughout the Saskatch- 
awan region. It 1s not much larger than a canvas-back 
duck, as it has only a length of twenty-four inches, but 
what it lacks in size it atones for in quality of flesh. 
