300 THE SLAUGHTER OF NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS 



many "professional" duck and brant shooters have abandoned 

 the business because the commission merchants no longer 

 will buy dead birds. 



Very many enormous bags of game have been made in a 

 day by market-gunners; but rarely have they published any 

 of their records. The greatest kill of which I ever have heard 

 occurred under the auspices of the Glenn County Club, in 

 southern California, on February 5, 1906. Two men, armed 

 with automatic shotguns, fired five shots apiece, and got ten 

 geese out of one flock. In one hour they killed two hundred 

 and eighteen geese, and their bag for the day was four hundred 

 and fifty geese! The shooter who wrote the story for pub- 

 lication (on February 12, at Willows, Glenn County, Cali- 

 fornia), said: "It being warm weather, the birds had to be 

 shipped at once in order to keep them from spoiling." A 

 photograph was made of the "one hour's slaughter" of two 

 hundred and eighteen geese, and it was published in a western 

 magazine with "C. H. B.'s" story, nearly all of which will be 

 found in Chapter XV of "Our Vanishing Wild Life." 



Here is an inexorable law of Nature, to which there are 

 no exceptions: 



No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile or fish can with- 

 stand exploitation, for commercial purposes. 



Throughout the whole world the killing of wild game for 

 sale {i. e., game not reared in preserves) should be rigidly and 

 permanently prohibited by law. 



The Illegal Slaughter of Birds. — As already inti- 

 mated, the destruction of our birds and mammals, game and 

 not game, by lawless and brutal methods has been enormous. 



