EXTERMINATION OF THE BABBIT IN AUSTRALASIA. 381 



Columbia was full of them. About the middle of November of that year, a 

 party left Fort Saint James, on Stewart's Lake, for the purpose of having 

 an afternoon's hunting. Over sixty were shot in three hours, and the 

 hunters claimed to be disappointed because they did not kill a hundred. 

 During the month of September, 1875, while ascending the Clear-water 

 River, north of Portage-la-Loche, our provisions ran short, and for some 

 days the men snared almost enough to supply us with food. The evening 

 we reached the Portage we were altogether without eatables, and would 

 have gone to bed without our dinners had not a couple of squaws gone to 

 the wood and brought us, in a few minutes, thirteen very fine hares. That 

 same autumn every little thicket was full of them, but I have not seen a 

 dozen since." 



Mr. Ernest E. Thompson, in his * Mammals of Manitoba' 

 (Winnipeg, 1886, p. 19), writes of Lepus americanus that — 



" It is said to go on multiplying for six or seven successive years, and 

 then at length an epidemic disease regularly appears and almost exterminates 

 the species. If this be true, there can be but little doubt that 1887 is about 

 the last year of the series of increase, as the rabbits have multiplied to such 

 an extent as to cause uneasiness to many persons, who are aware of the 

 trouble a kindred species has caused in Australia. In the fall of 1886 the 

 woods about Carberry [Manitoba], so abounded with the species that killing 

 them ceased to be a sport. I do not think I exaggerate in sayiug that 

 during the month of October I could on any one day have killed 100 rabbits 



with one gun During the summer the species is much subject to the 



attacks of the parasite tick, Ixodes bovis, numbers of which may often be 

 seen hanging on the throat and neck." 



My friend Dr. A. S. Thompson informs me that when at 

 Edmonton, on the North Saskatchewan, in 1886, rabbits were 

 extremely scarce there, but that the year before they had been 

 extraordinarily numerous. During the previous winter (1885-6), 

 they had been so abundant, and had so completely consumed all 

 the available food, that haystacks — built round the houses in the 

 town — had actually to be protected from their ravages, although, 

 as a rule, the animals seldom leave the wooded districts. It was 

 a matter of common talk there, at the time, that Lynxes were 

 also very abnormally abundant ; and some trappers, who were out 

 after them at the Athabasca Landing, ninety miles north, were 

 unusually successful, as they obtained something like 1200 lynx- 

 skins in the course of their season's trapping. Dr. Thompson 

 adds that, among the trappers and others then at Edmonton, it 

 was currently believed that both the rabbits and the lynxes came 



