THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN'S 



\,;;....:L 



JOURNAL. 



Entered According to Act ot Congress, tn tne year 1381, by the Forest and Stream Publishing company, In the Office or tbe Librarian of congress, at Washington. 



W-^^^n NEW YORK, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1 88 1 . {« os . 39 jaSVKS'JJw, 



IVewr Yorfc. 



CONTENTS. 



Editobial :— 

 The Proposed International Match j "Wild .Fowl on Long 

 Ial&nd ; A Word to the New York Yacht Club 303 



The Spobtsmaj? Toubist :— 



LaayeiJ from a Log Book ; The Modern Ark ; American 

 Sporting Literature; English Kaces and American Tri- 

 umphs ; In a Chinese House Boat j Animal Myths of the 

 Iroquois 30i 



Natural Histobi :— 

 Are Grouse Destroyed Ijv Squirrels? Chestnuts; Elk and 

 their Horns ; The Herring Gall and tho Ring-Bill of 

 Georgian Bay; Habits of the Redheaded Woodpeckers ; 

 Digestion of the Alligator ; The Homing Instinct 306 



Game Bao and Gun : — 

 ADay With the Ruffed Grouse ; Tho Hurtling Grouse ; Two 

 Days Among the Bluewings ; Rust Spots in Gun Barrels ; 

 Those Four Wild- Cats with One Bullet ; Novel Hunting 

 Methods; Nebraska Ply- Way Shooting; Life Saving Sta- 

 .tion Employees : State Pigeon Tournaments; Trapping 

 Nesting Pigeons ; Cheap Guns; His First Miss; Bloom- 

 ing Grove Park 308 



Sea and Riveb Fishing : — 

 A Cape Cod Resort ; Red Drum at Capo May ; Fishing in 

 the Susquehanna ; Notes from Kentucky ; Tennessee Fish 

 Notes : Trout in Siberia; Sport in Kentuckv; Gut— Its 

 Brittleness from Ago 311 



FlSHCULTUBK : — 



North Carolina ; Black Bass in Pennsylvania ; Growth of 



Carp in Tennessee ; Texas ; Edinburgh Exhibition 31 3 



The Kennel :— 

 Training vs. Breaking ; Rabies ; Tho National Trials; Com- 

 fortable Quarters lor Dogs 314 



Bifle and Trap Shooting 316 



Yachting and "Canoeing : 317 



Answers to Correspondents 318 



TO CORRESPONDENTS. 



The Forest and Stkbam is the recognized medium ot entertainment, 

 instruction and Information between American sportsmen. 



Communications upon the subjects to which Its pages are devoted 

 are Invited trom every part of the country. 



Anonymous communications will not be regarded. No correspond- 

 ent's name will be published except with his consent. 



The Editors cannot be held responsible for the views of correspond- 

 ents. 



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Address: Forest and Stream Publishing; Co., 



Nos. 39 and 40 Park Row, New York City. 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



Thursday, November 1?. 



THiNKSQiviSG.— Next week the Fokest and Stream will 

 go to press on Tuesday, one day earlier than usual, in order 

 that all our subscribers may receive their paper at the usual 

 time. Advertisers and contributors will please bear this in 

 mind. 



Capt. L. A. Beahi)8Lee, whose letters in the Fokest and 

 Stream have made him pleasantly known to many of our 

 readers, sailed for Europe from this cily yesterday in the 

 steamer France. Capt. Beardslee will be abroad six months ; 

 he goes on a pleasure tour, and is accompanied by his wife. 

 True to his instincts he bus taken a fishing rod along, and 

 we are promised an occasional line from his pen. 



Tiik Buoolts QfflK Clib is one of the live organizations of 

 Long Island. It has been engaged in posting a digest of the 

 game laws in the stations and baggage cars of the Long 

 Island Railroad, and proposes to follow this up by other 

 measures to make these laws known and obeyed. The club 

 is raising a fund for the liberation on the Island of a large 

 number of live quail. The special committee having this in 

 charge are Messrs. Aten, Walter, Pi st and Creed. In this 

 practical endeavor to increase the game supply of Long 

 Island, the Brooklyn Gun Club is setting au acimirable ex- 

 ample, which, may well be followed. 



THE PROPOSED INTERNATIONAL 

 MATCH. 



TflROM the letter which will be found in another column, 

 -*- there would seem to be aprospect that the shooting season 

 of 1882 will witness a match between the volunteers of Great 

 Britain and the United States; at any rate the subject is fair- 

 ly launched now, and it remains to be seen whether all the 

 talk which has been had on the subject is mere talk, or 

 whether there is a real intention to have a match. Such a 

 contest if held would rouse the interest of the entire public on 

 both sides of the Atlantic. 



England is very proud of her volunteer force, and it is 

 really a body of which any nation might be proud. For 

 twenty years or more this great force has been growing, im- 

 proving and solidifying, until to-day it is the finest body of 

 its sort in the world. From the very s!art of the movement 

 special stress has been placed upon the importance of rifle 

 practice. It was impossible to have long stretches of camp- 

 ing duty, though there were such great annual concentrations 

 of the fo:ce and field movements as are witnessed at the 

 Easter displays, but every company has either its special 

 range or range privileges, acd the men pursue their class 

 practice with remarkable assiduity. The force is not well 

 armed, but out of the Snider, such as it is, they have secured 

 all the results that stem possible. The arm today is an an- 

 tiquated one, and the movement has been to so widen the 

 conditions of practice in matches and competitions as to en- 

 courage the men by permitting the use of superior arms. 

 The great gatherings at Wimbledon are sustained almost en- 

 tirely by the effort of the British Volunteer force. The all- 

 comers matches for the small-bore experts, and those compe- 

 titions in which the regulars appear alone are insignificant 

 btside the mass of individual, company, battalion etc., eon- 

 tests for members of the Volunteer body. 



Against all this array of practice, experience and result, 

 the American militiaman can only point to a few records run- 

 ning back less than ten years. We have a glorious record 

 in small-bore work, but in military shooting we have very 

 little to show. The State of New York instituted a system 

 of rifle practice, which, if clumsy and exacting in many re- 

 spects, was at least of value in enabling us to know where 

 we might place the men in comparison with the soldiers of 

 other countries, and just as we were getting something to 

 show the effects of systematic training a sapient governor 

 and a complaisant Adjutant-General conclude that the citi- 

 zen soldier reaches his highest development when he serves 

 as a tailor's model for the display of gold lace, and the sys- 

 tem is broken up. In the other Stales endeavors, with vari- 

 ous degrees of success, have been made. The majority of the 

 States, however, have no systematic home guard at all. In 

 others there is an organization on paper only, and the whole 

 subject is in the worst pos=ible state of confusion. It is to 

 be hoped that the proposed match with the English Volun- 

 teers, or the discussions of it if the project should fall 

 through, will direct public attention to this important sub- 

 ject of the cultivation of a great bjdy of armed civilians, a 

 check: on internal dissension and a bulwark against invasion 

 from abroad. 



The mere fact, however, that we can show only a handful 

 of men against the half million or more belonging to the 

 Volunteer force of Great Britain ought not to discourage at 

 all. We recall distinctly how, without arms, men, or the first 

 reciuisite of a successful match except pluck, the roving 

 challenge of the then triumphant Irish team was taken up 

 in the fall of 1873 by the Amateur Rifle Club. We are not 

 quite so bad off now. We know a thing or two about rifle 

 shooting in general. We have much to learn yet about mili- 

 tary shooting, and we think we can learn it in time to give 

 the English Volunteers in July, 1883, a lively struggle. 

 Pitting the English years of experience and indisposition to 

 profit by them against the American determination and quick 

 subordination of circumstances to a purpose, we should con- 

 sider the match as outlined a very even one. There is such 

 a wide chance for flukes in such a contest that it is difficult 

 to foretell, even with all the antecedents in one's knowledge, 

 but the probabilities would certainly be in favor of the 

 American team if it be organized with anything like the 

 system whicn ought to govern it. 



A match of this sort would work benefit in a great variety 



of ways. In the matter of arms it would provoke a discus- 

 sion, which would find expression in many improvements. 

 We take it that neither team would shoot with its official 

 arm. The English Volunteers would surely consider them- 

 selves handicapped if compelled to use the Snider, and the 

 American shots would hardly care to blaze away with the 

 large calibre Remington, Peabody or Springfield rifles. We 

 would be enabled to see the best work wilh the best military 

 rifles of to-day, to note their excellencies as well as to have 

 their imperfections made manifest. The match should be 

 an exhaustive one, extending over all the ranges and made 

 to be a test of the men and rifles as comprehensive as the 

 limits of a range will permit. Too much care cannot be taken 

 in the drawing up of the conditions. No steps have as yet 

 been taken, and with a clean slate before them it remains to 

 be shown how satisfactory a schedule of rules and restrictions 

 the directors of the two National Associations may devise. 

 They may assume from the start that there will be a liberal 

 support from; the general public to both teams. National 

 pride will be aroused on both sides, and unless gross blunder- 

 ing shall forfeit popular countenance, the projectors of the 

 match may rely upon it. 



At any rate it does seem that international small bore shoot- 

 ing has involved itself in such a skein of confusion that there 

 is little prospect of another civilian long range match in the 

 near future. The foreign teams are pretty well satisfied that 

 the Americans are invulnerable on that point, but a military 

 matchis as yet an untried venture. It is on oneside au inviting 

 new field of conquest for the American rifleman, and on the 

 other a diversion where the British rifleman may wipe away 

 the stigma of small-bore defeat under the eclat of a popular 

 military victory. One of the members of the committee 

 signing the letter published, put the situation very well in 

 the following words, which he wrote on the subject ; 



National pride, patriotic feeling, and the rivalry which is seem- 

 ingly inseparable from the rifle field would all be brought into 

 active play in such a match ; and to a greater degree similar 

 notions would s w ay the popular mind, and draw about an Inter- 

 national military match an enthusiasm beside which the excite- 

 ment of the small-bore matches would appear tame. We here at 

 Creedmoor— speaking now of Creedinoor as a representative 

 American range— have bad enough of military shooting to carry 

 conviction fiat, pitted against an All-England tea.m, in match 

 work, we could hold our own, with a fair showing for first place. 

 Our marksmen are armed with American weapon?, and these have 

 before now proven a little better than the bout on more fields than 

 one. The average match shooting on American ranges, all things 

 considered, is equal to anything Bhowu elsewhere. Even England, 

 in her twenty years' experience in rifle meeting management, and 

 her ranges innumerable, can show no better averages than 

 those of a dozen State shooting fields. America, surely of all 

 nations, has nothing to shrink from in the undertaking of an In- 

 ternational military match. 



WILD FOWL ON LONG ISLAND. 



ONE of the most foolish and short-sighted pieces of legis- 

 lative action that has recently come to our knowledge 

 is that of the Supervisors of Suffolk county in this State. 

 Some time ago these officers passed a law that ducks should 

 only be shot on alternate days. This change was welcomed 

 by every one who had given the subject any thought for, of 

 course, its tendeny was to keep the birds from being har- 

 assed from morning until night, to make them more plenty 

 and gentle, and as a consequence to improve the shooting. 

 The greed of some of the baymen, however, has made a 

 change which cannot but work harm to all who derive either 

 pleasure or profit from the fowl-shooting on the South Shore. 

 A short time before the opening of the season the Supervisors 

 got together, and abrogated the provision of the local law 

 protecting the birds on three days of the week, so that at 

 present shooting is permitted every day, and all day. The 

 night before the opening day there were nineteen batteries in 

 position in Shinnecock Bay, all of them on the feeding 

 grounds. The birds not only are tormented all day, but are 

 disturbed at night on the flats, where they go to feed, by the 

 men who ate gathering bait for their eel pots. They get no 

 rest. 



We have reason to believe that the recent chaDge of the 

 law was made at the request of certain baymen who depend 

 for support on the gunners who go from New York and vi- 

 cinity to shoot at various well-known resorts along the South 



