THE OREGON SPORTSMAN 107 
PRACTICAL GAME CONSERVATION 
[Nore.—The letter offering below accompanied the manuscript of this story, 
Oregon Sportsman will be the judge as well as the jury to determine the question.] 
Hayward, Cal., March 14, 1916. 
Carl D. Shoemaker, State Game Warden, Portland, Or. 
My Dear Sir—I am sending you an article on “Practical Game 
Conservation.” It may be a little bit radical, but it is what I have been 
preaching in the different papers for the last twenty years, and is the 
only practical solution to the question. Have been very busy with fifty 
mallard hens, hence this delay. 
This is written from a California standpoint and will deal with 
conditions found here, in the vicinity of San Francisco Bay, and the 
Sacramento and San Joaquin River districts, where twenty-five years 
ago, the webfeet lived and bred in countless millions, where birds 
could be had for the shooting in any kind of weather. 
No gun license, night and day shooting, no bag limit, few game 
wardens and hardly a conviction in the courts, for any offender of the 
fish or game laws. Too late we realized that making game laws, 
arresting offenders which we could not convict and ourselves going to 
the marsh and bringing home more game than we could use, was 
making a big hole in the duck supply of the state; but protection on 
paper, without propagation among the ducks, give us the conditions 
as they exist today, which are not very flattering, in regard to any 
attempt of conservation of the duck and shore birds of California. 
What is true of this place is repeated, or has been repeated, all over 
the United States, which at one time contained a greater number of 
game birds than any country in the world. 
The conditions as we find them today in California, with few 
exceptions, will be found to exist in all the states. 
In the year 1914, California issued nearly 160,000 hunting licenses, 
had 117 paid men working for the commission, a hundred (and then 
some) fish and game laws, and in the last twenty-five years little or 
no attempt made for propagation and restoring the duck to the 
marshland. 
Just how long the 97 per cent of the license holders will pay their 
dollar so that the 3 per cent may have the ducks and sport is a 
question. 
California may well be proud of her record in the conservation of 
her fish, as well as many other states; not a creek, river or lake 
where conditions are anywhere near right but what will be found 
stocked with fish suitable to its waters, but the conservation of the 
fish came not by making laws, but by making fish. 
The sport fishing of today would be in exactly the same condition 
as the game bird shooting if we were taking all the fish produced in 
a natural way, with no attempt to relieve the great drain or toll col- 
lected by the millions of fishermen, by artificial propagation. 
The conservation of our game and food fish has been a strictly 
business transaction, while with the exception of a few states the 
conservation of our game has been a costly experiment, making game 
laws instead of game birds. In California we have released from our 
state game farm one game bird for every forty-four square miles of land 
in the state; not a very good prospect for the hunter to see results, if 
he has to walk over forty-four miles of California looking for that bird. 
