146 



THE GAME BREEDER 



than the crows are at present in Massa- 

 chusetts and Maine, on account of the 

 mischief they committed among the 

 fruit trees of the orchards during win- 

 ter, when they fed on their buds; or 

 while in the spring months, they picked 

 tip the grain in the fields." This mis- 

 chief, Dr. Judd well says, was due large- 

 ly to the abundance of the birds, a con- 

 dition never likely to return. He might 

 have added that at the time Audubon 

 wrote there were comparatively few or- 

 chards, fruit trees and grain fields and 

 that the vast "multitudes of grouse gath- 

 ered where the buds and the grain could 

 be obtained easily. 



The fact that the grouse, like the 

 pheasants, the wild ducks and some other 

 game birds and mammals may do some 

 damage on a farm where they are made 

 over abundant should not be used to make 

 it illegal for a farmer or sporting land- 

 owner to make and keep the wild food 

 birds and deer plentiful on his own land 

 if he wishes to do so. There can be no 

 doubt there are many places where it 

 would be more profitable to have grouse 

 than it would be to have fruit and it- is 

 not a difficult matter to employ scare- 

 boys, as they do in other countries, to 

 keep the game out of orchards and fields 

 during tlie short periods when game may 

 do some damage if produced abundantly 

 for the market or for sport. The land- 

 owner should decide if he wishes to have 

 game for profit and he should not be 

 liable to arrest for food producing which 

 is a crime unknown in all countries ex- 

 cepting America, where the effect of 

 such crime-making has been, as often we 

 have pointed out, to exterminate a tre- 

 mendously valuable supply of desirable 

 food animals. 



I have referred to the fact that 1 shot 

 these birds and also the northern sharp 

 tailed grouse when they were tremend- 

 ously abundant. I have seen thousands 

 of grouse in the air at a time late in the 

 season when they were forming in packs 

 and becoming too wild to afford good 

 sport with the dogs. The lesser prairie 

 hen, a bird very similar in pattern and 

 markings to the common prairie grouse 

 but a little smaller and lighter in color. 



was equally plentiful in the southwest, 

 its range being Texas, Louisiana and 

 Southwestern Kansas and Oklahoma. 

 Mr. W. S. Colvin, in Outing, records 

 these birds as plentiful in parts of Kan- 

 sans and Oklahoma, as late as 1906. and 

 he deplores their rapid extermination. 

 "In the eighties," he says, "a man by the 

 name of Hatch nested in the sand hills 

 just inside the Kansas line in Seward 

 County. Here he planted a grove of 

 black locust trees and spread out his 

 broad fields of maize and kaffir corn. 

 The Texas bobwhites and lesser prairie 

 hens soon learned that this man was a 

 friend of the birds, and straightway 

 made it their rendevous. Here, each fall. 

 the chickens gathered by the thousands, 

 and each spring spread out over the vast 

 prairies, nesting and rearing their young. 

 In the fall of 1904 my brother estimated 

 that he saw in a single day fifteen to 

 twenty thousand chickens .in and around 

 this one grain field." 



In 1906, the same writer says: "In a 

 cane field we saw a flock of five hundred 

 or more and when they arose it seemed 

 that a hole had been rent in the earth. I 

 was for stopping and shooting a few. 

 but Dillard said: 'Come along, those are 

 only rovers, I'll show you some chickens.' 

 "Soon the shooting was lively. Chick- 

 ens were flushing everywhere, and droves 

 of fifty to a hundred would take down 

 the corn rows sounding like a moving 

 avalanche as they touched the blades of 

 corn." In one field, the writer says, Mr. 

 Ward and I estimated there were from 

 three thousand five hundred to four 

 thousand chickens. In conclusion, the 

 author says, he told his friend that lie 

 would be, "lucky to find a few chickens 

 to shoot five years from now and that is 

 the truth." 



I have see-n the chickens equally abun- 

 dant in North Dakota and in oilier West- 

 ern States and it seems too bad that the 

 birds are being actually exterminated". 

 slowly in some cases, but surely, by law. 

 Let the Mr. Ward referred to ( or any 

 other resident where a few birds still 

 occur) know that he or they can quickly 

 make the birds more plentiful than they 

 ever were without danger of going to 



