EDITOR'S CORNER. 



479 



with men who wantonly destroy fish 

 and game. 



It is only fair to conclude that if 

 Judge Smith had not been reading 

 Recreation, he would not have 

 known just how contemptible a crea- 

 ture a fish dynamiter is, and would 

 not have placed so heavy a fine on 

 Winters. 



Judge Smith should have a monu- 

 ment and I am not sure that I shall 

 wait until he dies to begin the collec- 

 tion of funds to build him one. 



SOME PUMP GUN WORK. 

 Several of my contributors when dis- 

 cussing the pump gun have insisted that 

 it is not a game hog's weapon ; that it is 

 the man behind the gun who is the hog, 

 and that the gun has nothing to do with the 

 case. I grant that claim, for the sake of ar- 

 gument ; but since the game hog is abroad 

 in the land, he should be prohibited from 

 using anything more destructive than a 

 double barreled gun. Here is a statement 

 made by a game dealer who employs several 

 experts to shoot for him all through the 

 year, and it is scarcely necessary to say 

 these men are all armed with pump guns. 

 The dealer starts his men after the ducks 

 when they cross the Canadian border, fol- 

 lows them down through the States and 

 into Old Mexico, where the men shoot all 

 winter and ship the ducks back into the 

 States. The dealer says : 



"Sitting one morning in a blind with a 

 crack man, I said, 'Clay, let me see what you 

 can do in the way of fast shooting.'- At 

 once Clay sounded the call and 4 mallards 

 that were flying over stopped and began to 

 flutter down between the tree tops. In- 

 stantly Clay's gun gave out 4 reports in 

 quick succession. Before the first duck 

 struck the water the victim of his last shot 

 was whirling in the air. I could scarcely 

 have believed this feat possible had I not 

 seen it with my own eyes." 



With a double barreled gun Clay could 

 not possibly have killed more than 2 birds 

 out of the 4. This is not an isolated case. 

 These market hunters often walk the ducks 

 up out of marshes or small pools, and fre- 

 quently a dozen or more mallards get up 

 close together. It is easy for the man be- 

 hind the pump gun to get 5 or 6 birds at 

 one rise. In other cases the shooter takes 

 his place in the bow of a boat and has a 

 man in the stern push him through the 

 reeds, rushes or wild rice. The birds are 

 jumped in bunches and cut down with the 

 pump gun before they can get out of 

 reach. Tn pass shooting a man may 



get 6 birds out of a flock that flies low 

 over his stand; or, if shooting over decoys 

 and a bunch comes in, he can do equally 

 destructive work on them with this modern 

 machine gun. Therefore, I say the pump 

 gun is a disgrace to civilization and its use 

 should be prohibited by law, just as the 

 swivel gun now is. 



The automatic gun is simply another 

 long step toward the total destruction of 

 American game birds and its use should 

 also be interdicted. It will take a long 

 time to secure the enactment of laws in 

 the various States prohibiting the use of 

 these weapons, but public sentiment can at 

 once relegate them to the ranks of mar- 

 ket shooters and game hogs. Let it be 

 understood from to-day that no decent man 

 in the United States will ever use an auto- 

 matic gun, and that no gentleman will asso- 

 ciate with the fellows who do use them. 



NEWSPAPER NATURAL HISTORY. 

 Here is another sample of newspaper 

 talk about the habits of wild birds and ani- 

 mals. One Forrest Crissey writes a long- 

 article for the Saturday Evening Post about 

 duck shooters. He tells of one market 

 hunter who bought some canvas decoys 

 and put them out on an Arkansas river. 

 He camped on the bank of the stream. 

 The next morning several of his decoys 

 were missing, but were finally found hang- 

 ing on bushes in the neighborhood. The 

 hunter imagined that some native who 

 was jealous of the shooting rights had pep- 

 pered the canvas decoys with shot and then 

 hung them up to dry; so the market 

 shooter watched for the aggressor. Crissey 

 tells the sequel in these words : 



"About midnight the native came, sure 

 enough. Bishop, the hunter, was just get- 

 ting into a doze when the stillness of the 

 woods was shattered by an unearthly 

 screech. There was a commotion in the 

 upper air, and 2 huge Arkansas owls 

 swooped down on the decoys, thinking 

 them to be live mallards, their natural 

 prey. Of course, Bishop shot the vandals, 

 but he made the mistake of telling his ex- 

 perience, with the result that he was called 

 Owl Bishop from that time forth, and has 

 not yet heard the last of his adventure. 

 He went back to the use of the good, old 

 fashioned wood decoys and has used no 

 others since." 



Of course, the owl would utter an un- 

 earthly screech before descending on a 

 bunch of_ mallards. That is, he would in 

 the imagination of the average newspaper 



writer. 



GOOD WORK OF THE L. A. S. 

 _ The Georgia Legislature, at its last ses- 

 sion, passed an up-to-date game, fish and 

 bird law, and Governor Terrell at first de- 

 clined to approve it because it provided 



