30 THE BOOK OF FORESTRY 
forty years ago there are now about 3000 buffalo; 
nearly one-half are in the large Government breeding 
parks and happily they are breeding quite rapidly. 
In addition to buffalo, other splendid game animals 
have been wantonly killed. Antelope for years fur- 
nished the meat supply of the pioneers while on the 
prairie and the elk have been slaughtered in some cases 
for their heads or teeth alone. Eleven species of birds 
formerly common to the United States have been 
totally exterminated in their wild state and other 
species, like the heath hen, have escaped extinction by 
a very narow margin’ Besides the terrific decrease in 
game animals owing to continued shooting by the market 
hunter, other conditions have worked against them. 
Their haunts have heen invaded by the lumberman 
and the resulting fires have destroyed their cover. Sheep 
and cattle eat the ranges clean during the summer and 
late fall so that grazing animals like the ell find little to 
feed upon and die by hundreds of starvation. All told 
the amount of game today is only two per cent of what 
it was fifty years ago. 
This wholesale destruction of game not only repre- 
sents a loss which concerns us as lovers of the outdoors 
but by diminishing our animal life the balance of nature 
has been upset and the forests and fields pay the 
penalty. The public in the end pays the bill through 
the Iumber yard and grocery store. Forty years ago 
orchards had little need of spraying. Now it is a 
continuous fight against the many pests which prey 
upon the fruit trees. Zoologists claim this can be 
directly traced to the great reduction in the number of 
birds which formerly kept these enemies in check. The 
rapid spread of the boll weevil, the arch enemy of 
the cotton planter, is attributed to the killing off of the 
