During severe oold spells, when tens of thousands of ducks are 

 concentrated in small open bodies of water, it would be almost miracu- 

 lous if a few dead birds were not found. Some of these may be individ- 

 uals that have lived through a normal span of life or that are otherwise 

 unfit, and it is natural for them to succumb during critical periods. 



Cripples 



The annual loss of crippled or unretrieved birds is a very serious 

 drain on our waterfowl. Although this is to some extent unavoidable and 

 is sometimes caused even by expert shooters, a large percentage is the 

 result of attempts to bag birds beyond the effective range of the gun. 

 The following quotation from an artiole by E. P. Sheldon, in Country Life 

 (Feb, 1940) is illustrative: 



"Few duck shooters can go through a season without having cause for 

 self-reproach over the number of crippled birds that are not recovered. 

 Even if a gunner is utterly indifferent to the humane aspect of the mat- 

 ter he cannot ignore the fact that it is dreadfully poor business to al- 

 low one-fourth of the total annual kill of wildfowl to be wasted in suoh 

 fashion. One way to avoid orippling is to use these modern heavy shot 

 loads properly— not in attempts to make long-range hits, but to produce 

 cleaner kills at normal ranges, I wish with all my heart that there 

 could be less talk about the long-range qualities of these cartridges. 

 Every word of it adds to the numbers of the poor broken-winged, gun-shot 

 creatures dying in their thousands back in the willows and sedge, out of 

 sight and too often, I fear, out of the minds of the men who put them 

 there, God knows there is little need to encourage the average duck 

 hunter to try a long shot. On any day on any ducking ground one will see 

 incorrigible optimists firing long-range cartridges at birds at distances 

 of from 30 yards to infinity. It's a lamentable and scandalous fact that 

 most of these lads are not too hot at the 30-yard birds, but they will 

 nevertheless dauntlessly undertake to bet a 3-inch 5-cent shotgun shell 

 against the life of a wild duck 80 yards distant. Just often enough to 

 support their egos and back up the advertising claims they'll kill a 70- 

 yard duck dead in the air, having missed a few, and hopelessly crippled 

 a few more that could not be gathered afterward, 



"I feel that I have an extra-moral privilege to speak frankly on this 

 subject, for in the past I, too, have fired long-range cartridges in a 

 long-range gun at a long-range duck who had nothing to lose but his life 

 or his splendid gift of flight, Ee had, perhaps, burst his shell well be- 

 yond the Arctic Cirole on a night when the Northern Lights were sweeping 

 long fingers of oold mysterious fire across the firmament, Ee saw that, 

 and later he saw the length of a great continent flowing past and beneath 

 his wings. The Great Slave Lake, the Touissant Marsh where the slow stream 

 of that name empties into Erie; Currituck Sound; the canebrakes, bayous, 

 and piney woods of the Deep South, and a winter on a shallow coastal lake 

 in Louisiana, Then northward again to the Cirole with a mate, and south- 

 ward again, until one morning on Mattamuskeet a far flung pellet of number- 

 four shot smashed the delicate articulation on his right wing and brought 



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