Forest and Stream. 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copt. 1 

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NEW YORK, APRIL 15, 1886. 



I VOL. XXVI.— No. 13. 



I Nos. 39 & 40 Park Row, New York. 



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CONTENTS. 



Editorial. 



The Water Butcher Wins. 



The Folly of Spring Shooting. 

 The Sportsman Tourist. 



Some Points in Woodcraft. 

 Natural Historv. 



The Audubon Society. 



The A. O. IT. Check List. 



The Sparrow Hawk in Winter. 



Houses for Birds. 

 New Publications. 



McLellan's Poems. 



Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. 

 Game Bag and Gun. 



Recollections of a Sportsman. 



The Ontario Game Law. 



A Goose Shootin? Match. 



Game Protectors' Reports. 



An Up and Down Shot. 



Hunting- at Army Posts, 

 Sea and River Fishing. 

 I Angling Gush, 



Camps of the Kingfishers.— vn. 



Attaching Droppers. 



The Trout of Sunapee Lake. 



Fishotlture. 



Short Lobsters. 

 The Kennel. 



The Boston Show. 



The Hartford Dog Show. 



Kennel Management. 

 Rifle and Trap Shooting. 



Range and Gallerv. 



A New Rest Target. 



National Rifle Club. 



The Trap. 

 Canoeing. 



- A 500-Mile Cruise on the Rivers 

 ! of Northern California. 



The Canoe Exhibition. 



The Spring Meets. 



The A. C. A. Trophy. 

 Yachting. 



[ A National Racing Association. 

 : An Interrupted Cruise, 

 j Cruise of the Brunhilde. 

 | Cruise of the Coot.— xix. 

 A Handsome Steam Yacht. 

 Answers to Correspondents. 

 1 Publishers' Department. 



THE WATER-BUTCHER WINS. 

 'T^HE clamor of the few has prevailed over the interest of 

 the many. Selfishness has carried the day. The 

 water-butcher has won. Yesterday the Senpte of New York 

 passed the bill to repeal the anti-hounding law. The bil 

 was passed as given in our last issue, save that the amend, 

 ment was adopted limiting the n amber of deer killed by one 

 person to three. An amendment forbidding the killing of 

 deer in the water was voted down. St. Lawrence and Dela- 

 ware counties are exempted from the dog scourge. The 

 measure now goes back to the Assembly for its concurrence 

 in the amendments, and then to the Governor, who will 

 promptly give it his signature, and the dogging and water- 

 killing of Adirondack deer will have the sanction of the law 

 of the land. 



The result was not unlooked for. It had been practically 

 a foregone conclusion from the beginning. As explained in 

 these columns two months ago, the conditions at Albany 

 this year were peculiarly favorable to the clique of individ" 

 ualswho had declared their purpose of overthrowing the 

 deer protective law. The Speaker of the House, Mr. Hus- 

 ted, a deer hounder, was opposed to the law because it in- 

 terfered with the sport of himself and some of his cronies; 

 and it was understood that he would use the influence of his 

 position to secure its repeal. Several of the members of the 

 Legislature, as Barnes, Hadley and Palmer in the Assembly, 

 and Kellog in the Senate, had been directed by the June 

 mountain mutton hotel keepers to repeal the law; they had 

 practically no volition in the matter; they were told what 

 to do, and when the time came they obeyed orders and 

 did it. Mr. Husted took care to appoint the 

 right kind of a game committee. It was a body 

 made up of wax-noses, and their plasticity was something 

 astonishing. It was equaled only by their avidity to be 

 humbugged. That the hounders had taken an accurate 

 measure of these men, was proved by the character of the 

 misleading and deceptive document they sent to the Legis- 

 lature. This was prepared by an Albany doctor, who gave 

 it out as coming from the Eastern New York Fish and Game 

 Protective Association. In its ostensible origin, its contents 

 and its purpose, it was a humbug; and naturally had weight 

 with the committee and the Assembly. As had been antici- 

 pated, when the bill came up in the House, the members, 



eager to curry cheap favor with Speaker Husted, rushed the 

 measure through and sent it to the Senate. 



In the several hearings before the Senate committee the 

 humbug was stripped off. The defenders of the bill were 

 compelled to recede from their stand as game protectors. 

 They were forced to acknowledge, one after another, the 

 ridiculous nature of their pretenses, and to own up that all 

 their hue and cry were solely with purpose to secure to 

 themselves present gratification. The selfish character of 

 their efforts was clearly proved. The committee fully under- 

 stood this and knew that the bill ought to be killed ; but 

 surrounded as they were by the persistent doggers and 

 hampered by entangling alliances, they lacked the moral 

 courage to do what they knew to be right, and sought a way 

 out of it by "compromising" — the customary makeshift of 

 weak men. (It should be stated that Senator Vedder, of the 

 committee, intelligently and consistently opposed the meas- 

 ure ) The bill, which had been favorably reported by 

 the pliable Assembly wax-nose committee because of defi- 

 ciency of brains, was approved by the Senate committee 

 because of a corresponding lack of back-bone. 



In its final form the bill does not give the hounders all 

 they at first asked, but it gives to the selfish clique for whose 

 special benefit it has been passed, about all they want. These 

 men go to the woods in September. Lawful hounding will 

 be limited to that month and the first five days of October, 

 a period suiting their convenience. The evils attendant upon 

 the system will, however, not be confined to that season. 

 The destruction of deer by dogs will, in the future as in the 

 past, go on at all times of the year. All the abuses and 

 abominations incident to the maintenance of hordes of 

 domestic wolves in the Northern Wilderness will be perpetu. 

 ated. That an Albany doctor may take the President of the 

 United States on a deer dogging expedition in September, 

 the dogs will be fed on February killed does heavy with 

 fawn. That a Peekskill politician may have his September 

 sport, the young deer dogs will be "blooded" with the 

 blood of deer run down in March snows. That a 

 New York physician may gratify his propensity for butcher- 

 ing deer and leaving the carcasses to rot, the Adirondack 

 woods must witness the hounding to death of the mother 

 doe in July. That the members of the Bisby Club may dog 

 deer in September, fawns must starve to death in August. 

 That Paul Smith may feed his guests on "run" venison, 

 running and clubbing and drowning must be waged from 

 Jan. 1 to Dec. 31. The so called "compromise" is such 

 only in name. Hounding one month means hounding 

 twelve months. Killing with dogs in September means kill- 

 ing with dogs in June and January. There is no such thing 

 as a compromise between dogs and no dogs. 



Temporarily, then, the hounders have gained what they 

 sought. Temporarily — because in the very nature of things 

 their extraordinary privileges cannot be lasting. They have 

 obtained permission to destroy. They have added celerity 

 and certainty to the approaching practical extermination of 

 Adirondack deer. When they have enjoyed for a short 

 while this license to destroy, they must perforce come to a 

 halt. The supply cannot last. The end will come when 

 the deer are gone. 



It may come before. With a Legislature less in awe of 

 millionaire deer doggers, less susceptible to humbug, less 

 eager to please cliques, less forgetful of their obligation to 

 the community, it may be possible to save the deer from the 

 fate certain to overtake them if hounding continues. 



The deer doggers have gained their point, but it is most 

 certain that they have lost something as well. The discus- 

 sion has not been altogether fruitless. It has thrown a flood 

 of light on the motives of the advocates of deer dogging. 

 It has torn from them their mask ; laid bare their motives. 

 They can never again pose as philanthropists and game 

 protectors. The thorough selfishness of their demands has 

 been made clear. The next time they appear at Albany 

 it must be in their real character, not as seeking game con- 

 servancy, but as putting in a special plea for personal privi- 

 leges of game destruction at the expense of the public. 



Moreover, a brand has been put on the forehead of the 

 water-butcher. The prowess of hounding "that buck when 

 I was in the Adirondacks" will not be as great in 1886 as it 

 was in 1884. The same old dog and guide and boat and 

 magazine rifle and club performance will be repeated as of 

 yore, but it will not be so generally sanctioned as in years 

 past. Mr. John T. Denny and other water-butchers of deer 

 may be rowed out by their oarsmen to the animal and bravely 

 slaughter it, but they can no longer prate of their 

 philanthropy in "pumping lead" into the struggling crea- 

 ture to make it "shy," so the cruel still-hunters may not get 



it. Such valiant exploits will be put down for what they 

 are. The public now has a pretty clear notion of what Adir- 

 ondack deer hounding means. It will have a still clearer 

 notion in the near future. The time is coming when the antlers 

 of an Adirondack buck killed in the water will be about as 

 much of a trophy as the horns of a Texas steer killed in the 

 abottoir. That time is not far off either. 



THE FOLLY OF SPRING SHOOTING. 

 T\7'E presume that in the ordinary affairs of life the 



* ' sportsman conducts himself much as other men do- 

 Why then in matters connected with his recreation should 

 he show himself a fool— a selfish fool? If he be a farmer he 

 does not send to the butcher cows that are about to calve, 

 nor does he kill the ewes just before lambing time. He knows 

 that to do this would be to bring upon himself loss, that he 

 would lose two animals while receiving the price of but one. 

 When it comes to shooting and fishing, however, the average 

 man seems at once bereft of intelligence and foresight. He 

 reasons with himself that the game and fish are something 

 elusive, here to-day and there to-morrow, if one man does 

 not take it another may. The future may look out for itself. 

 So he starts out in the spring and butchers, or tries to butcher, 

 the snipe and the ducks and the geese which are passing on 

 to northern breeding grounds, but many of which, if undis- 

 turbed, would stop with us and rear their brood, where they 

 used to in the old days before the greed for blood had become 

 universal throughout the land. Each year the killing goes 

 on and every year the birds become fewer in numbers. 



There are localities, of course, such as Currituck Sound for 

 example, where the fowl are more plenty now than in former 

 years, but this is because a certain amount of protection is 

 afforded them on these waters, and having been driven from 

 others on which they were formerly scattered, they have 

 concentrated in such places, leaving their former home3 

 tenantless. 



Every female killed in the spring is so much taken from 

 next fall's shooting, and in these days when game is so 

 scarce and good shooting so hard to find, it ought not to be 

 difficult to make the sportsman realize that it is for his inter- 

 est more than for that of any one else that this abominable, 

 selfish and and wasteful practice should cease. The fact that 

 the birds are in such wretched condition in spring would, 

 furnish to the minds of many a strong argument against the 

 practice. They are lean, often rank in taste, and frequently 

 affected with parasitic worms in the flesh, which certainly 

 are not pleasant to see, however innocuous they may be to 

 the eater. 



It is high time that spring shooting were abolished. We have 

 more than once made strong efforts to bring about such a 

 change, and a few years since came near seeing the pass- 

 age of a bill in New York State entirely forbidding shoot- 

 ing after February 1. The selfishness of certain New York 

 sportsmen, and of the keepers of Long Island shooting 

 resorts, defeated the objects we had in view. 



It is time that the sportsmen of the country awoke to the 

 importance of this matter. If any change is to be made it 

 must be done by agitating the subject in earnest, and arousing 

 a public interest in the matter. 



The birds are becoming fewer and fewer. The old shoot- 

 ing resorts are giving out, there are no new ones to go to, for 

 the whole country is covered with shooters. If we are to 

 have any game left we must more closely restrict the 

 killing, and the most effective way to do that is to cut off 

 the murders of the mother in the spring. 



The New Ontario Law.— By the omission of a word 

 in reference to the new Ontario game law last week an 

 erroneous impression of the clause relating to spring shoot- 

 ing was given. By reference to the full text of the law. as 

 printed in another column, it will be seen that the killing of 

 swans and geese is forbidden between May 1 and Sept. 1 ; 

 of ducks and other water fowl between Jan. 1 and Sept. 1 ; 

 and snipe, rail and golden plover between Jan. 1 and Sept 1. 

 A correspondent suggests with good reason that the Jlaws 

 of the several States should be changed so that the pro- 

 tection given to migratory game may not be limited to the 

 line between the United States and Canada. 



Michigan's Need. — The Michigan Sportsmen's Association 

 members have before them the task of awakening public in- 

 terest in their cause. The effort will be made at the next 

 session of the Legislature to secure a State game warden. 

 The Association cannot begin too early a systematic cam- 

 paign to prepare the way for securing what the people of 

 the State so greatly need. 



