Forest and Stream 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



NEW YORK, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 18 9 5. 



Terms, $4 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy. I 

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j VOL. XLV.-No. 19. 



I No. S18 Broadway New York. 



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Jacksnipe Coming: Ir.. "He's Got Tnem" (Quail Shooting-). 

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THE SEASON AND THE BIRDS. 



To the dwellers in cities a prolonged drought excites 

 only gladsome remarks and mutual congratulations on 

 the clear and pleasant weather. So thoroughly is the 

 water supply of most large cities assured by artificial 

 means from never failing sources that the innumerable 

 hardships entailed in the country and towns by a scarcity 

 of water are seldom directly felt. To the dwellers in the 

 country the rainfall is of constant and vital importance. 

 Long droughts result in dry wells, low or dry streams, 

 short crops, bare . pastures, suffering to cattle, and much 

 extra labor and loss in the agricultural districts; the more 

 remote effects are felt later in the manufacturing centers 

 in the extra prices for food and in its inferior quality. 



The agricultural interests are in direct and constant 

 sympathy with the rainfall; the manufacturing interests 

 are in direct and constant sympathy with agricultural 

 gain or loss, thus ultimately feeling the misfortune or 

 prosperity of the farmer. Yet cities which were not sup- 

 plied from large bodies of water suffered severely this 

 year, some being forced to adjust their needs to a short 

 supply, while others, as Altoona, Pa., were forced to im- 

 port a supply by railroad. 



Reports from New Jersey estimate the cranberry crop 

 at one-fifth of the average yield, owing to the drought 

 and the consequent low water and inability to flood the 

 bogs. Thus the turkey, wild and tame, will be shorn of 

 one of his Thanksgiving glories, or at least will have it 

 diminished. 



For two years the drought has been widespread and 

 intense. Inland streams, lakes, sloughs, etc, , have been 

 very low, and some of them were entirely dried, the lat- 

 ter more particularly in the prairie country, where there 

 are not the natural reservoirs as in a hill country. 



From the South come reports of injured cotton crops 

 from the effects of the drought. From the West, begin- 

 ning at the Pacific States, a deficiency in the rainfall is 

 reported, which is charged chiefly to the months of Sep- 

 tember and October, the former month having but .95 of 

 an inch this year as against a normal average of 3.94 

 inches. 



In our columns this week will be found most valuable 

 information on the game supply, written by men of rare 

 observation, intelligence and experience. It will be noted 

 that in some sections birds are reported as being scarce, 

 while in other sections they are abundant. 



These reports cover a vast region of country, and while 

 they are particularly correct in the information concer- 

 ning their respective sections, they may be considered as 

 reflecting the general situation of the game region. They 

 are from Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Pennsyl- 

 vania, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Manitoba, New 

 Jersey, North Dakota, Arkansas, etc., and, in addition to 

 the information as to game conditions, they contain other 

 matter of special interest. 



To what extent the breeding of the birds was affected 

 by the peculiar weather conditions it is difficult to deter- 

 mine. That they were affected is a reasonable inference; 



for all reports from the quail region indicate a remarkable 

 number of squeakers, the result of second or extremely 

 late hatchings. Whether this was due to the drought or 

 the heavy spring rains is a matter of speculation. Knowl- 

 edge on these subjects is lamentably meager. It is con- 

 ceded that heavy rains during the hatching season will 

 chill the eggs or destroy the young birds; of the drought 

 and its direct effects on birds all is vague conjecture. 



If the drought deprives an ordinarily well watered 

 region of its water, many sportsmen strenuously maintain 

 that it in no wise affects the birds, as they drink the dew, 

 and that even in ordinary seasons birds live and thrive 

 many miles from water; yet in seasons of extreme drought 

 there are many nights in which no dew falls, or at least 

 not more than a perceptable dampness. The birds cannot 

 drink dew then. There are seasons when birds are 

 extremely plentiful or extremely scarce, without any 

 apparent reason for either. If they are plentiful, it is 

 carelessly attributed to the season with little consideration 

 of what the season really was, for few indeed can definitely 

 recount the weather details of a season after it is past. 



The scarcity of ruffed grouse has been attributed to the 

 grouse tick; the scarcity of chickens and quail, to too 

 much rain, or too much shooting, etc., yet birds are often 

 plentiful in sections where there was an excess of shooting 

 and rain. As to the embryological effects of the weather 

 on the birds, we know still less. And yet all these matters 

 as studies have their special interest and are not without 

 profit. It is a field which as yet has been subject to little 

 research. 



But whatever the effects may have been on the breeding 

 and habits of the birds, there are no doubts as to its 

 effects in the practical realm of sport. Sportsmen are a 

 unit in affirming that there has been no sport. The 

 trainers of every section complain of the extreme dry- 

 ness and the consequent inability of their dogs to do good 

 work or, rather, any work of consequence on birds. So 

 dry is the ground that there seems to be no scent left by 

 fur or feather. 



The trials of the Northwestern Beagle Club were notice- 

 able for the apparent inability of the dogs to trail rabbits; 

 in reality, it was a physical impossibility for them to fol- 

 low a trail on which there was no scent. 



The trials of the Dixie Fur Club were abandoned in con- 

 sequence of the same unfavorable conditions. No doubt 

 that other trials would have met the same fate, had 

 not the rain of last week done much toward improving 

 the conditions for sport afield. 



The Continental Field Trial Club has abandoned its 

 trials at Newton, N. C, owing to the scarcity of birds, 

 which the dry weather may have made more apparent 

 than real. 



But as to the causes of the peculiar game conditions, 

 there is a field of research opened to the sportsman which 

 he should not ignore. 



SNAP SHOTS. 



We are unable to recognize in a non-resident license 

 system the long sought panacea for the cure of lax game 

 protection. Nevertheless it is probable that if Missouri 

 must discriminate against outsiders a license system would 

 prove at least an improvement upon the present farcical 

 condition of things. 



ravine, curving and twisting and doubling upon itself, to 

 give the teams advantage of every grade. For long 

 stretches it is buttressed with great walls of stone, tre- 

 mendous blocks which must have been laid in the years 

 when there were giants upon the earth. One is amazed 

 at the moss-covered monument of that toilsome age. 

 Here the fathers built a memorial to endure for cen- 

 turies. 



Resting here beside the spring while you eat your fru- 

 gal sportsman's lunch, you may hear in memory the 

 wood-wagon creaking and straining and groaning for all 

 the world like a ship laboring in the sea; and the fearful 

 oaths of the driver to his team like .those of mate to 

 crew. 



We said last week that the Missouri non-resident sports- 

 man law was a dead-letter. New evidence of this fact is 

 afforded in the report printed in another column of the 

 meeting held in St. Louis last week to contrive means for 

 the better protection of game. It was pointed out by 

 some of the speakers that the non-resident ehooters were 

 responsible for the great dearth of game in many portions 

 of the State, and a suggestion was made that a tax might 

 well be levied on non-residents in order to discourage 

 their coming and so to lessen the destruction they 

 wrought. The astonishing feature of the discussion was 

 the fact that none of those who took part in it appeared 

 to be aware that there was already on the books a strin- 

 gent law, not simply to put a deterrent tax on outsiders, 

 but positively forbidding them under a penalty from 

 crossing the borders of the State armed and equipped for 

 shooting. So much for one non-resident law, 



It is years and years since the uproar of the wood-team 

 affrighted this peaceful spot. The names of those who 

 built the road, felled the wood, captained the teams, al 

 are but a memory, dim and shadowy, and held only by 

 the oldest inhabitant, whose voice quavers as he tells of 

 the primitive days of his fathers. The institution of the 

 ox team has vanished from these parts, and there are no 

 oaths now like those that woke the echoes here. 



But the ravine itself remains, clothed with vernal green 

 in trouting time, and with the glory of scarlet and crimaon 

 and gold in the hunter's season; the brook still babbles 

 and gurgles and tinkles; the grouse drums, and in the 

 thicket flashes the brief vision of the startled hare. Mus- 

 ing in reverie by the old woods road, dip up in hollowed 

 hands a draught from the pure spring, and give thanks 

 that you are here, to enjoy to the full these autumn days 

 in the woods. 



It is related, whether truly or for advertising purposes 

 only, we know not — that Sherlock Holmes proved such a 

 nuisance to Conan Doyle, by reason of the letters the 

 author received from readers interested in the fortune 

 of the superhuman detective hero, that in self-defense he 

 was obliged to make an end of the fellow by dropping 

 him from a cliff, and so putting a finis to the Sherlock 

 Holmes series. Something of a similar strategem has 

 been resorted to by the Western genius who got up the 

 story of the bear farm where bears were to be bred like 

 sheep for their pelts and flesh. 



It was in Minnesota. A native expert on bears, backed 

 by the ready capital of a New York physician, had built 

 a hotel or asylum or reformatory for bears, had corralled 

 a number of the brutes and assigned them rooms, and laid 

 in a stock of provisions for their feeding during the win- 

 ter months. Left to themselves, the bears would have 

 crawled into holes and wintered without grub, as their 

 forebears had done before them; but the Minnesota enter- 

 prise was to be something entirely novel in the history of 

 beardom. 



You may trace it even to-day, the old woods road, lead- 

 ing from the swamp on the mountain top down to the 

 valley far below. It follows the precipitous sides of the 



As elaborated by the man who wrote it, the story was 

 a literary product, which one would think might well 

 have been continued in many successive chapters. There 

 is a well-defined public thirst for bear stories. Properly 

 managed, the Minnesota ranch might have supplied bear 

 bulletins for months to come. But when the author 

 began to get in the returns, when his mail was filled with 

 letters asking for more particulars, when he was implored, 

 for instance, to give the cubic space required for each 

 bear on a bear farm, the probable cost of maintenance per 

 head, the market price of bear skins, the ruling quota- 

 tions for bear meat, and a host of other questions, such for 

 instance as Forest ajnd Stream received after it printed 

 its skunk farm reports — the pestered and desperate 

 man resolved to make an end of the troubles he 

 unwittingly had precipitated upon himself. In an 

 evil hour — it came this week, and we regret to 

 say on the Sabbath — he permitted himself to be- 

 come intoxicated with the exuberance of his own imag- 

 ination, and forthwith consigned the bear farmer to a 

 fiery doom. In the dead of night the herder of planti- 

 grade sheep awoke to find his house and barn in flames 

 and his own retreat cut off. There was no way out but 

 through the bear den. Tbat way he took; and fi d from 

 flame only to be killed by the bears. It was a crut 1 death; 

 but we must remember that the story writer had great 

 provocation. 



