Forest and Stream. 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



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

 Six Months, $2. I 



NEW YORK, MARCH 24, 1892. 



J VOL. XXXVIII.-No. 12. 

 i No. 318 Broadway, New Yohk. 



CONTEXTS. 



Editorial. 



March Days. — iu 



Canadian Salmon Petition. 



Protect the Black Bass. 



Salmon Spawning Without 

 Going to Sea. 



Piscatorial Exhibition in Lon- 

 don. 



Park Grabs. 



Natural History. 



Catching Wild Animals— v. 

 The Instinct of the Cowbird. 

 Tamed Hummingbirds. 



Game Bag and Gun. 



Esquimau Carioou Himting. 

 Adirondack Guides' Assoc'n. 

 The New York Game Bill. 

 Chicago and the West. 

 New Hampshire Camps. 

 A Typical Iowa Sportsman. 

 Shooting Quail at Home. 

 The "Kitchen Garden" Gun. 



Sea and River Fishing-. 



Large and Small-Mouth. 



Manitowish Way. 



Where Salt- Water Fish Hide. 



Belle's Pickerel. 



Trout and Worm. 



Chicago and the West. 



Th« History of a Decoy Fish. 



A Catfish in Armor. 



Frostfish or Chivey. 



Onondaga Anglers. 



Fishculture. 



Sea. Salmon Breeding Without 

 Going to Sea. 



The Kennel. 



Pittsburgh Dog Show. 



Points and Flushes. 



That Iron-Clad Coursing Rule 



Judging and Handlers. 



A Serious Charge. 



Kentucky Field Trial Grounds 



Dog Chat. 



Canoeing. 



A Canoe Trip in the Maine 



Woods.— II. 

 Sliding Seats in England. 

 Vesper B, C. 



Yachting. 



Conditions of the "Coupe do 



France." 

 A New Era in Philadelphia. 

 Size ts. Length, 

 News Notes. 



Rifle Range and Gallery. 



"Forest and Stream" Tourna- 

 ment. 



Trap Shooting. 



The Trap Clubs of Chicago. 

 Drivers and Twisters. 

 Matches and Meetings. 



Answers to Queries. 



For Prospectus and Advertising Rates see Page 290. 



Any person who cannot find the " Forest and 

 Stream " for sale at any news stand in the coun- 

 try, is requested to report the fact, with location 

 of stand and name of dealer, to the Forest and 

 Stream Pub. Co., 318 Broadway, New York. 



MARCH DAYS.-II. 

 ^ITEE sunshine, the bracing air, the swaying boughs of 

 the pines and hemlocks beckoning at the woodside, 

 the firm smooth footing irresistibly invite you forth. 

 Your feet devour the way with crisp bites, and you think 

 that nothing could be more pleasant to them till you are 

 offered a few yards of turf, laid bare by winds and sun, 

 and then you realize that nothing is quite so good as the 

 old standby, a naked ground, and crave more of it, even 

 as this is, and hunger for it with its later garnishing of 

 grass and flowers. The crows, too, are drawn to these 

 bare patches and are busy upon them, and you wonder 

 what they can find; spiders, perhaps, for these you may 

 see in thawy days crawling sluggishly over the snow, 

 where they must have come from the earth. 



The woods are astir with more life than a month ago. 

 The squirrels are busy and noisy, the chickadees throng 

 about you, sometimes singing their sweet brief song of 

 three notes; the nuthatches pipe their tiny trumpets in 

 full orchestra, and the jays are clamoring their ordinary 

 familiar cries with occasional notes that you do not often 

 hear. One of these is a soft, rapidly uttered cluck, the 

 bird all the time dancing with his body, but not with his 

 feet, to his own music, which is pleasant to the ear, espe- 

 cially when you remember it is a jay's music, which in 

 the main cannot be recommended. To-day, doubtless, 

 he is practicing allurements for the coming mating sea- 

 son. 



You hear the loud cackle of a logcock'making the daily 

 round of his grub preserves, but you are not likely to get 

 more than a glimpse of his black plumage or a gleam of 

 his blood-red crest. 



By rare luck you may hear the little Acadian owl fil- 

 ing his invisible saw, but you are likelier to see him and 

 mistake him for a clot of last year's leaves lodged mid- 

 way in their fall to earth. 



The forest floor barred and netted with blue shadows of 

 trunks and branches, is strewn with dry twigs, evergreen 

 leaves, shards of bark and shreds of tree-moss and lichen, 

 with here and there a heap of cone scales, the squirrel's 

 kitchen middens, and there the sign of a partridge's 

 nightly roosting, and similar traces of the hare's moon- 

 light wanderings, and perhaps a fluff of his white fur 

 shows where they've ended forever in a fox's jaw. 



Here and there the top of a cradle knoll crops out of 

 the snow with its patches of green moss, sturdy upright 

 stems and leaves and red berries of wintergreen, as fresh 

 as when the first snow covered them, a rusty trail of May- 

 flower leaves, and the flat-pressed purple lobes of squirrel 

 cup with a downy heart of buds full of the promise of 

 spring. 



The woods are filled with a certain subtle scent quite 

 distinct from the very apparent resinous and balsamic 

 aroma of the evergreens and] eludes description but as a 

 kind of freshness that tickles the nose with longing for a 

 more generous waft of it. 



You can trace it to no source, as you can the odors of 



the pine and the hemlocks or the sweet fragrance of the 

 boiling sap, coming to you from the sugar-maker's camp 

 with a pungent mixture of wood-smoke. 



You are also made aware that the skunk has been 

 abroad, that reynard is somewhere to windward , and by 

 an undescribed, and so far as you know, unattributed 

 pungency in the air, that a gray squirrel lives in your 

 neighborhood. Yet among all these more potent odors 

 you still discover this subtle exhalation, perhaps of the 

 earth filtered upward through the snow, perhaps the 

 first awakening breath of all the deciduous trees. 



Warmer shines the sun and warmer blows the wind 

 from southern seas and southern lands. 



More and more the tawny earth comes in sight among 

 puddles of melted snow, that bring the mirrored sky and 

 its fleecy flocks of clouds, with treetops turned topsy 

 turvey, down into the bounds of fields. The brooks are 

 alive again and babbling noisily over their pebbled beds, 

 and the lake, hearing them, groans and cries for deliver- 

 ance from its prison of ice. 



On the marshes you may find the ice shrunken from 

 the shores and an intervening strip of water where the 

 lnuskrat may see the sun and the stars again. 



You hear the trumpets of the wild geese and see the 

 gray battalion riding northward on the swift wind. 



The sun and the south wind, that perhaps bears some 

 faint breath of stolen fragrance from far-off violet banks, 

 tempt forth the bees, but they find no flowers yet, not 

 even a squirrel cup or willow catkin, and can only make 

 the most of the fresh sawdust by the woodpile and the 

 sappy ends of maple logs. 



Down from the sky, whose livery he wears and whose 

 song he sings, comes the heavenly carol of the bluebird, 

 the song sparrow trills his cheery melody, the first robin 

 is announced to-day, and we cry, "Lo, spring has come." 

 But to-morrow may come winter and longer waiting. 



THE CANADIAN SALMON PETITION. 



OEFORE this number of the Fopest and Stream shall 

 reach all of its readers, it is altogether likely that 

 the celebrated petition of the salmon anglers in the Cana- 

 dian rivers will be in the hands of the ministers at Ottawa. 

 The petition has already been published in these columns 

 in full. It asks that the time when the nets shall be 

 raised, in the bays and rivers below, shall be increased, in 

 order that the parent salmon may have more of a chance 

 to reach the breeding grounds in the rivers above. Mr. 

 D. Blanchard, of Boston, the originator of the petition, 

 first published in the Forest and Stream, has now 110 

 signers to the document, all owners and lessees of salmon 

 rivers in the Dominion. Messrs. G-eo. B. Appleton & Co., 

 of Boston, have kindly assisted Mr. Blanchard in the 

 work, making their tackle store the headquarters for the 

 receipt of names. The petition is a most reasonable one; 

 for the benefit of all concerned— the netter as well as the 

 salmon angler. It is scarcely possible that the wisdom of 

 the Canadian ministry will refuse the granting of a prayer 

 so reasonable. 



As further reason why the salmon anglers think that 

 their petition should be granted, it may be added that 

 these anglers spend many thousands of dollars annually 

 in Canada. One club alone spends over $40,000 a year 

 there, and the members of this club ore all signers of the 

 petition. The anglers provide employment for the people 

 of Canada, as guides, guardians and attendants, and the 

 people in the vicinity of the salmon rivers are very largely 

 dependent upon such employment for their support. 

 Through the efforts of the petitioners, the saimon rivers 

 are better guarded and protected than they could possibly 

 be by any other system, because the inhabitants living 

 along the shores, through the employment furnished 

 them by the anglers, are made interested to preserve the 

 fish, the destruction and extermination of which would 

 be of incalculable damage to them, by reason of the loss of 

 this employment. 



Of late these people have become much alarmed at the 

 scarcity of saimon, which they have observed to be 

 rapidly growing worse. They very well ^know that this 

 scarcity is due to the excessive netting carried on each 

 season. When the salmon become so scarce as to leave 

 it no object for the angler longer to visit the rivers, 

 which time is very rapidly approaching, as witness the 

 ill-success of last season especially, it is easy to see what 

 will take place. The Canadian people along the shores, 

 having lost, their interest in the fish— their interest in pre 

 serving them— and feeling, as they will in that case, that 



their loss of employment is entirely due to the selfish 

 course of the net fishermen — will then not hesitate in the 

 least to take the parent salmon for their own use, and 

 thus work the final completion of the utter destruction 

 of all the salmon in the rivers. They would feel that 

 this utter destruction had been begun by the greed of 

 the netters below, and it would be impossible to prevent 

 their action, begun in a spirit of retaliation. These men, 

 employed as guides and guardians ]by the anglers, know 

 every spawning bed in the streams they watch. Indeed 

 they know almost every salmon, so familiar are they 

 with the streams, and they could take even the last 

 parent fish left, if moved, as there is danger of their 

 being, by a desire to get even with the netters. Take 

 away the motive of self-interest that the inhabitants now 

 have, the interest they now feel in keeping the streams 

 well stocked with fish, in order that the number of 

 anglers may be greater and through these anglers greater 

 rewards to the people, and put in its place a feeling of 

 retaliation against the netters for having destroyed the 

 source of their "bread and butter," as it were: and a 

 regiment of soldiers along the borders of every salmon 

 river could scarcely save the parent fish from destruc- 

 tion to the last spawning salmon. 



The excuse offered by the net fishermen, and doubtless 

 it will be offered against the granting of the petition, is 

 that their nets, or trap nets now in use, are so constructed 

 as to make it difficult to lift them during the weekly 

 close time now in vogue. From this reasoning the 

 anglers very naturally conclude that the short close time, 

 already the law, is not observed, and that the nets are 

 not taken up as they should be. If such is the case, then 

 the law has to comply with the interest of the netters 

 rather than that the netters obey the law. 



The anglers would say to the net fishermen, "Please 

 bear in mind that whatever we may say or do for the 

 furtherance of our own interests in this matter, we can- 

 not benefit ourselves without benefiting you also. We 

 sincerely believe that if our petition is granted, by the 

 wisdom of the Canadian government, it will require but 

 a short time to prove that it is working for the interest of 

 the government itself, the netters, the anglers and all 

 concerned." 



PROTECT THE BLACK BASS. 



r l^HE treatment of the black bass in different localities 

 shows a wonderful amount of variation. In most of 

 the States they are protected during the spawning season 

 or what is supposed to be their spawning time, while in 

 others no effort is made to protect them at any time. It 

 is well known that the nesting season in New York ex- 

 tends certainly to the end of June, and in the northern 

 portions into July, yet the open season in this State begins 

 on May 30. Even in Indiana, which has a warmer climate 

 than New York, the hatching of the black bass has been 

 observed to continue after the middle of June. In New 

 Hampshire it is very well known that the spawning lasts 

 through June, but the anglers favor its capturing during 

 that month because it will not readily take the fly in any 

 other summer month, and this applies equally well in most 

 of the waters of the Middle States, 



The black bass is subjected to many dangers through 

 certain of its habits. As it is frequently found in schools, 

 the skillful anglers can often capture almost an entire 

 school. Its innate voracity, also, is another cause of its 

 own destruction, since the young bass devour one another 

 with great relish during the first two or three weeks of 

 their existence. Still another unfortunate habit of this 

 fish is that of making its nest in shallow water near the 

 shore where, owing to its large size and light color, it 

 can be readily observed. The parents guard the nest and 

 the young, and during this exercise of paternal care are 

 often pounced upon and destroyed by poachers, Then too 

 the male bass at the time of breeding fight among them- 

 selves and many are thus Milled. 



The black bass is not very prolific, the number of eggs 

 to the female having been estimared at about 4,000, and 

 when the parent fish are destroyed the young fall a prey 

 to crawfish and minnows. According to observations of 

 Mr. C. F. Holt, in Michigan, the young fish do not become 

 perfectly developed until they are from one to two months 

 old. During this time they are under the care of the 

 parents, learning how to obtain food and to shelter them- 

 selves among the water plants from the attacks of their 

 enemies. Kill the guardians of these tender broods and 

 the pike and pickerel will do the rest, 



