Forest and Stream 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



Terms, $i a Yeah. 10 Ots. a Corr. { 

 Six Months, $2. S 



NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 3, 1892. 



i VOL. XXXIX.-NO. 18. 



1 No. 318 Broadway, New Yohk. 



CONTENTS. 



Editorial. 



Mr. D^x^n's Robms. 

 Care of Live G^ame. 

 Familiar Acquamtances. 

 Snap ShiotB. 



The Sportsman Tourist. 



A Nierht in the Woods. 

 Tlie Panther's Scream. 



Natural History. 



How a Snake Sheris Its Skin. 

 Canada Lynx in Maine. 

 Boldness of the Canada Lynx. 



Game Bag and Gun. 



Chicago and the West. 

 Adirondack Notes. 

 Indiana Small Game. 

 Again the Huntinfj Rifle. 

 A New Hampshire Bear 

 Pocket. 



Transp-irtation and Care of 



Live G-ame. 

 On tlie Sunflower River. 

 Oincinnaii Qaail Case. 

 Boston Sportsmen. 

 Long Island Quail. 



Sea and River Fishing. 



White Perch of the Potomac. 

 The Navarra Salmon. 

 The Bis; Alligator Gar. 

 The Kekosbee Fish Story. 

 Angling Notes. 



Sea and River Fishing. 



PikP.Pickerel and Mascalonse 

 More About Chipola. 

 Camp3 of theKingfi=hers-xiv. 

 Some Sample ''Investiga- 

 tions." 



Fishoulture- 



Rainbow Trout in Virginia. 

 The Kennel. 



National Bsagle Club Field 

 Trials. 



American Coursing Club. 

 Dog Chat. 



Answers to Correspondents. 



Yachting. 



Michigan Y. C. Special Match- 

 New York Y. C. 



Rifle Range and Gallery. 



Hudson R'fla Cluh Tourna- 

 ment. 



Trap Shooting. 



Riverview Tournament. 

 Newburgh Tournament 

 Moodus Interstate. 

 Independent's Are Jersey's 



Champions. 

 Chicago Traps. 

 Answers to Queries. 



For Prospectus and Advertising: Rates see Page v. 



FAMILIAR ACQUAINTANCES. 



THE MINK. 



The little fur-bearer, whose color has been painted 

 darker than it i"*, and singularly made his name proverb- 

 ial for blackness, is an old but not so familiar an ac" 

 quaintance of the angler and sportsman as he was of 

 them and of the country boy of two score years ago. 



It was a woeful day for tbe tribe of the mink when it 

 became the fashion for other folk to wear his coat, which 

 he could only doff with the subtler garment of life. 



Throughout the term of his exaltation to the favor of 

 fashion, he was lain in wait for at his own door and on 

 his thoroughfares and by-piths by the traps, dead-falls 

 and guns of professional and amateur trappers and hunt, 

 ers, till the fate of his greater cousin the otter seemed 

 to overtake him. But the fickle empress who raised him 

 to such perilous estate, changing her mood, thrust him 

 down almost to his old ignoble but safer rank, just in 

 time to avert the impending doom of extermination. 

 Once more the places that knew him of old, know him 



In the March snow you may trace the long span of his 

 parallel footprints where, hot with the rekindled annual 

 fire of love, he has sped on his errand wooing, turning 

 not aside for the most tempting bait, halting not for rest, 

 hungering only for a sweetheart, wearied with nothing 

 but loneliness. Yet weary enough would you be if you 

 attempted to follow the track of but one night's wander- 

 ing along the winding brook, through the tangle of wind- 

 falls and across the rugged ledges that part stream from 

 stream. When you go fishing in the first days of sum- 

 mer you may see the fruits of this early springtide woo- 

 ing in the dusky brood taking their primer-lesson in the 

 art that their primogenitors were adepts in before yours 

 learned it. How proud one baby fisher is of his first cap- 

 tured minnow, how he gloats over it and defends his 

 prize from his envious and less fortunate brothers. 



When summer wanes, they will be a scattered family, 

 each member shifting for himself. Some still haunt the 

 alder thicket where they first saw light, whose netted 

 shadows of bare branches have thickened about them to 

 continued shade of leafage, in whose mid-day twilight 

 the red flame of the cardinal flower burns as a beacon set 

 to guide the dujky wanderer home. Others have adven- 

 tured far down the winding brook to the river and fol- 

 lowed its slowing current past rapids and cataract to 

 where it crawls through the green level of marshes be- 

 loved of water fowl and of gunners, whose wounded 

 victims, escaping them fall an easy prey to the lurking 

 mink. 



Here too in their season are the tender ducklings of 

 wood-duck, teal and dusky duck, and all the year round, 

 fat muskrats, furnishing for the price of conquest a ban- 

 quet that the mink most delights in. 



In the wooded border are homes ready builded for him 

 tinder the buttressed trunks of elms or in the hollow bolls 

 of old water maples, and hidden pathways through fallen 

 trees and under low green arches of ferns. 



With such a home and such bountiful provision for 

 his larder close at hand, what more could the heart and 

 stomach of mink desire. Yet he may not be satisfied, 



but longs for the wider waters of the lake, whose trans- 

 lucent depths reveal to him all who swim beneath him, 

 fry innumerable, perch displaying their scales of gold, 

 shiners like silver arrows shot through the green water, 

 the lesser bass peering out of rocky fastnesses, all attain- 

 able to this daring fisher, but not his great rivals, the 

 bronze-mailed bass and the mottled pike, whose jaws are 

 wide enough to engulf even him. 



Here, while you rest on your idle oar or lounge with 

 useless rod, you may see him gliding behind the tangled 

 net of cedar roots or venturing forth from a cranny of the 

 rocks down to the brink and launching himself so silently 

 that you doubt whether it is not a flitting shadow till you 

 see his wake so silent that you wonder that it breaks the 

 reflections lengthening out behind him. 



Of all swimmers that breathe the free air none can 

 compare with him in swiftness and in grace that is the 

 smooth and even flow of the poetry of motion. Now he 

 dives or rather vanishes from the surface, nor reappears 

 till his wake has almost flickered out. 



His voyage accomplished, he at once sets forth on ex- 

 ploration of new shores or progress through his estab- 

 lished domain, and vanishes from sight before his first 

 wet footprints have dried on the warm rock where he 

 landed. 



You are glad to have seen him, thankful that he lives, 

 and you hope that, sparing your chickens and your 

 share of trout, partridges and wild ducks, he too may be 

 spared from the devices of the trapper to fill his ap- 

 pointed place in the world's wildness. 



MB. DIXON'S ROBINS. 



Rev. Thos. Dixon, Jr., is a New York clergyman, who 

 has attracted considerable attention by preaching on 

 topics of the times. He has made local politics the sub- 

 ject of sensational sermons and has scored city officials 

 unmercifully. Tammany Hall has been the principal 

 object of his attacks, and not long ago he figured in a 

 police court libel case brought against him by one of the 

 Tammany excise commissioners. 



For this reason, when, one day last week, Mr. Dixon, 

 the champion of law and order, was intercepted by a 

 Staten Island game constable, taken before a justice and 

 compelled to pay a good fat fine for shooting robins con- 

 trary to the law, it was quite natural that the incident 

 should promote public hilarity. The newspapers, Tam- 

 many and anti-Tammany alike, made the most of their 

 opportunity to get in their digs at the Rev. Thomas Dixon, 

 Jr. The wittiest reporters were sent to write up the 

 Staten Island end of the affair; the editors discoursed 

 solemnly on the enormity of the killing of song birds by 

 a clergyman; the rival cartoonist held the clerical robin 

 slayer up to public gaze, and the rhymsters sung of his 

 exploits in most atrocious verse. In short, newspaper 

 readers, and that means everybody, had a steady diet of 

 Dixon robins, and the town has been pointing its finger 

 at the unfortunate individual ever since. 



This manifestation of public condemnation of the vio- 

 lation of the game laws is, as the advertisements put it, 

 "grateful and comforting." Nevertheless, it must be 

 borne in mind that if Mr. Dixon had not made himself 

 by his clerico-political activity a prominent mark for the 

 newspapers, his robin-shooting would have been dis- 

 missed by the news editors in a four-line item. 



Moreover, in fairness to Mr, Dixon it is to be said that 

 he is only one of a multitude of gunners who have potted 

 robins in the autumn without , recognizing theheinous- 

 ness nor even the impropriety of their act. As a matter 

 of fact, until this year the robin has had official recogni- 

 tion as a game bird in the New York law, just as it has 

 to-day in the laws of some other States, as Connecticut, 

 Rhode Island, Maryland and North Carolina. Indeed 

 there are sections of the country where the robin is best 

 known not as a song bird, but as a component of potpies, 

 and Mr. Dixon happens to have come from such a section 

 of the country. 



We take it, that Mr. Dixon's acquaintance with the 

 robin of this latitude is confined to the wild creature of 

 the October woods, which is not at all the domestic bird 

 of the door-yard and orchard in spring and summer; and 

 under these circumstances he might m-ge that, being 

 unfamiliar with the robin of sentiment, he could not 

 reasonably be expected to share that sentiment, which is 

 the robin's best protection. But even this plea cannot ex- 

 cuse him. 



' For Mr. Dixon's chief offending, as we see it, is that as 



an intelligent individual, who by the obligations of his 

 profession and walk of life is bound to conform to the 

 laws and to set a good example, he has recklessly and 

 ignorantly rushed into law breaking, when that very 

 ignorance is in itself an aggravation of the offense. In 

 these days of game protection and game laws, the very 

 first duty of a thinking man, who proposes to go shooting 

 or fishing, is to inform himself as to the legitimacy of 

 his sports. In shooting the legal maxim that ignorance 

 of the law excuses no man is doubly and trebly true. 

 Mr. Dixon might readily have ascertained that robins 

 were protected by the New York law of 1893, not as 

 "song birds," but specifically as robins. Having failed 

 to exercise ordinary discretion and to use the commonest 

 caution in this respect, Mr. Dixon has richly deserved, as 

 he would probably admit, all the unenviable notoriety 

 given his Staten Island robin-shooting. 



And then, Mr. Dixon is a regular reader of Forest and 

 Stream: he told a Times reporter that he had bought a 

 copy of this jotirnal on his way down to Staten Island. 

 Is this the fruit of our preaching all these years? 



CARE OF LIVE GAME. 



Few subjects present greater interest to the sports- 

 man than the care of game birds in captivity and their 

 transportation from one point to another. Over a large 

 portion of the Eastern States game birds and quadrupeds 

 are practically exterminated, and to obtain shooting 

 without making long journeys, it is necessary that such 

 depleted. covers should be restocked. 



To offer the greatest probabilities of , success this work 

 should be done on a considerable scale. Individual efforts 

 toward restocking are constantly being made, and some 

 of these are fresh in the minds of our readers; but no- 

 where has the work been conducted on so broad a plat- 

 form as in Massachusetts under the wise care of the 

 Massachusetts Fish and Game Protective Association's 

 Committee on Acclimatization. Of this committee Mr, 

 Henry J, Thayer is the secretary, and it has fallen to 

 him to superintend much of the work. His experience 

 in this field has thus, been more extended than that of 

 any other man in the country, and it is with great satis- 

 faction that we present to-day his paper, entitled 

 "Transportation and Care of Live Game," 



The value of this article will be apparent to every one 

 at all interested in the subject, Mr, Thayer wastes no 

 words in glittering generalities but gives a column and a 

 half of specific instruction, drawn from his own wide ex- 

 perience and covering no less than seven species of game, 

 five of which are entirely new to the country in which 

 they have been introduced. 



As is very natural, the more we learn about this inter- 

 esting subject the more we desire to know, and it is to 

 be hoped that observations are being conducted in 

 Massachusetts, which, in the course of a year or two, will 

 tell us how these various species of wild birds have 

 thriven. Of course a single failure— the entire disappear- 

 ance of a lot of birds turned out— is by no means con- 

 clusive evidence that a particular species cannot be ac- 

 climated in a given locality. But there would be great 

 encouragement in learning that any one of the species, 

 not native to the region, which was turned out, had 

 flourished and done well. 



While Mr, Thayer has been doing the good work of 

 writing this article for the benefit of his brother sports- 

 men he has suffered a severe misfortune in the burning 

 of his camp at Monomoy, Massachusetts, and the conse- 

 quent loss of gun, rifle, rods and canoe. Outside of 

 the money loss involved most of us realize how serious a 

 thing it is to lose one's old shooting implements, and we 

 can sympathize with Mr, Thayer in his misfortune. 



The fund for the Audubon monument has been com- 

 pleted and it is stated that before long the stone will be 

 in position and appropriate ceremonies for its dedication 

 will take place. It has required years of time and a grea,t 

 deal of work to raise the amount of money neccessary for 

 the erection of this monument, and all New Yorkers, as 

 well as all lovers of nature, may congratulate themselves 

 that the efforts of the various committees who had the 

 matter in charge have at last been crowned with success. 

 The stone is simple but effective, a base of granite shows 

 a medallion of the great naturalist, and above this is a 

 shaft of North River blue stone ending in a Runic cross, 

 on which are carved some of the birds and animals which 

 are inseparably connected with the name of Audubon, 



