Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Tbrms, 14 A Ykab. 10 Ots, a Copy. I 
8es Months, f2. f 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1896. 
I VOL. XLVn.— No. 14. 
1 No. 846 Bboadvat, N»W it obi. 
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■way, largely through the efforts of Mr. William Brewster, of 
Cambridge, have greatly increased. 
One useful purpose which these terns, and perhaps in 
some degree the sea birds inhabiting the Farallon Islands, 
serve is to act as a natural fog bell. When the islands and 
the adjacent rocks are hidden by mists, the cries of the gulls 
and scent of the guano are to be noticed at a considerable 
distance, and in this way warning of the neighborhood of 
the islands is often given to mariners who are approaching 
them. The terns of our Atlantic coast are well known often 
to serve this purpose for the islands which they inhabit. 
This subject is one which is well worthy of the attention of 
all who are interested in birds. It would seem as if the sim- 
plest and most natural way to act in the matter would be for 
the Lighthouse Board to issue instructions to its subordinates 
all over the country to protect rather than to destroy the 
birds which may breed or have their homes near the lights 
kept by the various light keepers. 
While, as has been said, we do not know what useful pur- 
pose these birds may serve, it is to be remembered that it is 
but a short time since a study of the economic side of bhd 
life began. Ten or a dozen years ago the hawks and owls 
were supposed to be harmful, and all birds of prey were 
grouped under the single adjective "noxious." Investiga- 
tion has proved that instead of being harmful these are 
among the most useful of our birds, and it is by no means 
impossible that before long we may learn that sea birds per- 
form some important work in the economy of the ocean. 
Whether or not the birds themselves be protected, their nests 
and eggs ought to be. 
EGG DESTRUCTION ON THE FARALLONS. 
The accounii of the destruction of the eggs of sea birds on 
the Farallon Islands which we give in another column is 
very suggestive. Mr. Loomis tells us that on certain portions 
of the island where a dozen years ago a large bird popula- 
tion flourished no birds are now to be seen, while on the other 
hand, on a single isolated rock, where the birds are allowed 
to breed undisturbed, they are crowded together so closely 
that a bird coming in from the sea to alight can hardly do 
so without jostling those already standing on the ground. 
Mr. Emerson, an observer Avho visited the Farallon Islands a 
•dozen years ago, told Mr. Loomis that in the summer of 1884 
300,000 eggs were gathered. Of these a great number were 
-wasted because the market was glutted, and there was no 
sale for the eggs. 
It is certainly worth while to inquire whether such whole- 
sale destruction of sea birds should not be put an end to. It 
is true that at present we do not know much about the econ- 
omic value of the various birds whose eggs are destroyed, 
but it may be regarded as certain that they have a value of 
some sort. In Great Britain, where along its northern coast 
sea birds breed In great numbers on rocks and islets, it has 
been thought worth while to protect their eggs and the birds 
themselves from destruction, and by stringent laws. Similar 
action ought to be taken all along the coast of the United 
States. 
It is to be noted that those who gather these eggs are the 
lighthouse keeper and his helpers. These men are hired and 
paid for their work by the United States Government, and 
the gathering and selling of these eggs is an outside business 
carried on in connection with their lighthouse work. We 
know of DO good reason why they should be permitted to 
carry on this work of destruction. The islands, we believe, 
constitute a Government reservation, and no persons except 
Government employees have the right to visit them and re- 
main there. If any others do so, they do it only by the cour- 
tesy of the light keeper, and he should be able to control 
their actions while there. If the birds on the Farallon 
Islands were protected as they ought to be it would not be 
long before they would be found there in their old-time 
numbers. 
An example of what protection can do for birds almost 
exterminated in their breeding homes is to be seen at Gull 
Island, on the eastern end of Long Island. Through the de- 
struction of their eggs the birds visiting this island to breed 
had been greatly reduced in numbers, when, the matter hav- 
ing come to the attention of Mr. William Dutcher and others, 
efforts were made to protect them. Through the influence 
of the Lighthouse Board. and the State authorities the light 
keeper was appointed a game warden, with instructions to 
prevent the robbing of the nests of the birds. This he suc- 
ceeded in doing, with the result that the birds have so 
greatly increased that they have filled up Gull Island, and 
have overflowed so that there is now quite a colony on a 
nearby piece of land. We understand that the terns of 
Muskeget Island, which have been protected in a similar 
THE WHOLE BOUNDLESS OONTJNENl 
IS YOURS. 
No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, 
But the whole boundless continent is yours. 
When Sewall wrote his patriotic lines he did not have ref- 
erence to sportsmen, although there were sportsmen then, and 
true sportsmen too, among their number a personage no less 
distinguished than the Commander-in-Chief of the American 
Army. But that was the winter at Valley Forge ; and Amer- 
ican poets and American generals, even one who was as 
devoted a sportsman as Washington himself, had something 
else to think about than the advantages of the American 
continent for the devotees of rod and gun and horse and 
hound. Sewall's noble couplet was addressed to Americans 
in their new country. It was not more a buoyant declara- 
tion of the limitless opportunities opening before them than 
a prescient prophecy of how gloriously those opportunities 
should be fuUfilled. You may see the spirit of the poem and 
the spirit of the people of whom it was written portrayed in 
Leutze's painting, 'Westward Ho!" in the Capitol at Wash- 
ington. The scene is laid in the Rocky Mountains, and the 
picture is of an emigrant train filing through the passes to 
a fair country opening beyond. True, the continent itself 
is no longer to be accounted boundless as Sewall sang of it, 
for its every bound has been attained, from the Atlantic to 
the Pacific, and has become populous with the growth of the 
expanding nation; yet is the Eepublic hmilless in what it is 
to do for the human race, as we all believe and have faith still 
to beheve even in these campaign times, when the orators tell 
us that the country is going to perdition and going fast. 
does have it. The sportsman tourist goes everywhere. He 
pushes beyond the beaten paths of trade and the roads of 
business enterprise. The wilderness lures hifn to its re- 
motest confines. His tiny bark adventures mysterious 
waters which other craft have never explored. He threads 
mighty forests which but for him know not the foot of man. 
He looks out from toil-won heights and stupendous sum- 
mits upon expanses at whose view no soul has been uplifted 
save his own. For him alone does the unnamed lake reflect 
in its depths the stars at night. He beholds the sun flood- 
ing with the glory of the'dawn mountain peaks which other 
eyes have never seen. Thus with peculiar significance does 
he make the boundless continent his own. 
This is not all, nor the best of aU. The sportsman tourist 
wins much more than his knowledge of nature and the wil- 
derness; he comes also to know men, the people of other 
sections than his own. He broadens his horizon, expands 
his sympathies, outgrows his sectionalism, and puts away 
the narrow, mean and unworthy prejudice, distrust, envy 
and unreasonableness which are bred of sectionalism. You 
will never hear one of the North declaim against the South, 
who has shared the hospitality a Southern host gives a 
JSTorthern sportsman; nor one of the East berate those of the 
West, who has hunted in the West. The traveled sportsman 
has no part in nor sympathy with nor tolerance for the 
wicked talk of those who would array one section against 
another as divided in interest or purpose. If the whole 
boundless continent is the sportsman's own for the exercise 
of his favorite field pursuits, it is his too for his citizenship, 
fellowship and patriotic pride. 
If you would know something of the wealth of the re* 
sources of the continent for the sportsmen, learn the propor- 
tions of this sportsmanship, and make some measure of the 
friendly intercourse and fraternal mingling of the men of the 
North and the South, the East and the West, turn the pages 
of the twenty odd years of Forest and Stream, wherein 
are chronicled the goings and comings of a host of sportsmen 
tourists tens of thousands strong. And if you, good sir, 
would have some estimate of what influence has been 
wrought thereby, multiply by a hundred thousand fold what 
it has done in the one particular case which is best known to 
you, for it -is your own. 
What a showing it is. The pages which follow in this 
present number give a new weekly installment of the story, 
and admirably illustrate, in so far as one number may, the 
sportsman's resources of the continent. The whole may not 
be to!d in any one number, nor in any one year, nor in a 
decade. It is a serial; at the end of each new chapter is ever 
to be written the legend To be cordinued. Those who are 
writing the chapters now are not those who contributed the 
chronicles of twenty years ago. Countless other hands will 
add new chapters in the years to come. The pleasing story 
will go on. For not to the sportsmen of our day only, but 
to many successive generations, let us trust, belongs the 
promise, 
— tlie -whole boundless continent is yours. 
But it is not to demean Sewall's verse if we make appli- 
cation of his lines in these days to the opportunities America 
affords in a number of directions, among others that of the 
sports of rod and gun. The sportsman has the whole bound- 
less continent for his own. And what a field it is, with its 
noble game of shore and marsh, upland, prairie, knoll and 
woodland; in variety, in supply, in game qualities, the rich- 
est and the best of all those of tlie continents of the earth. 
With its rainbow-tinted fishes of the dashing mountain 
stream, the silver-sheened denizens of the rivers, the bronae- 
backed warriors of the lakes, and the inexhaustible variety 
and supply of the gulfs and the oceans on either continental 
shore. With its variations of season and climate; its diver- 
sity of scenery — mountains, plains and canons — the restful 
repose of its landscapes, and its revelations of nature's sub- 
limity unfolded in panoramas that quicken the puLe-beat 
and make the breath come quick. Truly the boundless 
continent open to the American sportsman and appropriated 
by him for hi§ enjoyment^were a theme worthy the poet's 
pen. 
In these days of annihilation of distance by modern 
methods of transportation the sportsman my literally have 
the boundless continent for his own. And in practice he 
Pennsylvania sportsmen will renew this winter an active 
effort to cut off the market killing of ruffed grouse. A bill 
10 that effect was adopted by the last Legislature, but the 
Governor withheld his approval of it on the strength, it ia 
said, of a suggestion that if such a law should go into effect 
the Governor himself could not have game on his table for 
his own invited guests. This may have appeared to the 
executive a good enough reason for defeating the will of the 
people, as expressed by their representatives at Harrisburg. 
but the popular sentiment is that the preservation of game 
is of more moment than the menu of a governor's banquet. 
The Platform Plank is sound; we shall yet see its principle 
prevail in Pennsylvania. 
Oar suggestion of a Maine guides' association, modeled 
after that of the Adirondacks, has commended itself to those 
who know the situation in Maine; and there is printed to- 
day a letter tirging the project as one likely to achieve 
decided good. We would be glad to have the subject dis 
cussed; its possibilities are great. 
J. C. Wedstad, Superintendent of the] Government Station 
at Port Clarence, Alaska, now on his way to Washington, 
reports that the reindeer herds are flourishing and now 
numbsr 1,200 animals. Mr. Wedstad will present to the 
authorities a plan of establishing reindeer relay stations in a 
line to bring into communication the extreme northern 
counLry as far as Point Barrow. 
