June 13, 1903.I 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
465 
thirds around, but not enough to fell the tree. There 
was a pile of chips at the foot of the tree and they were 
perfectly fresh. He says they were surely made within 
twenty-four hours. The tree was cut into about eighteen 
inches from the ground. 
On looking around for more trees thus worked, Mr. 
Park saw a balsam stump on the other side of the river 
which leaned toward the water. He was not able to get 
across, but the stump looked to be "fourteen inches in 
diameter, if it was an inch." The tree itself was entirely 
gone. It had been cut on the under side, and when the 
tree broke it left a long splinter on the upper side of the 
stump. The weight of the leaning tree had helped con- 
siderably in its breaking oi¥. 
He picked up a handful of chips from the little heap 
where he stood and now has them carefully preserved. 
Some of them are close to three inches long. Most of 
them are about two inches in length. They are about 
a quarter of an inch in thickness. 
Mr. 'Park thinks the fact that trees are being cut indi- 
cates there must be more than one beaver. He further 
believes that they have started to build because of the 
low water, and that tliey lived in the still water without 
the need of a dam until the river became so low and 
the banks so dry. E. A. Spears. 
Nebraska in Bird Nest Time. 
Wymore, Nebraska, June 3— Editor Forest and Stream: 
The robins, and some of the other birds, seem to be nest- 
ing late this year. On last Sunday we noticed a robin 
tugging at some old strings that were hanging to a sweet 
pea rack, and watching her for a few minutes we dis- 
covered that she was building a nest in an elm tree close 
by. We got some old rope and cut it into pieces seven or 
eight inches long, and then untwisted or unravelled it, 
and, adding a few pieces of pink and white wool yarn, 
distributed it over the limbs of some small walnut trees 
near by, and then stepped away about twenty feet. The 
old robin, who had been watching us all the time, made a 
dart for the walnuts, and at once began carrying the 
fuzzy strands of rope, and the yarn to her nest. 
Up to this time she was the only bird we had noticed, 
but she had hardly left the tree with her load until a 
thrush came, then a catbird, then an oriole, and a little 
wild canary, and each seemed to be striving to see which 
cue would get the most of the rope and yarn, and the 
supply was soon exhausted. A. D. McCandless. 
Dovefcie in North Carolina. 
For many years there has stood in the sitting room of 
the Narrows'^ Island club house in Currituck county, N. 
C, a specimen of the dovekie. a little auk from the far 
North, Avhich breeds well within the Arctic circje and ui 
winter is found rarely as far south as New England 
and New York. This specimen was captured years ago 
by John Doxcy, a local gunner, was seen by an ornitholo- 
gist and secured for the club. 
Up to whhin a short time it has been the only speci- 
men ever taken in North Carolina, so far as we know. 
Recently, however, Mr. T. Gilbert Pearson, of Greens- 
boro, N. C, who is the secretary of the Audubon Society 
of North Carolina, writes us that on the 31st day of 
December, 1902, he picked up a dovekie on the beach, 
about twenty-five miles north of Cape Hatteras. 
If other specimens of the dovekie are known to have 
been taken in North Carolina, we should be glad to hear 
of them. 
Several weeks ago Messrs. Plenry Gaston and Joe But- 
ler were bobbing on Pine Lake in the Hamburg neigh- 
borhood. A small trout of about one pound weight struck 
the patent bob and carried it away. The fish was seen 
to rise several times by the gentlemen, and attempted to 
shake the hook out of its jaw. About a week after this 
a negro man fishing in the same lake caught a fine black- 
fish which, when dressed, weighed nine pounds. In the 
stomach of the blackfish was found a trout and in its jaw 
was the bob lost by Mr. Gaston. The bob was restored 
to its owner, and he is now using it to capture more 
fish. This is a true story. — Madison (Florida) New 
Enterprise. 
^mie ^Hg Httd ^nm 
— ® — 
Proprietors of shooting resorts will find it profitable to advertise 
them in FosssT ANP SlxtAM. 
Adirondack Ruin. 
F.ditoy Forest and Stream: 
Under this heading, on June 17, 1899, I wrote for you 
about the condition of affairs in these woods, dwelling on 
two things that I heard there : woodsmen were threaten- 
ing to set fire to the woods because of the preserves from 
which they were being excluded by men of wealth, and 
of the "scientific culling" of the forests, which means 
getting out every last inch of timber that it would be 
I^rofitable to cut down. 
The opoprtunity has come for the woodsmen who have 
only one way in which to reach the preserve owners, and 
they are taking advantage of it. For six weeks the 
■fegion has been almost without rain. The woods are as 
dry as tinder — a shovelful of the surface soil thrown on 
a "fire flashes like so much powder in its eagerness to 
burn. And the fires have been started. I was told to- 
day of how the fighters on Webb's game preserve at Ne- 
ha-se-ne wrestled with the flames for days in an effort to 
gave the closest preserve in the Adirondacks. Thousands 
oi acres of land were burned over, and there is every 
f^a^ion to believe that the end in that locality is not yet 
^-eaich'ed, so far as fires are concerned. The gang was 
jhghting one bad blaze and they had it surrounded. Then 
.the men sat down pa rest. After a few minutes they 
jioticcd another fire not far away, and when they got to 
.ihat one, jt was geen to he a snjall ojigj creepipg away 
from a center; and beyond that a few rods was seen 
another fire, and so several fires were fotmd recently set 
along a line. There is no doubt in this whole region that 
men are seeking re\enge for being excluded from the 
scores of square miles comprising the game preserves of 
Dr. Webb and others. _ 
It is a most deplorable condition of affairs, and the 
men who own these preserves are realizing this fact to 
the extent of many thousands of dollars. I read just the 
other day that Webb's park keeper thinks $150,000 will 
scarcely cover the damage to that one preserve alone. 
To-day (Thursday) I saw a telegram that had been 
sent from Big Moose by the fire warden there saying to 
the chief warden at Albany that the fire was beyond his 
control at Big Moo.9e, althoiigh he had every available 
man out, and asking for help, for the need was most 
urgent. At Raquette Lake fires were only got under 
control just in time to save the town, and a mile from the 
Fulton Chain railroad station the woods were all ablaze. 
Northwood is in a dense clo\id of smoke, and north of 
the place thousands of acres have been burned over. 1 
think that more than twenty thousand acres have been 
burned over within eighteen miles of this place. 
Webb's railroad trains are complained against as being 
one of the reasons why fires are burning along it. There 
is no sympathy expressed for Webb, who has lost 
thousands of acres of fine wood land. It was he who 
took the railroad into_ the heart of the Adirondack 
forests. Perhaps he will sue the State for the damage 
done to his preserves by fire. But the railroad has 
"paid." If one considers the moitey it has paid in divi- 
dends to the stockholders, it has "paid" them. But what 
of the people in the State — who pays them? There was 
no need of taking a railroad into the heart of the wilder- 
ness. Saranac Lake could have been reached from some 
other direction than by way of Big Moose, Beaver River, 
and the thousand other places which few of the motley 
summer crowd appreciate because they don't have to work 
to get to them. 
It is said that 1,000,000 acres of land have been burned 
over in the Adirondacks this year — one-fifth of the wood- 
land area. More than a third of the woods for fifteen 
miles north and east of Northwood have been burned 
over. In North Wilmurt some tnen have been fighting 
fire for a month. 
And all this is due to just two causes throughout the 
whole mountain country — carelessness and unfair plaj'. 
Take the case of Webb's park. Part of it was fenced 
in. The rest of it was carefullj^ "preserved." No one was 
allowed to cross the land. Deer multiplied, trout multi- 
plied. The woods and streams teemed with game ani- 
mals. The woodsmen did not see that the overflow from this 
park would keep the surrounding region everlastingly 
stocked with game. The one thing that the woodsman 
saw and knew was that some men, no better than himself, 
exercised the right to take him by the collar and march 
him to a point beyond the borders of the "preserve." It 
is alleged that the park keepers did just that — took men 
by the collar and marched ihem off the land. One case 
is told of a man who shot_ a deer on State land which 
ran on to the preserve and it there fell dead, well within 
the line. While the hunter was dressing out the animal 
a game keeper came along and ordered him to leave the 
preserve, and leave the deer, too. And before the game 
keeper would leave the hunter _ alone, a rifle had to be 
leveled at him. At that the keeper hunted his employer, 
the employer, with great indignation, got a warrant, and 
the hunter wa-s' arrested, and finally the hunter received 
common justice. He was justified, in the eyes of the law, 
in taking his game even by force. There is no doubt 
among the woodsmen, however, but what the same course 
would again be pursued by the preserve owners on occa- 
sion. It has been the bulldozing tactics which many of 
the preserve owners have shown toward their neighbors, 
the woodsmen, that has brought on the condition of 
aft'airs in which men will go through the woods, fire in 
hand, and spread it broadcast where it will do the most 
damage. 
The law does not prevent the game park crowd from 
trying to keep people off more than their own land. They 
try to keep them off public highways — though ready 
enough on occasion to sneak highways across the land of 
the State, or private property. 
Right here at Northwood, W. T. Finch has posted 
hundreds of acres of wood land and built many dams for 
fish ponds. A wood alcohol factory which Finch owns 
is polluting the West Canada Creek at this very moment 
with the offal from the factory. This man is a member 
of the Adirondack Sportsmen's League, and it is natural 
to judge the other members by the specimen before one's 
eyes, especially as the Adirondack League has Canacha- 
g.ala Lake posted, this lake being a reservoir used to feed 
the Black River Canal. 
A brook at this place which was stocked with trout 
from the Fulton Chain hatchery three years ago has been 
dammed, and the public warned against trespassing, and 
another dam is to be built on it, one of the papers says. 
But one lesson which the fires have given to this region 
is a most hard one. The lumber jobbers and pulp "cul- 
lers" have sworn for years that there was no way of 
getting rid of the tops of the trees which they cut down. 
These tops are nowadays spruce and hemlock, spruce 
predominating. Much of the fire has been in the chop- 
pings, and here the fires have been simply invincible. It 
was useless, even dangerous, to fight them there, for the 
dry, gummy spruce made a blaze that leaped a hundred 
feet in the air, and none could approach the heaps within 
rods. Flere in these choppings everything has been killed. 
The bark of beech, birch and maple trees has been burned 
off and the forest totally killed. In the virgin timber 
only the smaller trees have been destroyed completely, but 
of course no trees can escape completely where the very 
loam itself has burned away. The stay of the pulp and 
saw mill people — the wholesale ones — ^has been shortened 
in these forests by the fires by long years. In their 
"scientific culling" busine-ss they made no account of the 
dry tops. Perhaps now they will burn them on purpose 
at seasons when it can be done iti safety. 
There are a good many lessons in recent Adirondack 
events which will not be totally lost. The sight of deer 
and other wild game leaping through holes in the fences 
of preserves from vvhich it was possible to exclude men, 
may teach the owners of these preserves something. 
Wires and insolent garne keepers were not enough to keep 
fire from trespassing in the forests. It was a sight, the 
fire fighters say, to see the snakes, in myriads, crawling 
along the groimd, and deer, squirrels, bears, foxes, what 
not, running and the birds flying among the trees, with 
the fire coursing along after them, When the fire had 
gone by fawns and other creatures were found dead. One 
buck was found in Webb's park with its hoofs burned 
off and legs worn, showing how long and frantically the 
bewildered creature had tried to run away from the fires 
around its feet. Perhaps this feature of the Adirondack 
fires is the worst of all. 
Of course, my personal feelings in this matter are very 
strong, as are the feelings of all the other backwoodsmen, 
in fact. And I don't want anyone to think that I mean 
by "woodsmen" the guides and game keepers. They are 
just guides and just game keepers who regard the woods 
as so much cash a year. By woodsmen I mean the 
farmers and other dwellers around the borders of the 
woods who think of the woods as a place in which to play 
in the fall when the crops have been gathered. It was 
for these people and the appreciative "summer people" 
that these mountain forests were grown, and it is to their 
loss that the woods are now at this moment being 
destroyed by fire. But I guess that several people have 
learned another wrinkle in the universal law of com- 
pensation. 
Doubtless Charles Day will come forth to say that 
complaints against the preserve-makers are the vaporings 
of men who are actuated by the feelings of swine — who 
v/ant something for nothing — as he did some time ago. 
But Mr. Day has not seen the best spawning bed of his 
favorite trout stream "preserved" in such a manner as to 
permit all the big trout to go into the little lake and keep 
them there, as I have in the case of the West Canada. 
Nor has he, in common with his neighbors, been subject 
to the studied insolence of game preservers and their 
hirelings, not only so far as the lawful preserves are con- 
cerned, but beyond that into the unlawful depriving peo- 
ple of their rights. But some few equally lawless cliarac- 
ters have taken the matter in their own hands, and in 
some measure the great pall of smoke hanging over the 
Adirondacks at the present time is due to these lawless 
men, Raymond S. Spears. 
NosTHWooD, N. y., June 5. 
CHICAGO AND THE WEST. 
Mr. Egan's Body Discovered, 
Chicago, June 5, — A dispatch from Bolton, Montana, 
dated June i, states that on that day the remains of 
Superintendent B. F. Egan, of the Great Northern Rail- 
road, were discovered near Lake Five, a short distance 
from the point where Mr. Egan was last seen alive on 
his hunt, November 4 of last year. It will be remem- 
bered that diligent himt was made for Mr. Egan at the 
time of his disapeparance, a special train leaving Kalis- 
pell on November 6. with a large party of men, who 
searched the shores of the lake near which Mr. Egan and 
his friend, Dr. Houston, separated. A great snow storm 
came on at that time, obliterating all trails, so that finally, 
with the greatest reluctance, all search had to be aban- 
doned. At the first time possible this spring the hunt 
was resumed with the result mentioned. It is thought 
that had the search party started from Kalispell on the 
day following Mr, Egan's disappearance, instead of two 
day's therafter,' they would have gotten in ahead of the 
big storm and hence have been able to find the missing 
man. It is not known what caused the wanderer's- death, 
but the chances are that he simply died of exposure and 
cold, combined with starvation. It seems almost incred- 
ible that a man could really be lost in any part of the 
Rocky Mountains to-day, and I own I could not believe 
that such was the case for Mr. Egan. The sad sequel, 
however, shows that the wilderness in winter can, on 
occasion, prove dangerous. The locality in which Mr. 
Egan was lost is said to be a very wild one, covered 
with lieavy timber and very inuch broken up by precip- 
itous mountains. The dispatch in question states vaguely 
that many other hunters and prospectors have been lost 
there, no trace of them ever having been discovered. 
Had Mr. Egan stopped and built a fire he would probably 
have been rescued on the second day. Had he gone to a 
willow patch and built himself a pair of snowslioes he 
could perhaps have traveled much more easily, had he felt 
it necessary to do so. Or had he taken his ax and gone 
to a pine tree and made himself some sort of a pair of 
skis, he could in this way have gotten along over 
the deep soft snow, which sometimes comes so rapidly in 
these mountain storms. Of these alternatives the best 
one for him would probablj'' have been to stay still and 
keep up a signal smoke, taking only exercise enough to 
keep himself alive. 
Pfoteclive Work in Michigan, 
Mr. Charles H. Chatnian, State Game and Fish Warden 
for Michigan, is good enough to hand in the follovving 
statement showing the number of arrests, convictions, 
etc., which would certainly seem to prove that the hand 
of the new warden is not weary in well doing. There 
were 197 complaints investigated; 139 arrests, 121 convic- 
tions, one acquittal, and six cases dismissed. Fines and 
costs amounted to $i,9,i3, and $294.47 was turned into the 
treasury. There were 22 seizures ; eleven cases are pend- 
ing. 
The total alnount of fines and costs collected for the 
month is nearly tAvice greater than the amount of fines 
and costs collected for any other month in the history of 
the game and fish warden department. The number of 
seizures was not great. The wild ducks seized and con- 
fiscated were sent to the Little Sisters of the Poor in 
Detroit. The fish seized and confiscated were sent to the 
Traverse City Asjdum for the Insane. 
All of the fines and costs imposed for the month have 
been paid, except in one instance, and in this case the 
violator, who is the owner of considerable real estate, 
and who also owns a trading schooner on the Great 
Lakes, was fined $21.90, or thirty days in jail, and the 
defendant is now serving his jail sentence. 
The following amounts have been turned into the State 
Treasury by this department for the month : May 9, pro- 
