Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1904, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
Terms', $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. ) 
Six Months, $2. f 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JULY 16, 1904. 
5 VOL. LXIII.— No. S. 
j No. 346 Bkoadway, Nbw York. 
SKYLARKS ON LONG ISLAND. 
We asked Mr. Wilmot Townsend to investigate the 
truth of a report that European skylarks were to be found 
on the meadows at Rugby, which is a section of Brooklyn, 
and so within the limits of Greater New York, and his re- 
port is printed in our Natural History columns to-day. 
He found the birds, and has given explicit directions for 
others who may wish to see and hear them. We have at 
various times recorded the presence of the skylark at dif- 
ferent points on Long Island on the outskirts of Brook- 
lyn; these records run back ten or fifteen years, and pre- 
sumably, the Rugby larks are descendants from birds which 
were introduced from England many years ago. 
A friend of Mr. Townsend, who spent his boyhood near 
Flatbush, Brooklyn, relates that there, sixty years ago, 
he used to hear the skylarks and watch them in their song 
flights. There are records of a skylark importation as far 
back as the middle of the last century. In the year 1846, 
Thomas Woodcock, the president of the Natural History 
Society, of Brooklyn, brought over from England many 
specimens of the field birds of that country, together with 
a large number of eggs, which, on their receipt here, were 
placed in the nests of our own warblers, and in the ensu- 
ing season goldfinches, linnets, bullfinches, skylarks, and 
English sparrows were seen at Greenwood, in the suburbs 
of Brooklyn, and at the Wallabout, another suburb, a 
colony of the English skylarks was successfully estab- 
lished, and wintered two seasons. In the spring of 1847 
there was printed in the Brooklyn Advertiser a poem writ- 
ten by R. W. Hugh, who was an associate of Wm. Henry 
Herbert (Frank Forester) in the instruction of youth at 
the Rev. R. T. Huddnot's school at Bloomingdale. The 
poem, revised by Frank Forester, was in the nature of a 
"humble appeal of a colony of British skylarks to the 
sportsmen of New York and Brooklyn, sung at the Wall- 
about on the 1st of May, 1847, ten minutes before sun- 
rise." It must have been a queer race of sportsmen in 
1847, if they needed the persuasion of poetic appeals to 
withhold their shot from the caroling lark, although in 
these degenerate days there is a small army of hoodlum 
shooters going out from our cities for whose game bags 
the skylarks would be most acceptable tidbits. 
1 AUDUBON AND SQUIRREL BARKING. 
In one of those sketches of American frontier life 
which are interspersed through the "Ornithological 
Biographies," and have a historical importance quite inde- 
pendent of ornithology, Audubon describes the killing of 
squirrels by Daniel Boone by a method called "barking." 
The feat was so to aim as to strike the bark of the tree 
under the squirrel, and by the concussion to kill the game. 
The story has been accepted for generations, but now a 
skeptic has arisen to question it. The doubter's own gro- 
tesque ignorance of rifles and squirrels and rifle shooting 
squirrels is so manifest in what he writes that he clearly 
is no "authority" to whom much attention need be given. 
It is to be noted that Audubon's account of squirrel bark- 
ing is not the mere retelling of something he had heard ; 
he explicitly states that he was an eyewitness of Boone's 
- squirrel barking, just as he describes it; and that subse- 
quently he saw the same feat performed by others. It is 
incredible that Audubon should have incorporated into his 
great work this story of squirrel barking as a deliberate 
piece of fiction, or if he had not seen it done, or at least 
p" had not seen something which he believed to have been 
the thing described. 
IT JUST HAPPENED SO. 
There were noted in these colums not long ago sundry 
coincidences which were typical of those so> often ob- 
served by all of us in various fields of life. Here is an- 
other one not unworthy of record: The papers of Monday 
of this week contained an announcement that the Spanish 
General Toral, who commanded the garrison at Santiago 
when that place surrendered to the Americans, died in a 
lunatic asylum at Madrid on July 10. And in another 
column of the same page it was told that on the same day, 
at Medina-Sidonia, Admiral Cervera was presented by 
some American with a testimonial of gratitude for his 
conduct at Santiago in caring for Lieut. Hobson and the 
American sailors after the sinking of the Merrimac. 
PAINS AND PENALTIES. 
In the old days, when a hunter took venison in the 
King's forest contrary to the laws made and provided, 
they put out his eyes or cut off his hands or feet or other 
members, to the end that the taking of the King's game 
might be discouraged. It proved, however, as with all 
like unseemly and inordinate penalties, that the ultra 
rigorous law did. not accomplish its purpose. 
Writing from Nebraska, Mr. A. D. McCandiess tells 
that the law of that State, which declares forfeit the gun 
and ammunition and dog of a shooter who violates the 
game law, has been held by the courts to be unconstitu- 
tional because it confiscates property without due process 
of law. On the other hand, a New York statute declaring 
-forfeit as public nuisances fishing nets in certain inland 
waters and authorizing their summary destruction by the 
fish wardens, has been held to be constitutional by the 
United States Supreme Court. 
It is nevertheless, as Mr. McCandiess well says, a grave 
error to overdo the severity of a penalty attaching to 
what the community is prone to regard as a venial offense, 
and under certain circumstances a forfeiture of gun, dog, 
and ammunition might be considered a punishment that 
did not fit the crime. It makes a difference, too, who the , 
culprit may be. A jury of his neighbors would be loth 
to find guilty with such a penalty a neighbor who might 
violate the law, whereas they would with eagerness con- 
demn a stranger who was intent upon carrying his booty 
illicitly out of the State. There is usually a cheerful 
willingness to punish the foreigner, and these non-resident 
game laws make foreigners of us all when we stray be- 
yond the confines of our own State. 
THE PERILS OF ANGLING. 
On Thursday of last week two Chicago boys were dig- 
ging angleworms in an alley preparatory to a fishing ex- 
cursion. A fallen telephone wire interfered with the quest 
of bait, and intending to push it to one side, one of the 
boys grasped it. The wire was a live one. When the 
boy screamed, his companion seized him, to pull him away. 
Both were shocked, and both died on the way to the 
hospital. 
On Jamaica Bay, a favorite fishing ground of New York 
city, a fisherman in a boat off Barren Island got a tremen- 
dous bite, jumped up in his boat to play the fish, was 
hauled overboard, and disapoeared beneath the flood. 
Companions dived for him, and after a strenuous time got 
him back in the boat, unconscious, and rowed him to the 
shore, where a physician revived him by artificial respira- 
tion, and sent him off to the hospital. The fish, which is 
described as at least half a dozen feet long, and having 
the appearance of a shark, was last seen heading for the 
inlet, towing line, rod, hook and sinker. 
The next day, in the same waters, a lone fisherman in 
his boat off Canarsie, after long and patient waiting for a 
bite, had a tug on his line, and was seen to jump up and 
begin excitedly to haul in hand over hand, when he lost 
his balance, toppled into the water, disappeared, and has 
not been seen since. 
THE DRUM . OF THE DRUMFISH. 
The drum of the.drumfish has in it something of the 
weirdness and mystery of a marsh bird's croak in the 
darkness, and the cry of the catfish is, under favoring sur- 
roundings, positively uncanny. To the observations in 
another column many other experiences and records might 
be added. William Elliott says in his "North Carolina 
Sports," that in the waters of Port Royal and Beaufort 
in calm weather and in the afternoon, which is a favorite 
time for drumming, the drum might be heard at a dis- 
tance of several hundred yards from the river. His ex- 
planation of the phenomena was that "it is the universal 
passion alone that gives them utterance," a view shared by 
George Brown Goode, who- suggested that as the sound 
is heard especially in the breeding season, it "is doubtless 
the signal by which the fish call to their mates." This is 
a theory which should sustain and soothe the weary drum 
fisher waiting for a bite, and getting only the poor satis- 
faction of hearing the drum in the water beneath him. If 
it be a lure, it may bring another within the attraction of 
his bait. 
There are circumstances, however, under which the 
voices of fishes may be' a very real distress, Silas 
Stearns once confessed that the grunting of the catfish 
when many were present was very annoying to him, and 
he passed more than one wakeful night from hearing it 
on the southern coast when the fish were swimming under 
his boat. 
The drumming of the squeteague has been studied at 
the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., 
by Prof. R. W. Tower, of Brown University, and these 
conclusions are given in the Bulletin of the United States 
Fish Commission : 
1. There is in the squeteague a special drumming mus- 
cle, lying between the abdominal muscles and the perito- 
neum, and extending the entire length of the abdomen on 
either side of the median line. 
2. The muscle fibres are very short, and run at right 
.angles to the long axis of the muscle. 
3. The muscle is in close relation with the large swim- 
bladder, and by its rapid contractions produces a drum- 
ming sound, with the aid of the tense bladder, which acts 
as a sounding-board. 
4. This muscle exists only in the males, and only the 
males are able to drum. 
PUBLIC FISH IN PRIVATE PRESERVES. 
The long contested Lamora-Rockefeller fishing trespass 
suit has been decided by the Appellate Division of the 
New York Supreme Court, and the finding is what was 
predicted in these columns when the case was in the lower 
courts. 
The circumstances in brief were these: Mr. William 
Rockefeller acquired certain lands in the Adirondacks, the 
waters upon which had been stocked with trout by the 
State. Before coming into the possession of Mr. Rocke- 
feller the waters had been open to the public, and Oliver 
Lamora, an Adirondack guide and fisherman, had been 
accustomed to fish in them. Under the new ownership he 
maintained that he was entitled to continue to fish, because 
the waters had been stocked by the State, and an old law 
had declared that water so stocked should be free to the 
public. Mr. Rockefeller contested the claim and prose- 
cuted Lamora for trespass. The justice's court and the 
county court acquitted Lamora. The case was eventually 
appealed to the Appellate Division, in whose decision is 
involved a declaration of the principle that the waters of 
a private preserve are not open to the public, even if they 
have been stocked with fish from the public hatcheries. 
This is presumably .good law, and it assuredly is good 
sense. Public fish should not be put into private waters; 
and the commissioners should do their best to confine fry 
distribution to public waters; but the opening of private 
waters stocked by the State is not a remedy the courts 
will sustain. 
ANTS AND SAINT. 
The cotton boll weevil threatens the Southern States 
with the loss of half the cotton crop, whose annual value 
is $500,000,000. The Agricultural Department has found 
in Guatemala an ant which is believed to be an enemy 
of the boll weevil able to cope with the plague. Having 
sent agents to the home country of the ants, the Depart- 
ment proposes to introduce colonies of them into Texas 
experimentally, to study their ways under the new sur- 
roundings. Texas regards the proposal with alarm. It 
is apprehensive that the introduced ant may prove to be 
itself only a new and terrible pest. 
In earlier days these insect plagues were treated in a 
fashion at once simpler and more efficacious. For instance, 
when in the year 1584, the inhabitants of the Province of 
Havana could no longer endure' the ravages of the ants, 
the Cabildo — that is to- say, the chapter of the diocese — 
concluded that a remedy would be found in the putting 
away of the delinquent patron saint, and installing a 
new one in his place. Accordingly, an . election having 
been held by the chapter to this effect, the bishop con- 
ferred upon San Marcial the dignity of patron, agreeing 
to celebrate his fiesta and to keep his day yearly on the 
condition of his interceding for the extermination of the 
hormigas and vivijaguas. The saint, it is to^ be con- 
cluded, was pleased graciously to accept the conditions, 
and faithfully kept his part of the bargain, and did his 
insecticidal stunt, for the hormigas and vivijaguas ceased 
to trouble and San Marcial is still revered and loved, and 
his fiesta is celebrated, though not with the old-time vim, 
for Cuba is now a republic, and republics are ungrateful. 
