Forest and Stream 
A. Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
^The Forest and Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 
ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 
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Copyright, 1904, by Forest and Stream Pubushing Co. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1908. 
( VOL. LXV.— No. IT. 
I No. 846 Broadway, New Y ork. 
The object of this journal will be to studiously 
promote a healthful interest in outdoor recre- 
ation, and to cultivate a refined taste for natura. 
, * j Announcement in first number ot 
Objects . Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 1873. 
walls and the rails of the fences ; shy and keeping on the 
other side of cover if you are moving, yet curious and 
bold and venturing up to some high point from which 
they can see well, if you stand perfectly still, 
Down in the swamp there are as yet no signs of the 
woodcock. Frosts are needed to bring them on, but 
when they come, here is abundant food for them. If we 
push up to the higher ground, perhaps somewhere not 
far away, a grouse may rise almost on silent wing, and 
dart away through the forest, veering this way and that 
to dodge the tree stems before him, yet still keeping a 
straight course and in full view perhaps for sixty yards. 
There is a sight to stir the blood of the New England 
gunner — fair view of a splendid and beautiful game bird. 
To the nature lover such a sight amply repays the fatigue 
of a day’s tramp under a warm sun. To the field shooter 
it means joy and hope, for it is a promise of what is to 
come. 
aged to the end that the public may be educated as to the 
true character of the fish and what its coming into new 
waters will mean. 
OCTOBER. 
A BRILLIANT October sun shines warm from a cloudless 
sky. The gray haze that envelopes all the landscape, soft- 
ening and blending its distant features, does not temper 
the heat. F'rom the hill tops the broad prospect is warm, 
too with color. Damp meadows are vividly green ; pines, 
cedars and spruces are black; hard maples and hickories 
yellow; oakk are turning crimson, while all along the 
fence rows the sumach flames, and tongues of even darker 
red— the Virginia creeper— climb to the very apex of 
some cone-skaped cedar. To every country lover the 
scene is familiar, and as dear as familiar. 
Cultivated fields are dotted with shocks of yellow corn. 
Stubbles are gtay with ragweed. Among the green foliage 
of the orchard shine brilliant fruit globes, and now and 
then the intense quiet is broken by the thud of a falling 
apple striking the soft ground. Fences and hedp rows 
and stubbles dnd weed fields and swamps are alive with 
a multitude of birds. Each step startles from their forag- 
ing ground a horde of gray, seed-eating sparrows of many 
species, that by easy stages are taking their way across the 
land, prompt at the first suggestion of cold weather to 
hasten their southward journey. They are everywhere, 
close alaout the house, in front door yard and flower 
o-arden and kitchen garden. Among them is the white- 
throated sparrow, handsome in his livery of brown and 
yellow and white, and even the blue snowbird, soberly 
clad like a most respectable divine. These are birds that 
winter in the north and do not seem to belong with us 
yet. From one wood lot to another small groups of crows 
fan their way with cheerful cawings; robins are busy 
over lawns and wherever the ground is damp, searching 
for the worms that still lie close to the surface; flycatoh- 
ers and warblers and a multitude of other birds, bright 
plumaged or sombre in color, are busy about their various 
Though it is mid October, the frosts have not yet come. 
Garden flowers are still in bloom; pansies, geraniums, 
heliotropes, dahlias have the beauty of summer. Yet, al- 
though the air is so warm the ripened leaves in wood 
and swamp are letting go their hold on the trees and 
slowly falling to earth. They are not dry and harsh, as 
they will be later when cold weather shall have come, but 
rustle softly under the foot as one pushes through them— 
a pleasant sound. Perhaps it is because there has been 
no frost that the swamp maples, usually the first trees to 
change their color— and for a time the most brilliant-- 
are this year paler than usual. Some of them, though 
losing their leaves, are white rather ^ than red, whde 
others seem to approach their usual brilliant crimson. O 
yellows there is a multitude of shades, the pale birch, the 
beech a little stronger, the hickory still, brighter, and the 
sassafras wonderful for its orange, a color so vivid Aat 
if backed by hickories or birches, the sassafras shines 
against their y^ellows like a sun in a smoky sky . 
The leaves keep dropping down ; on the ground they lie 
thickly, the stretches of open water in the brook are cov- 
ered with them, white and red and yellow, and the ripples 
where the w'ater finds its way among the stones seem 
choked with jewels. 
From the edges of the woods the gray squirrels have 
ventured out toward the opening, for what purpose who 
can tell? Perhaps they are looking for the chestnuts that 
have long been gathered, or perhaps a hickory tree is 
dropping, its nuts in the pasture lot. The chipmunks, as 
^hva^-s, are busy; one can see them running along the 
THE CARP CURSE. 
It happens that just as we have put into type Mr. Alex. 
Starbuck’s arraignment of the carp as a pest threatening 
our inland waters, there comes to hand a report from 
Consul General Holloway, of Halifax, which says. 
“Whitefish and salmon trout in Canadian waters are al- 
most extinct. In the fresh waters, where they are not 
yet extinct, the German carp, imported years ago, and 
breeding about fifteen times as fast as whitefish, are de- 
stroying the remainder.” 
The earn menace is by no means confined to the United 
States. In the Great Lakes it is in the very nature of the 
case a matter of international concern. And it is a con- 
cern which every year is becoming more serious as the 
fish multiplies in its old haunts and finds a way into new 
waters. “I may not live to see the day when the carp 
will be the monarch of all our waters,” writes Mr. Star- 
buck, at the age of eighty, “but one need not be much 
younger than I am to realize this great tragedy of our 
lakes and rivers.” Many of us have seen it already in 
waters with which we are familiar, where the carp has 
driven out and supplanted the native fish, far superior to 
it in all that counts for excellence. With respect to many 
of the lakes and rivers of North America the introduction 
of the foreign carp has been one of the gigantic blunders 
of fish transplanting. The carp is here and it is here 
to stay. To extirpate it from connecting water courses is 
something which may safely be counted as beyond the 
ingenuity of man. 
The carp. has been a subject of discussion for several 
years in Illinois, where it has found active champions as 
well as those to denounce it; and here its supremacy, 
won at the expense of the native fish, is well illustrated. 
The Illinois River, which is about 400 miles long, and has 
172 rivers and creeks as tributaries, and seventy-one 
rivers and creeks which are wholly within the State, and 
Fox Lake, which is one of the headwaters of the river, 
are crowded with these “scavengers of the waters,” which 
will soon, by sheer force of ixumbers, drive out all other 
species. From Fox Lake, which has been famous as a 
breeding ground of game fish, more than 40,000 pounds 
of carp have been taken in an effort to clear it of this un- 
desirable fish. The work was useless. The carp is there. 
It is there to stay. 
If a lake or pond be so small that it may be com- 
pletely drained — as has been done with some of the New 
Jersey lakes near New York— it is practicable to draw 
the water off and pitchfork out the fish. But with waters 
too large to treat in this way — with the Great Lakes — no 
remedy is suggested. 
While with respect to so many scores of carp-infested 
. ponds and lakes and streams the only thing left is to be 
content with the coarse fish which has taken the place of 
native species, it is not too late to protect from the curse 
waters which have not yet been invaded. There are in 
some States — as there should be everywhere — laws for- 
bidding the introduction of fish into public waters with- 
out the sanction of the commissioners of fisheries; and 
to prevent the accidental stocking of waters with carp 
there are laws forbidding the use of carp minnows for 
bait. 
Mr. Starbuck’s paper should have careful reading, it 
has to do with a subject of incalculable importance to the 
fishing resources, opportunities and industries of the coun- 
try. Discussion of the carp question should- bp encoum 
ITALY AFIELD. 
The flooding sunlight of these serene October days is 
the golden flood of the sun of Italy, and the blue of the 
sky is that same bewitching blue which arches above the 
Mediterranean. Yielding to the seductive call of the 
suburbs the exiled child of Italy straps on his gun, loads 
his pockets with ammunition, and sallies (or sneaks) out 
into the fields and thickets near the cities to shoot song- 
birds in this glorious land of freedom as he has been 
wont to do in his native Italy. At Fort Lee, in New 
Jersey, opposite New York, last Sunday, the game warden 
took in three enthusiastic sportsmen of the Latin race, 
who, in court, gave the names of Clemente Terosti, Sal- 
vatore Cusotro and Francisc.o Surati. They had between 
them a dozen robins, which had fallen to their ardent 
pursuit. A Hackensack justice fined them $25 each for 
hunting in the State without a license and $40 each for 
having slaughtered robins. The men astonished the court 
by producing the amounts of their fines in bills, paid up 
promptly and without ado, and took the feriy for home. 
They were not the only aliens who figured in the Mon- 
day newspaper reports of Sunday shooting. A Brooklyn 
song bird shooter, who gave the name of Thomas Simo- 
netti, was taken in by the police for having shot a robin, 
a woodpecker and a wren. The Italian laborers on the 
Jerome Park Reservoir are incorrigible song bird shoot- 
ers, and last week a protesting resident, on whose 
grounds a band of Italian shooters was trespassing in 
pursuit of robins, was menaced by the murderous gang 
with personal assault. These incidents, which are 
typical of a long catalogue of like outrages, all point 
straight to the necessity of a law to forbid the carrying 
of shotguns by unnaturalized foreigners. Other States 
have adopted this system; New York conditions de- 
mand it. 
The fishing trespass suit of Rockefeller vs. LaMora 
is already famous and promises to take its place among 
the important cases which have to do with the develop- 
ment of the private fishing and hunting preserve in this 
country. Mr. Raymond S. Spears, who gives in another 
column to-day a summary of the progress of the case as 
carried through the several courts to the Court of 
Appeals, tells us that he has endeavored to write an un- 
biassed and unprejudiced statement of the affair. It was 
perhaps inevitable that getting the story in part from La- 
Mora’s counsel, his_ version should have a slight color of 
sympathy with the native Adirondack view of the matter. 
It is to be said, however, that many of the points brought 
out have not before been clearly explained. The case, as 
here described, is not one of simple trespass. As to the 
contention that the planting of fish by the State in the 
waters in dispute gave to others tnan the owner any right 
to enter upon the land for the purpose of fishing, that is 
an argument which has been considered more than once 
by us ; and it is one upon which a decision by the higher 
courts is much to be desired. 
- >6 
Commissioner H. G. Thomas, of Vermont, takes up 
the challenge of a critic of the Vermont non-resident 
shooting license law and replies to the criticism by citing 
decisions of the courts upholding the principle of such a 
statute. In brief, the argument usually advanced to 
justify the non-resident discrimination is this, that the 
State owns the game, and as the owner may prescribe 
regulations for its taking, even to the extreme of, forbid- 
ding its killing at any time or in any manner. Clearly 
then, the argument runs, the State may restrict the privi- 
lege wholly to its own citizens, or it may extend to 
others permission to shoot on any terms it elects. The 
principle is pretty well established ; and proposals to test 
the constitutionality of the non-resident system are not 
heard so frequently now nor so confidently as in earlier 
years, when such laws were novel. But, to repeat a sug- 
gestion made here last week, is there reason to believe that 
such a law as that of New York, which prescribes re- 
prisals for non-residents varying in amount and deter- 
mined by the residence of the visitor, is likely to holcj if 
put to the test of constitutionality j* \ . 
