December, 1920 
FOREST AND STREAM 
643 
useful accomplishment and we hope and believe 
that this is only a beginning of what it is to do. 
The public park idea has for a long time been 
growing in Iowa and citizens have given land and 
the State has given money to inaugurate a system 
of State parks and lake improvements. Most ex- 
cellent work has thus been set on foot and as it 
is carried on and the movement acquires more mo- 
mentum, it will certainly be demonstrated that 
this work is for the benefit of all the people of 
Iowa and that it will bring into the State returns 
far in excess of expenditures. We look forward 
to a time when the movement will extend from 
Kesaukua, down in the southeastern part of the 
State, north and west until the whole surface of 
this fertile and great State shall be dotted with 
similar parks and preserves. 
PEARSON HEADS AUDUBON ASSOCIATION 
A T the Annual Meeting of the National Associa- 
tion of Audubon Societies in October, Mr. T. 
Gilbert Pearson was elected President of the Asso- 
ciation to take the place of the late William 
Dutcher. 
During all the years that have passed since Mr. 
Dutcher was stricken with the illness which in- 
capacitated him for active work, the affairs of the 
Association have been chiefly in the hands of Mr. 
Pearson, whose energy, industry and good judg- 
ment have made the Association constantly strong- 
er, enabled it to do better work, and added to its 
resources. For the past year the income of the 
Association was over a hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars, of which a large share has been expended 
for the protection of useful birds and will be re- 
turned to the country in added measure in the in- 
crease of agricultural crops and the lessened ef- 
fort required to produce them. 
By the fine efforts that he has put forth in con- 
nection with this bird protective work, Mr. Pear- 
son has fairly won his spurs. His efficiency and 
success were long recognized by Mr. Dutcher, the 
President of the Association from its -beginning, 
and he had been selected by Mr. Dutcher as his 
natural and proper successor in this honorable and 
important office. 
Mr. Pearson is a young man who no doubt has 
many years of usefulness before him; and if we 
may judge the future by the past, the'se years will 
produce valuable results in behalf of wild life 
protection — results that twenty years ago would 
not have been thought possible. 
BEARS AND ARROWS 
A CORRESPONDENT, who read with interest 
Dr. Saxton Pope’s recent account of the killing 
of grizzly bears with arrows in the Yellowstone 
Park, has written us commenting on the article, 
and concludes his letter by the following questions : 
1. How did California secure the privilege of 
killing specimens in Yellowstone Park? 
2. Does every state in the Union have a museum 
of natural history, big or small, publicly supported 
or otherwise ? 
3. How many grizzly bears are there in the 
Yellowstone Park? 
4. If California took five grizzly bears out of 
Yellowstone Park, and the other forty-seven states 
took five bears apiece (totalling two hundred and 
fortv specimens in all), how many bears would be 
left? ^ , . 
The tone of our correspondent’s comment clearly 
shows that he does not approve of the article in 
question, chiefly, it seems, on the ground that it 
deals with the killing of animals. Yet Forest and 
Stream, which for nearly fifty years has been 
printed in the interest of outdoor sports and the 
study of natural history, has had to do with the 
capture and killing of living animals from its first 
issue. These are incidents of the outdoor life that 
Forest and Stream stands for, and are the in- 
ducements to that outdoor life. Perhaps such in- 
cidents are deplorable, yet they are minor matters 
when compared with the advantage to human be- 
ings of a life in the open and the study of natural 
things, which are a pai;t of field sports. The taking 
of life — whether of a fish, a bird, a deer or a grizzly 
bear — is not in itself praiseworthy; it is even 
something to be avoided and there are not a few 
men today who prefer to devote their time and 
effort to the observation of wild things rather than 
to killing them. Such a preference, however, comes 
to people whose experience is large, and many of 
the younger generation would not pursue sport un- 
less there were some hope of a concrete reward for 
their efforts, whether that reward be a creel of 
fish, a bag of birds, a ram’s head or a bear’s hide. 
All this is merely to indicate that there are dif- 
fering points of view about these matters. Each 
reader is entitled to his viewpoint. 
Some of our best and most successful hunters in 
recent years have devoted their energies largely 
to collecting specimens for scientific institutions 
which, in many cases, have no equipment either of 
money or of men to use in securing these greatly 
needed specimens, often requiring the undertaking 
of long journeys and the expenditure of consider- 
able sums of money. Hunters who are doing this 
work are performing valuable service for science 
and so for humanity, and their work is worthy of 
high praise. If an animal is to be killed — provid- 
ing always that the killing is done in a sportsman- 
like manner — it makes little difference whether the 
killing is done with bullet, arrow or lance. 
Now for the answers to the questions : 
1. California secured the privilege no doubt by 
application to the National Park Service, the 
bureau which has control of the national parks. 
2. Probably every state in the Union has a natu- 
ral history museum of some sort, large or small. 
The museum for which these Yellowstone bears 
were killed is, we understand, a private institution. 
A great museum, which supplies the needs of a 
large population, might well require, for exhibi- 
tion or study purposes, a series of grizzly bears, 
adults of both sexes and young; and these bears 
dead and preserved are more useful to man than 
if alive and running among the mountains. 
3. There has been, we suspect, no census taken 
of the grizzly bears in the Yellowstone Park, but 
as they are protected there and are thus without 
enemies, there are too many of them, we think. 
They have become so tame that they destroy not a 
little property and on one or two occasions have 
killed men and several times have iniured people. 
This is sometimes the fault of the visitors, and in 
such cases the bears are merely fool killers; still 
there are too many bears there. 
4. If the two hundred and forty bears referred 
to were taken from the park, we think there would 
be plenty left. Since these bears are seldom killed, 
the onlv check on their increase is disease and old 
acre. We are inclined to think that the Yellowstone 
Park could well enough snare one bear for every 
fourteen square miles of its area. 
