i Februaey, 1919 
FOREST AND S T R E A M 
67 
penny’s worth from the few dollars he 
, has to invest in recreation, canoeing and 
I cruising offers more pleasures and more 
, advantages than any other sport. To 
I prove the truth of this assertion, buy a 
canoe and choose your odtfit, take cam- 
era and fishing tackle — leave your rifle 
at home, unless it is a little twenty-two 
for target practice — and when the sight 
of the first green leaves of spring im- 
pels you irresistibly into the open, take 
your week-end outings in a canoe. Spend 
your vacation exploring some stream 
with which you are unfamiliar, or cruise 
nearer home if you wish. Provided you 
have been wise in your choice of a canoe 
and outfit, you will not only be well satis- 
fied with the cruise, but you will be the 
owner of everything necessary for future 
cruises — except the commissary — and all 
for the same money you would have paid 
for a much more elaborate but less satis- 
factory vacation spent in some neigh- 
boring mountain or seaside resort. 
M any people may not at first realize 
the great advantages of a canoe 
over a rowboat. A canoe can safely 
follow a rowboat anywhere; but let the 
keelless craft take the lead and the row- 
boat is left ignominiously in the lurch at 
the mouth of some shallow stream where 
the canoe floats like a lily on the surface. 
Because the canoe has no keel it is some- 
times thought to be unsafe or “cranky.” 
This is no more true of canoes than of 
boats — if either is unduly cranky be sure 
it is from a fault in the construction. 
Naturally, care must be exercised in get- 
ting in and out — one must place the en- 
tering foot squarely in the center — and 
sudden lurches must be avoided, but if 
one keeps a low seat there is no danger 
of capsizing. The erroneous belief, held 
by many persons ignorant on the sub- 
ject, that a canoe must be cranky and 
dangerous, is being gradually eliminated 
by the co-operation of the manufacturers 
in combining the maximum of beauty and 
strength with the minimum of weight 
and instability. Do not be afraid of a 
canoe — the feeling of security that comes 
with the perfect adjustment of physical 
balance to the motion of the craft reacts 
upon the mind and makes for sanity 
and mental poise. 
The oarsman is a back-looker; the 
canoeist is a futurist. He looks ahead, 
faces and overcomes every threatened 
danger, chooses his course to a nicety 
through foaming rapids, or among angry 
whitcaps; and he can rest himself en 
route by paddling on one side or the 
otker or by shifting from the sitting 
to the kneeling position. For hunting 
or fishing the canoe is the watercraft 
unequalled, for it floats as noiselessly 
as a leaf and there is no noise of the 
paddle in skillful hands. 
Canoes are practically unsinkable be- 
cause of their immense buoyancy. The 
amount of wood in a canoe, if contained 
in a solid block, would be more than 
sufficient to support a man in the water. 
So a man in a canoe carries a life pre- 
server always with him — the canoe it- 
self. If fitted with air tanks in bow 
and stem, safety is still further assured, 
and a sponson canoe cannot be sunk. 
S O here we have our canoeist — self- 
contained in his small craft, “the 
poor man’s yacht,” ready for a 
cruise of a day or a summer with equal 
facility, his outfit snugly compact, but so 
complete that when night overtakes him 
he has but to make fast his painter to a 
friendly tree at the water’s edge, take 
out his tiny alcohol stove, cook his simple 
meal, roll up in his blanket and sleep, like 
the snail, in the midst of his house, lulled 
by the myriad murmurs of the night 
into ■ a sleep as sweet as that of Mr. 
Moneybags, out in mid-stream in his 
palatial motor cruiser or steam yacht. 
If you are hampered and restricted 
F or several years the hunters of 
Canton, S. D., have held an annual 
crow hunt, and competition be- 
tween the rival teams — the Get Them 
All’s and the Never Miss ’Ems — has 
been high and hotly contested. It has 
been impossible for an event of such 
wide significance long to remain localized 
and the Du Pont Powder Company has 
inaugurated a National Crow Shoot, ex- 
tending throughout the current year, 
governed by regulations and rewarded by 
trophies presented to the mightiest slay- 
ers of the black-winged marauders. 
The destruction of the crow is a matter 
of great importance to sportsmen as well 
as to farmers. The havoc wrought in 
the corn field is self-evident; the depre- 
dations on the coveys are noticeable only 
through results and in many cases the 
dwindling numbers of game birds are 
caused more often by the voracious crow 
than by disease. 
A young crow while in the nest will 
consume an amount of food equal to 
three or four times its own weight, and 
only a small part of this food consists 
of insects. Most of it is made up of the 
eggs and the young of other birds, which, 
if left alive, would be of benefit in the 
protection of crops. 
Insatiable egg eaters, they scour the 
fields, hedge-row, thickets and orchards 
for nests of birds and even for the eggs 
of the barnyard fowls. They follow the 
wild ducks to their nesting grounds in 
the far North to feast on the eggs and 
young. Prairie chickens suffer severely 
from their depredations and the pheasant 
preserves are the frequent victims of 
their marauding habits. 
In its bulletin, the Bureau of Biological 
Survey says; “The destruction of nes- 
tling birds of highly beneficial species is 
not to be condoned and constitutes one 
of the strongest arguments against the 
crow. On game farms, preserves and in 
suburban districts where it is the desire 
to foster small birds, the crow popula- 
tion must be within limited numbers.” 
All this is the raison d’etre of the 
National Crow Shoot, whose clever 
slogan is “Conserve the Grain; Protect 
the Game; Remove the “Caws.” 
by small streams in your vicinity, re- 
member that there is more satisfaction 
in the successful negotiation of a seven- 
teen-foot bend by an eighteen-foot canoe 
than there is in miles of straight pad- 
dling down some large uncompanionable 
river. To be intimate and within touch 
of the earth and yet to move with the 
greater freedom of mobile water is the 
chiefest charm of canoe cruising. 
Your first cruise will convince you that 
here at least you are your own master. 
You realize that fishing may lure, hunt- 
ing may attract, but canoeing compels, 
and the charm never lessens but grows 
greater year by year. 
T he crow has the universal reputa- 
tion of being a wise, wily and wary 
bird. Yet it is surprising how 
easily they are fooled by anyone who can 
properly manipulate a crow call. In- 
deed, the calling-in and shooting of 
crows by an expert is a revelation to 
many, who all their lives, have known 
and hated these black marauders of the 
fields and woods. The crow call is a 
small wood instrument resembling a 
whistle and can be purchased from al- 
most any sporting goods dealer or hard- 
ware store for from 75c to $1.00. 
Preparatory to calling in the crows, 
the shooter should conceal himself care- 
fully and remain as quiet as possible, 
for the crow has wonderful eyesight. 
Many crow hunters even try to wear 
clothing that will not contrast sharply 
with the environment. In using the 
crow call it is desirable to try to imitate 
the cry of a young crow in distress and 
to indicate to the older crows that their 
young aite being attacked by some other 
bird, upon which they will immediately 
start flying toward the point where the 
caller is concealed. It is important to 
kill the first crow shot at as otherwise 
the crow will give a warning call that 
will alarm all the other crows in the 
neighborhood and they will not approach 
again for some time at least. The birds 
should be fairly close in, not over 35 or 
40 yards, in order to insure a kill with 
a choke bore gun. 
Among other methods suggested for 
luring the crows within range, the fol- 
lowing may be recommended. A stuffed 
owl with movable wings placed up in a 
tree and operated by cords brought down 
through rings to the concealed shooter, 
used in conjunction with a crow call, has 
proved effective in many instances. If 
a wounded crow is captured it will serve 
as an excellent decoy for attracting other 
crows. One farmer writes that by plac- 
ing a large piece of meat or the carcass 
of some animal in a field and then getting 
under cover at a distance of 40 or 50 
yards he has seen from 50 to 75 crows 
gather around the meat and has been 
able to kill ten or more with a single 
(continued on page 94) 
"CAW! CAW! CAW!” 
THE NATIONAL CROW SHOOT OF 1919 IS A NOVEL COM- 
BINATION OF SPORT AND CONSERVATION MEASURES 
