OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE WISCONSIN, ILLINOIS AND MICHIGAN AUDUBON SOCIETIES 
One Year 25 Cents Single Copy 5 Cents 
Published by the Wisconsin Audubon Society at Madison, Wisconsin 
Entered as second class matter fluoust 23, 1909, at Madison, Wis., under the act of Congress of March 3, 1879 
VOL,. XIII. JUNE, 1912 NO. 10 
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RECOLLECTIONS OF BIRD-LIFE IN PIONEER DAYS 
By H. L. Skavlem 
Some of the most lasting ancl vivid 
impressions ol‘ my boyhood,—1 may 
well say childhood days.—relate to and 
recall pictures of bird-life in Southern 
"Wisconsin, somewhat more than half a 
; century ago. 
We hark back to the time of the 
ponderous slow moving, breaking team, 
consisting of five to seven yoke of 
oxen, hitched to a long cable of heavy 
logchains attached to a crudely but 
strongly built “Breaker,” with a beam 
like a young saw-log and a mould- 
board made of iron bars that turned 
over furrows two feet or more in 
width. 
Those great unwieldy breaking 
teams, consisting of 10 to 14 large 
oxen, are vet distinctly outlined on 
l memory’s page, and reminiscently, 1 
I see them crawling like some huge 
Brobdignagian Caterpillar around and 
1 around the doomed “land”—“land.” 
in breaking parlance, being that piece 
of the wild selected for cultivation,— 
leaving a black trail behind, that, day 
by day, increased in width, bringing 
- certain ruin and destruction,—abso¬ 
lute annihilation,—to the plant habi¬ 
tants who had held undisputed pos¬ 
session for untold centuries. 
The mild-eyed, slow-moving ox teams 
were not only instruments in the cle- 
: struction of the centuries-old flower- 
parks of the wilderness, but with them 
came tragedies in bird-life, resultant 
from the inevitable changes from na¬ 
ture's. rules of the wild, to man’s arti¬ 
ficial sway. Often in preparing or plan¬ 
ning for the breaking of a new piece of 
land, the same was guarded from the 
prairie fires of the fall and early 
spring, so that it could be “fired” at 
the time of breaking. This would 
commence the latter part of May and 
continue on through June and July, 
covering the nesting season of the 
numerous species of bird-life, that had 
for untold generations, made this beau¬ 
tiful park region of the Rock River 
Valley, their summer home. 
It was in the early fifties that I, then 
a little tow-headed tot, chased butter¬ 
flies and gathered armsfull of prairie 
flowers, at the same time “spotting” 
bird nests of many and various kinds, 
on a piece of land destined to be civil¬ 
ized by the big plow that very season. 
I distinctly remember the large eggs 
of the “Prairie Snipe” and the still 
larger ones of the “Crooked-bill” or 
“Big-Snipe.” The former I later 
learned to know as BARTRAMIA 
LONGICAUDA, and the latter, long 
after they had entirely disappeared, I 
found had the book name of NUMEN- 
10US LONGIROSTRA, or LONG 
BILLED CURLEW. These snipes 
