INTRODUCTORY OBSERVATIONS. 
17 
nas so long deterred this bird of passage from visiting the east¬ 
ern parts of Maine, is the fact that, in the British Provinces of 
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, much farther to the north¬ 
ward and eastward, and in the old cultivated French country 
below and around Quebec, the Woodcock has long been an 
object of pursuit by the sportsman, and of attainment by the 
gourmet. 
It may, therefore, be assumed at once, that the spread of agri¬ 
culture and civilization, in themselves, has no injurious operation, 
but rather the reverse, on any kind of winged game; and that, 
in some instances, the progress of one is simultaneous with the 
increased numbers of the other. 
Even with game of the largest kind, .as Deer, Bear, Hares, 
and the like, it is not the circumscription of their limits by 
ploughed fields, but the ruthless persecution to which they are 
subjected, which is gradually extinguishing them, where, within 
ten or fifteen years, they abounded. 
In the counties of Hampshire and Berkshire, in Massachusetts, 
of Dutchess, Putnam, Rockland and Orange in New York, and of 
Sussex, in New Jersey, there is an extent of forest land, wilder 
and more inaccessible, and in every way more suited to harbor 
herds of Deer, and ten times greater, than all the Deer forests in 
the Highlands of Scotland; in the former, you have perhaps rather 
a greater chance of meeting an elephant, thanks to the abundance 
of menageries, than a hart or hind—in the latter, the Red Deer 
are more numerous now than they were two centuries ago. 
Hence it is evident, that there is no natural reason whatever, 
much less a necessary or inevitable one, for the rapid decrease 
and approaching extinction of all kinds of game, whether large 
or small, throughout the United States of America. Nor is it to be 
attributed to any other cause than the reckless and ignorant, it 
not wanton, destruction of these animals by the rural population. 
The destruction of the Pinnated Grouse, which is total on 
Long Island, and all but total in New Jersey and the Pennsyl¬ 
vania oak-barrens, is ascribable to the brutal and wholly wanton 
havoc committed among them by the charcoal-burners, who fre- 
