624 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Published Weekly by the 
Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 
Charles A. Hazen, President. 
W. G. Beecroft, Secretary. Charles L. Wise, Treasurer. 
127 Franklin Street, New York. 
CORRESPONDENCE— Forest and Stream is the 
recognized medium of entertainment, instruction and in¬ 
formation between American sportsmen. The editors 
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are devoted, but, of course, are not responsible for the 
views of correspondents. Anonymous communications 
cannot be regarded. 
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THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL 
will be to studiously promote a healthful in¬ 
terest in outdoor recreation, and to cultivate 
a refined taste for natural objects. 
—Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 1873. 
IT IS THE CAT. 
Few people, we imagine, realize how full of 
vicissitudes and perils is the life of our upland 
game birds. Take, for example, one of those 
quail hatched not a hundred rods from your 
door step and reared on your own farm, whose 
parents you heard whistling on the fence, or the 
old rocky knoll, every day through the spring 
and summer. Have you ever thought how many 
enemies that little thing had to contend with, 
and how small was the chance that it would ever 
attain its full size, and spring from before the 
dogs in November a full fledged bird? From 
the time that it struggles out of the shell till 
the hour when, struck by the leaden hail, it turns 
over to the shot and is pocketed by the satisfied 
shooter, its life has been one of constant watch¬ 
fulness—one long series of efforts to escape 
from constantly impending perils. 
The egg from which it is to emerge has 
been deposited. The parent birds have not been 
destroyed by the deep drifts of the previous 
winter, nor have they fallen a prey to the small 
boy and the pot-hunter who, when the weather 
is favorable for such nefarious practices, track 
the innocent birds over the light snows and 
shoot them when huddled. The nest is prepared 
and the eggs are laid. Now, other dangers 
threaten. If the mother is killed, if by heavy 
rain storms the nest is flooded; if the prowling 
skunk or the thievish crow discovers its loca¬ 
tion, the life of our young quail will be a short 
and not a particularly merry one; he will never 
see the daylight. 
Let us suppose him happily hatched, how¬ 
ever. He starts forth with his brothers and sis¬ 
ters on his journey through-life. The chances 
are ten to one that before three weeks have 
passed he will have been picked up by a hawk, 
or carried off some evening just at dusk by a 
soft-winged owl, or captured as he passes some 
o_ld pile of stones by a weasel, or casually gob¬ 
bled up by a fox while passing through the 
swamp. If he escapes all these dangers, if the 
weather during his days of extreme juvenility 
is warm and dry, so that he gets a fair start 
and plenty of strength before cold, harsh rains 
come to chill his small body and make him an 
easy prey to disease; if the larvae of the par¬ 
tridge fly do not fasten on his poor little head 
and suck away his very life blood; if none of 
these things happen—and all or any of them are 
likely to come about—our quail has a reasonably 
fair chance of living for six or seven months, 
and finally being brought to bag in the approved 
and legitimate way. From a quail’s point of 
view, however, his lot is not a happy one. 
We have enumerated a few of the dangers 
to which some of our upland game birds are 
subjected, and which it is the sportsman’s duty 
to diminish as far as possible. Bounties on 
hawks, owls, skunks and foxes, offered by gun 
clubs and game protective associations, would 
do much to lessen the number of these vermin, 
thus increasing birds in any district. Of all 
our hawks the common marsh harrier is one of 
the most persistent and successful destroyers of 
quail, and one of them will more than decimate 
a growing brood. All the animals mentioned, 
with the exception of the fox, may be readily 
destroyed either by the gun or trap, and a little 
well directed effort to this end would, we think, 
soon be repaid by the improvement in the shoot¬ 
ing. But there is one enemy to bird life to which 
we have not yet alluded, although, in our opin¬ 
ion, it is no less destructive than all the others 
which we have mentioned. An enemy that hunts 
indifferently by night or day, in the deepest 
woods or in the orchard close to the house; a 
creature that does more to deplete the covey of 
quail, to destroy the woodcock, both old and 
young, and kills more insectivorous birds than 
all the hawks in a district; an animal that is 
the pet of the children and the favorite of the 
housewife—‘ What!” says some horrified reader, 
“you don’t mean the—” “Yes, we do. It is the 
cat.” 
A cat that lives in the house or in the stables 
and only makes occasional stolen visits to the 
woods and fields is bad enough, and destroys no 
small amount of bird life. We have seen such 
a cat—one that spent all its days lying under 
the stove, or in the warm sun; one that had such 
a virtuous and innocent countenance that you 
would have trusted it with untold pitchers of 
cream—we have seen such a cat, we say, start 
quietly out just at dusk and return to the kitchen 
in less than ten minutes with a dying woodcock 
in its mouth. From the stomach of another 
similar feline Pecksniff we have taken the larger 
part of an adult quail. 
But house cats that only hunt occasionally 
are saints and martyrs compared with the do¬ 
mestic cat run wild, or with the utterly irre¬ 
claimable descendants of these wild, tame cats. 
Such animals have to depend solely on their 
own exertions for a living. With them hunt¬ 
ing is a business as well as a pleasure. They 
are veritable pot-hunters. 
The English keeper well understands the 
injury done in the preserves by the domestic 
cat, and wages against it a war as bitter and 
as uncompromising as that which he carries on 
against its short-tailed wild cousin or against 
the stoat, or any of the hawks. A similar cru¬ 
sade should be inaugurated in this country by 
all who are interested in the preservation of our 
game birds. 
The hunting grounds of the cat cover all 
the localities frequented by our feathered game. 
You may start them as well from the swamp 
where the cock are to be found, as from the 
hedges that border the rye stubble through 
which, at morning and evening, the quail wander. 
We have come upon them peacefully reposing in 
the alder runs that we were working out late in 
the season for ruffed grouse, and have surprised 
them on the borders of the snipe grounds, at 
their meal on a green-winged teal or a rail. 
Nowhere can they be found in more abund¬ 
ance than in Pelham Bay Park. Anyone who may 
ride at dusk along the shore fload or down the 
lane to City Island will see Thomas and Tabitha, 
with all their relations, starting out on the war 
path. The rabbits and the many birds in the 
park furnish them with a fat subsistence. 
There is one way, and so far as we know, 
only one of curing 'a hunting cat of its fond¬ 
ness for what some of our contemporaries call 
the “noble art of venerie,” and we hope that 
during the next season all of our readers who 
may have the opportunity will give it a thor¬ 
ough trial. The rule is one which we invari¬ 
ably practice ourselves, and usually with the 
best results. It is this: When you see a cat 
while out shooting, approach it as closely as 
possible; yell scat, and give the fleeting feline 
a broadside. 
It is time that the sportsmen of our coun¬ 
try, and especially of the thickly settled East, 
where cats do most abound, took some active 
steps to protect the birds from this enemy, the 
most destructive, after man, with which they 
have to contend. We are sure that could the 
quail, the woodcock and the ruffed grouse speak, 
they would, if questioned as to the enemy of 
which they stand most in fear, reply in accents 
of horror and alarm: 
“Tt is, it is the cat!” 
And the great army of insectivorous birds, 
the friends of the farmer, the sweet-voiced warb¬ 
lers that cheer us through the spring and sum¬ 
mer by their songs, and beautify our homes by 
their brilliant plumage, would take up the sad 
refrain, and in tones whose pathos and earnest¬ 
ness could not fail to rouse the sympathy of 
every kindly heart, unite in uttering the confir¬ 
matory, the condemnatory, the now classic words: 
“They’re right; it is the cat.” 
“The older I grow,” writes a subscriber, 
“the more I love fishing, for I can wade streams 
easier than I can tramp over land in search of 
game.” Angling is the gentle craft, par excel¬ 
lence the employment of a quiet day. Men may 
angle when they may not shoot. The tramp 
over the fields and through the woods with gun 
and accoutrements presupposes a certain super¬ 
abundance of vigor. It is the fit sport of the 
young man whose glory is in his strength, and 
of those who are in the prime of life. As men 
grow older they forego the tramp after game 
and go out more often with rod and reel. The 
angler’s passion never ceases. An old man finds 
in the solitude of the streams a fit scene for 
living over his life again in the memories which 
there gather about him, playing in and out with 
the shadow of the leaves and the flashing of the 
stream. 
