FOREST AND STREAM 
American Woodcock, Picked Up Under Telephone Wires in Branchport, N. Y., July 15, 1913. 
It Lived Only a Few Hours After Photograph Was Taken. 
346 
tion of the weight of the gun must be the load 
of the cartridges. 
A very light 20-bore can kick, and there is one 
great difficulty which causes as much bad shoot¬ 
ing with boys as the worst fitting heavy gun, 
which the most casually taught among us ever 
handled. It is no use giving a boy a light gun so 
as not to tire his arms if he gets afraid of it. 
The light gun must carry a correspondingly light 
load, or the loss of weight develops a loss of 
skill at once. And a habit of flinching is one of 
the worst, as it is one of the most unnecessary, 
into which a boy can fall. It is easily enough de¬ 
tected, of course; a dummy cartridge slipped into 
the gun without the boy's knowledge reveals the 
tell-tale jerk at once. How often a recruit, firing 
his gun, misses on the rifle range hopelessly, one 
after another, has had the reason shown to him 
by the simple device of an empty cartridge case. 
The rifle range, by the way, suggests a ques¬ 
tion. In these days it must probably be the ex¬ 
ception for a boy to get his first experience of 
firearms with a shotgun. Now here is a point 
which seems to me worth investigating. Alto¬ 
gether apart from any question as to the value 
of the training with military or quasi-military 
weapons, is the beginning with a rifle the best be¬ 
ginning to make a game shot. 
Unquestionably it cannot teach him from the 
outset some of the most important lessons of all, 
such as keeping both eyes open, and looking not 
at his gun but at the mark he wishes to hit. On 
the contrary, the youthful rifle shot is adjured 
by all his gods to shut one eye, to look care¬ 
fully along his rifle barrel, and to align his fore¬ 
sight and backsight with the bull’s eye or what¬ 
ever may be the selected target. Having done so, 
he presses the trigger slowly, and, if he is to do 
any good as a rifle shot at all, does not know 
when his weapon is going off. 
Now all this is as different as possible from 
what he is taught to do with a shotgun, and the 
question that seems worth answering is whether 
the rifle shooting taught so early in a boy’s life 
does not leave them with habits which, as a 
game shot, he has to cure. A small rifle and a 
double-barrelled 20-bore certainly handle very 
differently, and it may be that to some boys there 
is no more association carried from the use of 
the one to the other than there is, say, from a 
tennis racket to a baseball bat. 
But with others, matters are different. I know 
a man, for instance, who happened to have a 
great deal of rifle shooting as a schoolboy before 
he had the opportunity of shooting game, and he 
found the greatest difficulty in breaking himself 
of what had become almost an instinct. Keeping 
both eyes open was no great difficulty, but the 
habit of looking along the barrel of the gun as if 
he were aligning it on a mark is one from which 
he still believes he has never freed himself. For 
whatever reason this habit clings to him with 
certain kinds of shots and not with others. In 
snap-shots, for instance, he is practically un¬ 
conscious of his gun, but crossing birds, more 
especially in fairly long shots, turns him into a 
rifle shot at once. If his is a common case, and 
there seems to be no reason to suppose that it is 
a rare one, there should be some modification of 
the system of teaching rifle shooting to boys. 
WAR ON THE HOUSE CAT. 
War was declared on the house cat that wan¬ 
ders into the woods and destroys bird life, at a 
recent meeting of the Washington Game Pro¬ 
tective and Propagation Association. A small 
bounty could, it was recommended, be placed on 
the cats to last over a space of one or two 
months, thus eliminating them. 
SOME BIRD ACCIDENTS CAUSED BY WIRES. 
By Verdi Burtch. 
It would be interesting to know how many 
birds are killed by flying against telephone and 
trolley wires. That there are a great many so 
killed I have no doubt, as several cases have 
come under my own observation. 
W'hen a boy I remember my father bringing in 
a woodcock that he had picked up from the 
ground under a telephone wire. When first 
brought in it appeared to be stunned, but after 
about an hour it came to, and when liberated 
flew away apparently all right. 
Several years ago a cock pheasant was picked 
up from under the telephone wires where they 
cross the marsh at Branchport, N. Y. The bird 
was dead, and on skinning it I found a bloody 
mark across its breast where it had struck the 
wire. 
On August 13th, 1905, a solitary sandpiper was 
brought to me that had been picked up along the 
trolley line. It had a wing broken at the shoul¬ 
der and was bruised on the breast under the 
wing. Evidently it had struck the wire. 
In the early morning of May 22nd, 1910, I was 
driving in the country when I saw a sandpiper 
running along the track. I caught it and it 
proved to be a red-backed sandpiper, the only 
one that I had ever seen in spring plumage. One 
wing was entirely missing from the body. Evi¬ 
dently the bird had struck the trolley wire which 
severed the wing at the elbow joint (ancon). 
The blood and flesh had dried on the end of the 
bone and the wound seemed in a fair way to heal. 
The bird was strong and ran along as though all 
right. I exposed a photographic plate on it, but 
when developed found that it had been exposed 
a second time, spoiling the negative. 
In September I saw a solitary sandpiper strike 
a telephone wire as it was flying across the road 
at Branchport marsh, and one wing was cut 
clean from the body, the bird falling down into 
the marsh and the wing whirling spirally down 
to the grass and flags. I made a thorough search, 
but was unable to find either the bird or its wing. 
A woodcock struck a telephone wire in the 
street at Branchport on July 15th, 1913. and fell 
to the sidewalk. It appeared quite bright for a 
while and I photographed it, but soon it began 
to droop and in an hour was dead. 
WOODCOCK IN CONNECTICUT. 
Cherry Hill, Branford, Conn., Feb. 26, 1914. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
1 have noted what has been said about the 
flight of woodcock in the last two issues. Here 
in Branford we had a splendid flight of wood¬ 
cock this fall, in fact have never known but two 
poor flights in this vicinity in over thirty-five 
years. The years 1911 and 1912 were poor. We 
had no rain for weeks before the flight, nor dur¬ 
ing it; ground was hard as iron and springs 
dried up. This year the birds came down by 
hundreds, I shot from six to twenty every day 
during the flight and did not hunt hard. 
Woodcock is the one bird that is more than 
holding its own right here. They breed every 
year within a few hundred yards of my house, 
and stay until the summer drouth drives them 
away. During the molt they retire to the thick¬ 
est spots they can find. 
I think that 3 r ou will find, if you consult our 
game laws for 1913, and we have no new ones as 
yet, that there is no limit on woodcock. And 
after all, the game laws are only in a man’s heart. 
There is a limit on grouse in this state, but only 
the law-abiding notice it. 
It would take one thousand game wardens to 
stop violations of the game law in our little state, 
and then they would have to go in fours if they 
would save their lives and be able to accomplish 
their purpose. There are certain people that shoot 
in bands in this state who will shoot a game war¬ 
den on sight, or any one else that tries to stop 
unlawful practices. — JOHN W. NICHOLS. 
