Aug. 26, 1911.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
329 
while and then ate our lunch. The river is called 
Big River, but at that point I easily waded across 
it. The river does not begin to get deep for 
several miles down. It was about 3 o’clock when 
we got back to camp and that was the most sultry 
day I ever saw. Aunt Della and I went swim¬ 
ming in Basin Creek, but although the water was 
ice cold, we felt much refreshed. 
We made Our start home from the Basin 
Creek meadows, up the east fork of Basin 
Creek, and over the Sun River and Teton divide. 
On the very top of the divide we passed through 
a natural lane. Each side was bordered by ever¬ 
green trees thirty or forty feet in height. The 
soil was very black and just a little sandy. Some 
of the trees were completely covered with dry 
moss, some green and some black. It really 
added to the beauty of the scene. There we 
were thousands of feet above sea level, nothing 
on any side except high mountains covered with 
green timber, only on their very tops where there 
was nothing but rocky ledges. Around these 
ledges the mountain goats and sheep live. 
Increasing the 
By AMOS 
UT a few years ago the cry of those who 
saw the diminishing quail supply was, 
■'Make smaller bags and give the birds 
a chance to reproduce themselves.” Now the 
warning is to . breed quail to fill the covers or 
we will soon have a very limited number of 
them anywhere in the land. The matter of quail 
breeding has been taken up privately and pub¬ 
licly by a number of interested parties who en¬ 
joy the shooting of these swift little flyers. In 
a few States the sportsmen have awakened the 
lawmakers to the fact that unless something is 
done, the birds will be gone in a few more 
decades. 
Quail can be bred in captivity, as they soon 
accustom themselves to the covered yards and 
to their caretakers, the food at hand and the un¬ 
natural cover afforded them, but they are not the 
wild birds of vigorous flight that grow on the 
reach of meadow that extends along the corn¬ 
fields of the Central West, the birds of the brushy 
cover in Kentucky and Tennessee and South¬ 
ern Missouri, nor the hardy insect killers of 
Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, that fly over the 
range along the creek bank, the edges of the 
dry sloughs or the stumpy waste of pasture land 
along the clearing. 
We all admit there must be something done 
to increase the supply of birds. We know that 
it must be accomplished by the great body called 
sportsmen. Laws have done little to help. In 
Nebraska where the quail season was shortened 
to fifteen days and in Iowa and Wisconsin where 
the shooting was done away with for years at 
a stretch just to give the birds a chance to in¬ 
crease, the results have hardly been seen. Two 
most appreciated methods fit themselves to the 
situation, I think, with better effectiveness than 
any others, and it is the working out of them 
that I shall try to make plain. 
Quail must be assisted in breeding, though not 
in mating and hatching particularly. They are 
able to do this for themselves, but cannot take 
From the top of the divide we proceeded down 
the West Fork of the Teton and stopped for 
dinner in Potato Park. Potato Park was so 
named because some hunters once buried some 
potatoes in the ground in the autumn and the 
next year someone crossed through the park and 
found the potatoes growing. That night we 
camped on the North Fork of the Teton, and 
the following day we fished down the river until 
we reached our wagon. We caught about a 
hundred trout, none of them less than a foot long. 
Not until we reached our wagon did we come 
to any of the country we had crossed before. 
We had made a complete circle and saw some 
of the most beautiful scenery in the world. 
Though the trip was a dangerous one, and the 
conditions such as to make it very irksome, we 
who made it feel that the beauty of the scenery, 
the novelty and excitement of the trip and the 
healthy exercise incident to the mountain life 
fully repaid us for making it. 
That evening we reached home feeling rather 
tired, but the happiest people in the world. 
Quail Supply 
BURHANS 
care of themselves in the coldest winter weather 
of the North Central States or the blizzards of 
the West. The most conspicuous cases of quail 
increasing in covers about shot out have been 
those in which the birds have been trapped by 
sportsmen and carried over the winter, finally 
being released in pairs during the early spring 
in covers where some food was provided as they 
were getting accustomed to being at liberty again. 
One gun club that I know of, against the law 
of the State in which it was located, paid a 
young man who was expert in trapping birds 
to carry as many over the winter as he could 
secure. When spring came he planted the birds 
about covers a few dozen rods apart. It so hap¬ 
pened that the first winter following this club’s 
decision to trap birds to stock their covers was 
a very hard one and this was the only club 
owning grounds in their section of the State 
that had birds worth shooting. Personally, I 
think the situation in regard to birds lies with 
the clubs who buy shooting rights or control 
the shooting on good covers. They are vita ly 
interested. They can afford to pay the big prizes 
to the farmers or farm lads who have the most 
birds in the covers. 
Another instance I have watched with great 
interest. A man who loves setters, but has not 
time to go where the shooting is good, lives in 
the edge of a town. Part of his garden has been 
fenced and covered with wire for a quail pen. 
He has kept a few breeding birds, always pairs 
together, through the winter, so they wi 1 be 
mated in the spring, which he has released on 
the farm of a friend interested in the experi¬ 
ment. Some of the older birds that he wants to 
keep at home for breeding and a few to re¬ 
plenish the covers with, he pinions and yards by 
themselves, after taking the first clutch of eggs 
away from the nest .and putting them under 
bantam hens. 
Still another individual who gets nice quail 
shooting loves the work of dog training, but 
found it difficult to get birds on which to break 
his puppies. Quite by accident he came upon 
a crippled bird, and the following fall taught 
two puppies how to hold their birds when on 
point by using the cripple in the brush patch 
of his poultry yard. Another season he bought 
a few birds and began raising them in little pens 
about his premises, releasing the brood hen and 
chicks after they had feathered out. He al¬ 
ways retained a few of the hardiest to breed 
from. By his method he is assured a lot of 
work for his dogs and some fair shooting at the 
same time. 
A woman in Missouri has made a business of 
quail growing for many years, selling her birds 
to the large game bird exporters and importers 
and the collectors and State game farms. The 
Connecticut State Agricultural College is going 
in for the breeding of quail and has placed 
Herbert K. Job in charge of the experiment. 
They are using Western quail for a try at 
breeding them in confinement. For a good many 
years certain parts of the East were recognized 
as good shooting grounds for quail, but through 
the lack of system in caring for them during pro¬ 
tracted cold spells, they have become nearly extinct. 
Many small gun clubs would add much to 
their shooting if they would appoint a commit¬ 
tee to begin feeding birds or see that they were 
fed before the hardest of winter came on, and 
then when the deep snows did arrive, the birds 
would know where to look for food. I planted 
shocks of corn in the edge of a second growth 
of maple and oak scrub and saw that two coveys 
were fed with wheat and barley there every day. 
The birds are very thick about that point to-day. 
This fall there will be good shooting there and 
some seed for another year’s crop. Farmer boys 
could be paid for feeding birds, the club getting 
them interested, buying the food and providing 
a small record book for the entry of each day’s 
feeding during the bad weather. If there were 
several young men doing this work for the club, 
it would be a good plan to offer a gun as a prize 
for the one who could show the most birds in 
the fall. 
Many young farmers are members of gun 
clubs. They are all interested in more quail. 
They will thresh a wheat stack at a convenient 
and sheltered point if they know how and why 
and what good it will do for the birds. Last 
winter I found two small coveys that wintered 
all the hardest weather in a large wheat stack, 
and I positively know they had nothing else to 
eat. Keeping the openings in the stack clear 
after snows saved them from smothering and 
starving. 
To create a sentiment for game conservation 
a shooting club must be doing something all the 
time to keep the interest awakened. At Oxford, 
Neb., there is excellent shooting every fall be¬ 
cause the club men there are always educating 
the people not to shoot out of season and to 
save a few birds for seed. Hungarian partridges 
were planted to see what good they wou’d do 
and the local papers kept up interest and helped 
along the good work by reporting all the news 
on the matter they could get. The boy quail 
tracker, who after a storm pots a whole bevy, 
little knows just how many hundreds he butchers 
in that batch that might have seen the next fall. 
Education and conservation, agitation and a club 
that has some life in it all the year—these be 
the helpers in increasing the quail supply. 
