632 
ARE MOST THEORIES OF GAME 
PRESERVATION WRONG? 
(Continued from page 6n.) 
If the law would only allow us, they say, to go 
into every old maid’s back yard and shoot her 
cat we would have plenty of game. Yes, my 
boys, but how about the rats that live right be¬ 
side the birds’ nests. Nature is a balance. Re¬ 
member that. 
All the wild, native, natural life we have or 
had when this country was discovered by Euro¬ 
peans, had been built up here by itself by a 
process of evolution, natural selection and sur¬ 
vival of the fittest through hundreds of thou¬ 
sands or millions of years. No one part of it ex¬ 
terminated the rest. It was all balanced and 
perfect as we found it. They all,—plants, ani¬ 
mals, birds, insects,—lived on each other and by 
each other, without extermination and they of¬ 
fered a richness and fertility unequalled in the 
world. We have been living on it so prosper¬ 
ously and powerfully ever since, that up to to¬ 
day we have not needed a large standing army to 
protect us. 
What, according to government investigation 
and statistics, is the greatest destruction of 
money values wrought to-day? It is done by 
insects; billions of dollars worth every year. 
The colonists and early settlers were not trou¬ 
bled in this way. They raised abundant har¬ 
vests with ease as they spread out over the fer¬ 
tile lands and luxuriated in the wonderful bal¬ 
ance of nature they had found. When did the 
trouble with insects begin? Recently; after we 
had upset that balance $f nature. Jt was not 
only that injurious native insects got ahead, 
but new ones that our depleted birds could not 
handle came in from foreign countries. The 
potato bug that has to be guarded against by 
large expenditure, the boll weevil that has put 
out of cultivation whole districts of cotton land, 
the chestnut blight, that is sweeping off all the 
chestnut forests, the scale, the brown moth, the 
fire blight, and diseases in the orchards, are all 
terribly destructive of our wealth and also com¬ 
pel us to a most expensive outlay for protection, 
which in many cases, is of little or no avail. 
Many of us well remember when northern 
sportsmen began going in such numbers to the 
Carolinas for the quail shooting soon after the 
Civil War, and how easy it was to find a dis¬ 
trict swarming with quail. I was not among 
the first rush. I came in a little later; but the 
sights I saw of the abundance of this game 
can not now be duplicated anywhere in the 
United States. You have to go to Mexico to 
find them; and Mexico, I understand, is full of 
hawks and vermin. But I am concerned at 
present with the Carolinas and the abundance 
of game of every sort we found there along 
with an equal abundance of its supposed enemies. 
Hawks and particularly the Blue Darter were 
very numerous. I have been going there ever 
since to many parts of the country, have seen 
the hawks and vermin reduced to almost noth¬ 
ing compared to their former abundance, but 
the quail instead of being helped have steadily 
diminished until instead of being able'to enjoy 
good sport almost anywhere, you now must 
join a preserve at considerable expense and 
shoot on land posted in your own favor, with 
not as good sport as you had in the days of the 
vermin. 
FOREST AND STRE 
What was it that destroyed that great abun¬ 
dance of game? Simply man; human beings. 
They are the great enemy of quail and all other 
game; the only real enemy it has. When we 
found that great abundance of game in the 
south after the Civil War, it had been there in 
that abundance for hundreds and thousands of 
years along with the hawks and vermin. They 
had all grown up, developed and flourished to¬ 
gether as the survival of the fittest, in the bal¬ 
ance of nature. If hawks and vermin are de¬ 
structive to game and song birds, why was there 
such a vast abundance of both here when the 
country was first settled by white men ? Accord¬ 
ing to the bounty theory there should have been 
no game or song birds at all here when the 
country was discovered, because the vermin had 
been having such a chance at them for innumer¬ 
able thousands of years. 
I have talked with some people who thought 
that the game must have increased in the south 
during the Civil War because such a large pro¬ 
portion of the male population was in the Con¬ 
federate armies, and that it increased for some 
years after the war because conditions still re¬ 
mained disturbed, and fields grew up in thick¬ 
ets and weeds. If that is true it shows that 
game, provided man is removed, will increase 
to the saturation point in spite of hawks and 
vermin. 
We all know what happened to the game in 
the south a few years after the Civil War was 
over. Man got fully to work. It was not only 
the sportsmen. They would not have had such 
a great effect. But the netter, the trapper, the 
market-shooter, kept swinging through the coun¬ 
try season after season and shipping the dead 
game for sale everywhere, to all cities small 
and great. The native country residents sud¬ 
denly discovered that increasing railroad facili¬ 
ties had made game as valuable as beef and 
mutton and rather more valuable than poultry. 
When I first began going south, eggs in the 
rural districts were ten cents a dozen, and a 
chicken, large or small, could be bought for 
twenty-five cents. If it were not for the laws 
of the last ten or fifteen years, checking the 
sale of game and the increase of preserved and 
posted land, there would not now be a feather 
of it left in the south. 
It is well known that it was not at all uncom¬ 
mon for parties of sportsmen so-called, to go 
to the south and employ native gunners to kill 
quail for them, furnishing them the ammunition 
and paying five cents a bird or some such price, 
so as to have an enormous bag to take back 
north. When a friend and myself, for the first 
time, leased the shooting privilege on a tract 
of land in North Carolina we immediately re¬ 
ceived a letter from a man offering on very 
reasonable terms to kill the birds for us. The 
letter was the more remarkable, because it as¬ 
sumed as a matter of course, that we would 
have such a person, and that there was noth¬ 
ing reprehensible about it. 
For nearly twenty years I have been familiar 
with many of the wild parts of Florida, where 
game and predacious creatures lived side by side, 
equally abundant and there my experience of 
the effects and results has been the same as in 
other places. 
Last autumn I was in a chance out-of-the-way 
corner not a hundred miles from Philadelphia. 
I was delighted to see a pair of eagles and a 
number of hawks. Some of the people were 
complaining that the hawks took chickens; and 
they were vowing vengeance and extermination 
on them. At the same time I found quail sur¬ 
prisingly abundant for a place so near the great 
centers of population. Myself and a companion 
found without difficulty ten coveys in a day. 
It is many years since I was in England, but 
I can remember the swarming bird and animal 
life I saw there in rural districts without par¬ 
ticularly trying to look for it. The enormous 
quantity of game and wild life there is almost 
inconceivable to an American, acccustomed to our 
vast stretches of lifeless territory. A few years 
ago the London Field collected statistics from 
its readers of the number of shot cartridges an 
English sportsman would usually use on game 
in a year. The numbers varied from 2,000 to 
10,000. I myself saw rabbits and hares enough 
along English country sides to make me think 
that a person could use several thousand shells 
a year on that game alone; and not seriously 
lessen its numbers. At the same time, I saw 
innumerable hawks and all sorts of predacious 
things. They are very numerous and you hear 
constant complaints from game keepers of their 
depredations, accompanied at the same time with 
the delight and pleasure all sorts of people take 
in watching and studying them. They are fre¬ 
quently captured and made pets of. 
When they become so very excessive in num¬ 
bers that the keeper thinks they interfere seri¬ 
ously with his reputation for keeping up the 
supply of game, he shoots and traps them to 
keep them within limits. In the London Field 
for May 29, 1915. page 952, there was an article 
on “Vermin and Vermin Killing, discussing 
the importance of not allowing game keepers 
to go too far in destruction. Instances of ex¬ 
cess were given; and instances of the restora¬ 
tion of “eagles, falcons, hawks and ravens,” 
which had been too much cut down. “There 
are few of us,” said the article, “who would like 
to see any bird or animal exterminated. 
That is the proper spirit; and they have plenty 
of wild life which they control by public senti¬ 
ment as much as by laws; and if birds of prey 
or vermin should become excessively numerous 
in a locality or farm in America, there is no 
reason why farmers or sportsmen should not 
lessen their numbers to bring them within limits. 
But that is a very different thing from offering 
a bounty from the tax fund by the authority of 
the state to every vagabond to go roaming over 
the whole state with guns exterminating crea¬ 
tures which add greatly to every decent person’s 
enjoyment of nature. About how many coveys 
of quail will be potted on the ground or driven 
into a net by the bounty hunters? Why start 
out such a class of people? 
I do not believe that in any state which, taken 
as a whole, needs to have the hawks, crows, owls 
and vermin lessened all over its territory by a 
bounty offer to vagabondage. Farmers can pro¬ 
tect their own chickens, as they have done in 
other countries for centuries; and sportsmen can 
protect their own preserves. I never saw a place 
or district in our sadly and increasingly denuded 
country where such lessening was needed. This 
country stands in no need anywhere of any en¬ 
couragement tending towards the extermination 
of animal life. 
