714 
F ORES T A N D STREAM 
Why Not Offer a Bounty to Bring Back Animals as Well as to Kill Them Off? 
Let Us Restore American Wild Life 
By Sydney G. Fisher. 
(Continued from last month.) 
A good illustration to show the exaggeration 
of the loose talk about the injury done by game 
and wild life is the history of deer protection 
in Vermont as reported in the Bulletin of the 
American Game Protective Association of Jan. 
25, 1915. In 1875 some men of business in Rut¬ 
land in that state, started to increase the wild 
deer which had been practically exterminated. 
By securing favorable legislation and untiring 
efforts, they have been so far successful that 
the number of deer killed by sportsmen in the 
autumn of 1914 was 2,233. The average annua! 
revenue brought into the state is estimated by 
the game commission as $53,416, which is 4 per 
cent, on a capitalization of over a million dol¬ 
lars. In order to quiet objections the legisla¬ 
tion required the state to pay all damages done 
to crops. People claiming such damage do not 
usually underestimate their loss and yet all the 
state had to pay for injury done by the greal 
number of deer in the year 1913, was $1,233.45. 
While we are rushing to legislatures with de¬ 
mands for bounties and extermination of this 
or that bird or animal, we miss altogether the 
most important protection of wild life, and that 
is cover; places of seclusion in which to hide, 
nest and live. Unless this is provided all other 
efforts are useless. It is a mere common-sense 
proposition; and yet it is all the time forgotten 
or neglected. Immense sums of money are con¬ 
tinually spent on projects which are well enough 
except in this particular cover and because of 
the lack of that, are impossible from the be¬ 
ginning. Astonished at their failure the projec¬ 
tors rush into exterminating the few wandering 
crows on the land, setting poison for everything, 
and making war on cats and dogs, only to make 
of the land more of a desert than ever. 
We have to build houses for the purple mar¬ 
tin because there are so few of the hollow trees 
in which he used to nest before the coming of 
the white man. Whole species of woodpeckers, 
owls, and the beautiful wood ducks that used 
that sort of habitation are now in danger of ex¬ 
termination. Many people are inclined to be 
hopeless about restoring the wild fowl because 
so many large districts like the Kankakee marshes 
in the middle west and innumerable reedy lakes 
and sloughs have been drained. 
The cleaning up and cutting down have also 
destroyed a large part of the wild food supply. 
This is another point continually forgotten. 
People are continually assuming that a mere 
tract of land will support wild game or wild 
life. But there must be food on it; and not 
merely to-day or to-morrow, or during the sum¬ 
mer, but for practically every one of the 365 
days in each year. There must be food during 
the terrible months of January, February and 
March. Many an experiment in game restora¬ 
tion fails for this reason. 
Food and cover are closely related. The de¬ 
struction of the cover often destroys the food: 
but that fact is not usually known or remem¬ 
bered. In Fngland where they have such great 
quantities of game and understand these sub¬ 
jects so well, we find them complaining of the 
decrease of partridge shooting because of the 
change in agricultural methods which abolished 
the large turnip crops that gave such excellent 
cover. In the times before our Civil War, a 
large part of England was planted to turnips 
which fed the immense flocks of sheep that were 
raised; and it was beneath the large leaves of 
the sort of turnips planted, that the partridges 
found cover and food. Those were great days 
in English country life and sport. ’ Plenty of 
turnips, plenty of mutton and partridges, plenty 
of good ale; what more can the soul of man 
desire? 
In the counties round Philadelphia, I have 
watched for years the effect of cover and food, 
or rather the absence of them. Every spring in 
those counties scattering quail appear, nest and 
breed; and why? Because everything is grow¬ 
ing up green in that rich soil and there is good 
cover and food. When November comes and 
that luxuriant growth has died down or been 
swept away, the quail all leave, migrate away 
somewhere. People tell me they have seen them 
in the act of migrating; they appear in unex¬ 
pected places, sometimes near a house or barn 
and are evidently on the move. At any rate 
they disappear and there is no shooting. If you 
take a few tramps through those counties in- 
November and December, you see the reason. 
Everything is stripped bare; there is little or no¬ 
natural wild cover and food. The quail had' 
lived in the green crops and grass of summer; 
but when that was cut down they had to migrate- 
or perish. Nothing in that region can survive- 
the winter unless it burrows into the ground 
like the rabbits or sweeps over immense terri¬ 
tory, like the crows; and sometimes I wonder 
that they are able to pull through, so bare is- 
everything. And yet fifty or sixty years ago- 
there was very fair shooting in the autumn in- 
those counties, because after the summer crops 
were removed there were thickets, woods, 
swamps, grown up fence rows and the innum¬ 
erable seeds and food from weeds and all sorts- 
of wild plants that that condition implies. 
When we cross the river at Philadelphia and' 
pass down into southern New Jersey, we soon 
come to districts where quail remain the year' 
round; and there we find increasing cover and 
hiding places and the usual accompanying food' 
supplies. I do not mean to say that cover al¬ 
ways implies food. There are places where it 
notoriously does not. It depends on what sort 
of cover it is and the kind of plants growing ir& 
