FOREST AND STREAM 
1051 
THE UNBALANCER OF NATURE 
HIS CROWSHIP, PRISONER AT THE BAR, IS ACCUSED 
OF BEING EVEN BLACKER THAN HE IS FEATHERED 
By John Bernard O’Sullivan. 
T O BE sure, the woods are full of perils; 
there’s the yellow fellow, the white; pov¬ 
erty, rum and so on, and we grownup 
campfire boys of the middle west—who tell our 
troubles to the chief at 128 Broadway—are now 
thoroughly aroused to the fact that the time has 
come to fight the new peril—the millions of crows 
(American crow, corvus brachyrhynchos) — tooth 
and nail. 
His crowship is pretty evenly distributed over 
the entire middle west, and everywhere you find 
them, there is a shortage of feathered game. 
Here in Nebraska, these ebony hued rascals 
became so destructive a year ago that we sports¬ 
men organized several county-wide game protec¬ 
tive associations whose sole object is the regula¬ 
tion of the overbalanced “balance in nature.” 
Away back fifteen years or so ago, these ravens 
were represented in this neck o’ the tall timber 
by a sprinkling here and there. Before this time, 
the country was too barren of trees to suit them, 
but when the homesteaders’ clumps of saplings 
stretched into sizeable timber, the crow multi¬ 
plied like cut-worms at a barbecue—so fast, in 
fact, that some flocks number as many as 25,000 
birds. 
The heavens, the fields and the woods are now 
not unlike the wooded regions of Wisconsin 
when the passenger pigeons flourished; it is the 
same in all but the color of the great flocks. 
’Tis strange, but true, that the crows of this 
region have some friends, and amongst them are 
naturalists of world wide renown; nevertheless, 
here is what I know of the tramp of the feathered 
world and you can draw your own conclusions 
as to whether they are just a harmless child of 
the great scheme or a little bird with an appetite 
comparable to that of an egg-sucking elephant. 
In the first place, they are utterly unfit for 
food. If you doubt this try one sometime. Then 
call the horse doctor. Maybe you’ll need two of 
them, but no matter; it is well known that these 
ravens, at times, subsist on the eggs of quail, 
grouse, ducks, young song birds and, now and 
then, the parent birds themselves, for a crow 
has no morals—nothing but a bottomless ap¬ 
petite. 
Last July I saw dozens of robins, thrushes, 
orioles, wrens and various other worth-their- 
weight-in-gold birds busily keeping house in the 
limbs along a stream. Like a curse from the 
master-grief-maker of the hot regions came an 
army of roost hunting ravens. First thing they 
did was to clean house. They ate all the eggs 
and young birds, tore the nests to bits and 
“cawed” about it for a half day. As though 
this was not sufficient for the nonce, they drove 
every single songster out of the vicinity. 
Several years ago I thought these black birds 
were harmless—part of the great plan—and that 
to destroy them was to upset “the balance in 
nature.” About three months ago, a clique of 
healthy-minded nature lovers organized to pro¬ 
tect the game and hand the crows the hot end of 
the shotgun. Mr. Mike Kirwin, the association’s 
game genius, evolved a plan calculated to deci¬ 
mate the numbers of crows and, at the same 
time, offer a chance for some good sport to the 
participants. 
The association met, two captains were chosen, 
the rank and file equally divided and a date set 
for a crow hunt. 
The side bagging the smallest number of crows 
was to pay for a banquet for all. The writer 
was invited and was paired with a member of 
the other side. All were so paired this way; 
so no unfair tactics in securing the birds could 
be used. Outsiders were invited to go, pro¬ 
vided they signed up to go with a member of 
the other side. 
Six of us went to a ranch ten miles from 
town—a place known to be a rendezvous of 
thousands of our quarry. 
This ranch was then feeding a thousand head 
of cattle on shelled corn, and Mr. James Ryan, 
the proprietor, had invited us to go there and 
shoot to our heart’s content. When we arrived 
there wasn’t a crow to be seen, but a look through 
a ten-acre grove of cottonwood trees foretold 
the coming of a myriad of ravens, sooner or 
later. The ground beneath the trees was literally 
hidden from view by black feathers and offal. 
After reconnoitering, we selected our hiding 
places and waited. Not a sign of a bird did we 
see until almost sundown, at which time the 
ranch-hands began to feed the bovines. 
As the men scooped the grain into the feed- 
boxes, the beeves bugled vociferously, and that 
was as a mess call to the dusky denizens of the 
timber and the heavens. From out of the pale 
blue nothingness of the northern sky there ap¬ 
peared a thin, ragged line of crows which looked 
like a river of giant flies. On they came, straight 
to where we crouched behind the trunks of the 
cottonwoods. 
I was never more nervous in my life, not ex¬ 
cepting the time a rattlesnake entwined himself 
around my shotgun and I discovered him there 
after shooting twice. 
Man, oh man, a multitude there was, of raspy 
voiced, hunger-driven scoundrels bent on ban¬ 
queting on corn they had no right to whatever. 
In the short space of one and a half hours we 
ANOTHER ALBINO DEER. 
Pottsville, Pa., May 22nd, 1916. 
Editor Forest and Stream : 
Enclosed find a photo of an Albino deer head. 
This buck was killed Nov. 29, 1915, on the east 
branch of the Mattawamberg River, Maine. It 
is a io-point, 15-inch spread and very symmetri¬ 
cal head. It was a good sized buck. This head 
was mounted up by myself and is one of the 
largest I know of in the Albino deer family, as 
they are usually smaller than the true colored 
ones. This head does not seem to bring the 
much attributed proverbial ill luck so much as 
many people think, as it is one of the most ad¬ 
mired specimens in my collection to-day and 
valued far above any of the other deer I have. 
C. W. Erb. 
killed one hundred and fifty, so you can see 
they were pretty numerous. They actually got 
right into the feed troughs and helped them¬ 
selves. As they finished eating they alighted in 
the upper reaches of the timber where we shot 
at them until our shoulders were numb. 
The foreman of the ranch told us he was tired 
shooting at them; said there was not less than 
a quarter million in this flock. This man’s stories 
of what he had seen these worthless birds do to 
nesting prairie-chickens and other game birds is 
enough to convince a wooden man that the crow 
is the tramp of the air—the quintessence of 
parasites. He is a bloodsucker. 
Some advocate placing a bounty on them, 
others claim poison will do the trick, and still 
others want them let dead alone. I am satisfied 
that you can not poison a crow. I have fed them 
strychnine on meats, corn and several other 
ways, and I have yet to find a carcass of a crow. 
Have been told it is practically impossible to poison 
any bird that has a craw, and I believe this, for 
I once fed a captured specimen a poison in a 
dozen graduated doses, and I discovered that he 
was the champion vomiter of America. 
Then I tried to wring his neck. This was a 
success, I am happy to say. 
The good old shotgun appears to be the 
remedy, but that is a mighty costly remedy when 
you stop to think that, usually, your crow is a 
little out of reach of same. 
I do not wish to go on record as a crow hater, 
nor do I want to indulge in personalities with 
the gentlemen who advocate letting all things 
live. The ravens of other parts of the country 
are not included in this creed. In all the world 
there is no one likes to hear the cheerful raven’s 
call better than I, but too many “cawls” make 
a thunderclap. Nothing makes a nature lover 
feel as satisfied as to hear a crow cry in the 
early morning. 
You step out into the sun burnished morn, 
observe the drowsy flowers, the busy birds and 
the indescribable foliage; you inhale the ex¬ 
hilarating air, listen to a medley of chants and 
still you listen. You smile and enter the domicile. 
You heard a crow’s “caw-caw-caw”! 
DEATH OF ALLEN KELLY. 
Mr. Kelly, old newspaper writer and author, 
died recently in Los Angeles, California. He was 
a man of great ability, extraordinarily competent 
as a newspaper man, and a facile and interesting 
writer. Old readers of Forest and Stream wilt 
recall many contributions from his pen in its 
columns. 
Mr. Kelly was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 
1855, and as a young man went to the Pacific 
Coast, where he was employed on the San Fran¬ 
cisco “Chronicle” and other papers. 
Having returned to the East, he became an 
editorial writer on the Boston “Globe,” and then 
managing editor of the Fall River “Globe.” He 
was the first city editor of the New York “Eve¬ 
ning Sun,” but after a time returned to San Fran¬ 
cisco, and occupied a number of responsible posi¬ 
tions on the San Francisco “Examiner.” For 
several years he was city editor of the Los An¬ 
geles “Times,” worked on other papers East and 
West, and for some years lived in the Imperial 
Valley, in Southern California, where at one time 
he conducted a paper at El Centro. In 1905 he 
visited Australia and New Zealand, in behalf of 
the Los Angeles “Times,” and some of his ob¬ 
servations and experiences there were printed in 
Forest and Stream. At one time he was 
Commissioner of Forestry in California, and he 
wrote a book entitled “Bears I Have Known and 
Others.” 
Mr. Kelly’s great ability and remarkable charm 
impressed themselves on everyone who met him, 
and his loss is severely felt. 
