Forest and Stream 
Terms, $3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $1.50. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 1908. 
j VOL. LXXI.—No. 6 . 
I No. 127 Franklin St., New Ycrk. 
A WEEKLY JOURNAL. 
Copyright, 1908, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
George Bird Grinnell, President, 
Charles B. Reynolds, Secretary. 
Louis Dean Speir ; Treasurer. 
127 Franklin Street, New York. 
THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL 
will be to studiously promote a healthful interest 
in outdoor recreation, and to cultivate a refined 
Haste for natural objects. 
—Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 1873. 
AN ECONOMIC PROBLEM IN PERU. 
To the people of Pern the guano industry is 
of the highest importance. Not only has the 
guano a great money value for purposes of 
export, but it is absolutely essential to the 
agriculture of the country. The destruction of 
the industry would be a public calamity. 
By not a few people it is supposed that the 
accumulations of guano in Peru are something 
like coal deposits in that they represent the very 
gradual accumulations of a vast amount of time 
and that their deposition is now at an end. 
This is not the case, since guano is being 
deposited to-day just as formerly, but in much 
less quantity than formerly, since the birds 
which produce it are far less numerous than 
they used to be. On the other hand the guano 
produced to-day is valuable—perhaps even more 
valuable than that deposited years ago. 
The deposits of old guano are being rapidly 
exhausted, and when these are exhausted 
there will remain only the annual product, which 
under present conditions is certain to grow less 
and less. This is true because the birds that 
produce it are wholly disregarded, for the con¬ 
tractors who collect the guano do so without 
the slightest reference to the birds on which 
the supply depends, driving them from then- 
nesting places and destroying the eggs and 
young. The whole subject lias been carefully 
studied by Senor Larrabure y Correa, who 
recently submitted a full report to the Peruvian 
government. 
The two principal birds which deposit this 
valuable product are a cormorant and a pelican, 
and these birds spend the greater part of then- 
time during the whole year on the nesting 
ground, unless frightened away by man. To 
secure the best results from their presence they 
should be encouraged to remain on these 
grounds, and instead of being treated as wild 
animals, whose useful product men seize and 
carry away, they should be treated as domestic 
animals, engaged in useful labor, and producing 
a crop, to the harvesting of which the highest 
intelligence should be devoted. 
The birds should not be driven away from 
their nesting grounds. The present tendency 
to a decrease in numbers could be checked. 
Protection will result in a great increase, and 
such increase will mean the addition to Peru’s 
supply of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ 
worth of guano each year. Everything should 
be done to increase the number of the birds, 
for the greater the number of the birds the 
greater the amount of the guano produced. 
Action should be taken at once, for the pelican, 
the more useful of these two birds, is grad¬ 
ually disappearing. 
It is necessary to watch the contractors who 
remove the guano from the islands and see that 
they do it with due regard to the safety of the 
birds and the future supply of the product. It 
would be well also to close each of the various 
guano islands in rotation for a term of years, 
thus leaving the birds on the different islands 
unmolested for periods of years as long as pos¬ 
sible. A great step in advance has been made 
in recent years by establishing a closed season 
for the islands, during which they are not to 
be worked; but this measure is after all only 
a palliative. It does not strike at the root of 
the evil. 
The agriculture of Peru is dependent on the 
supply of guano. The demands of the export 
trade are insatiable. The time is coming when 
both these demands cannot be satisfied. It is 
high time that a strong effort shall be made 
to increase the supply, and this can only be done 
by protecting the breeding grounds of the birds. 
FOREST FIRES. 
The drouth which parched vast regions dur¬ 
ing July continues. Local rains have had but 
small effect, as they have been too light and their 
duration too brief to saturate the ground. 
Disastrous forest fires have swept through not 
a few of the most valuable, as well as beautiful 
regions in the East, the North and Northwest. 
The Adirondacks suffered severely, but at pres¬ 
ent the danger is checked—permanently, it is to 
be hoped. Maine lost much valuable timber and 
other property through a score of forest fires 
that could not be controlled, and there as else¬ 
where the loss of birds and small mammals is 
believed to be important. 
The most disastrous fire of the year, how¬ 
ever, is now sweeping through the Alberta coal 
district in British Columbia, near the inter¬ 
national boundary line. The most distressing 
feature of this fire is that a large number of 
people are missing or dead. Several towns have 
been burned and the' property loss has already 
been very heavy, with the probability that it 
will mount still higher ere the fires burn them¬ 
selves out. Fernie was first to go, and as we 
go to press other towns in the Crow’s Nest ter¬ 
ritory are threatened. So much dry timber is 
at hand, and changes of wind probable, with 
the likelihood of heavy rains remote, that these 
fires may spread still more ere they cease to be 
a menace to life and property. The loss to the 
province be calculated. 
THE FATE OF THE WHALE. 
It is known only in a very general way that 
the whale is threatened with extinction. Vastest 
of all mammals, and formerly very numerous, 
it is now being destroyed by wholesale, and as 
Mr. Charles H. Townsend justly says, may soon 
be classed with the sea otter, the American bison 
and other wealth-producing animals, whose com¬ 
mercial value has been lost to man. 
Old people can remember when the whaling 
industry of New England brought great wealth 
to the country, but that time was over more than 
a generation ago. Whaling ceased to be profit¬ 
able and was no longer followed, and so the 
whale was neglected and had an opportunity to 
re-establish itself. Now it is being pursued again 
and far more relentlessly than ever. By means 
of improved methods of destruction, more and 
more whales are being constantly slaughtered, 
and unless some means to limit this destruction 
can be found the whale will actually become ex- 
tmct. 
At its annual meeting last winter the New 
York Zoological Society adopted a resolution 
calling for the protection of whales by means 
of international agreement, and there is a pos¬ 
sibility that some steps may be taken to cause 
the slaughter of the whales to cease. Nations 
move slowly, however, in these matters, and the 
history of lack of success, which attended the 
efforts to preserve the fur seal, does not hold 
out great hopes that attempts to preserve the 
whale will be much more successful. 
If anything is to be done in this regard it must 
be by means of informing the public at large 
of the danger which threatens this great and 
zoologically important group. A first step in 
this direction has been taken by the New York 
Zoological Society. Mr. Frederick A. Lucas, 
one of America’s first authorities on whales and 
whaling, has written, and the society has pub¬ 
lished, a paper giving interesting facts as to the 
passing of the whale. This paper we shall print 
in Forest and Stream in the near future. 
Broadway presents many strange spectacles 
at times, by day and by night, but it is not often 
that deer traverse it. This happened one day 
last week when a deer escaped from an express 
company and scampered down the street, to be 
caught at last by a tug in the harbor, across which 
it essayed to swim. And here, as elsewhere 
under similar conditions, a motley crowd ran 
breathlessly after the frightened animal. The 
unaccustomed sight bred many a yarn. Staid 
business men, resolute in their intent to remain 
at their desks all summer, changed their plans 
as they plodded, perspiring freely from the exer¬ 
cise, back to their offices. They are buying rifles 
now and poring over shooting resort informa¬ 
tion booklets. 
