772 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[May 14, 1910. 
them on several occasions I did not once find any 
bird remains. In all cases they were composed 
of the fur and bones of small rodents, mostly 
mice. 
Weasels are also almost universally persecuted 
on account of their propensity to get into the 
poultry house, yet I am of the opinion that it is 
the exception rather than the rule for a weasel 
to take to killing poultry. Their usual food is 
the blood of such small animals as mice, rabbits 
and gophers. That they sometimes kill poultry 
and birds is too well known to admit of ques¬ 
tion. They are the relentless enemies of pocket 
gophers and pursue them in their underground 
burrows where they are beyond the reach of 
most of their natural enemies. The skunk and 
bull snake are about the only serious enemies 
that the pocket gopher has to meet beside the 
weasel. The pocket gopher is a serious pest in 
the Mississippi valley and is constantly on the 
increase in spite of the bounties paid in many 
localities. Last summer my attention was called 
to a meadow that was spotted all over with 
hundreds of gopher mounds. 
One day while walking there with a friend we 
saw a weasel running about in search of an open 
burrow. We watched his movements until he 
entered a hole. This spring hardly a gopher re¬ 
mains in that field. How much of the change is 
to be credited to the weasel I cannot tell, but 
am inclined to give him much of the credit. A 
single weasel will destroy a great number of 
gophers or other small animals. They often live 
in groups of from three to half a dozen, and it 
is easy to see that such a family would soon 
clear out a large colony of gophers. 
On one occasion, when our place had been 
overrun with rats and mice for some time, a 
family of five weasels settled under a box in 
one of our outbuildings. They could be seen 
frequently moving about the buildings and wood 
piles. The hens were as usual roosting in a 
small house with roots near the ground and the 
door open. The hen house was within a short 
distance of the place where the weasels were 
located, yet not a hen was disturbed during the 
time that the weasels remained. It is needless 
to add that the rats and mice were quickly re¬ 
duced in numbers. 
The little spotted skunk ( Spilogale interrupla ) 
commonly called polecat or civet cat, is another 
much-wronged individual. Several different 
times we have had them about the place, much 
to the discomfort of the rats and without injury 
to the poultry. One winter a colony of rats 
established themselves under a big pile of cobs 
which we used for fuel, and which were stored 
in the wood house. They were beyond the reach 
of ordinary means, and too sharp for traps or 
poison. A sleek cat residing at a nearby farm 
house had such a reputation as a rat catcher 
that we borrowed her and confined her in the 
building without apparent result. The rats were 
as abundant and destructive as ever until we re¬ 
turned the cat in disgust. About that time a 
little skunk moved into the wood house. The 
rats very promptly moved out and not a sign 
of a rat was to be seen for many months. The 
same process was repeated again the past winter 
with the same result. In neither instance did 
the skunks trouble the poultry, although they 
were within easy reach. These little skunks are 
often caught in steel traps set in pocket gopher 
burrows, which indicates that they assist the 
weasels in keeping the gophers in check. In my 
opinion, however, mice and insects form the 
principal food of these animals. 
In contrast let me mention a cat case that 
came to my notice. The owner of the cat had 
a large number of young chickens, some of which 
were regularly missing. The missing chicks of 
course were charged to skunks or weasels and 
a watch was kept for their appearance. Great 
was the surprise when, on looking out of the 
window, the house cat was observed to creep 
from under a shed, and after taking a hasty 
-survey to make sure that no one was about, 
seize a chick and run back under the shed. The 
cat was of course put out of the chicken killing 
business on short notice, and the number of 
chicks was not further unaccountably diminished. 
My observations lead me to the conclusion 
that chicken killing is not more common among 
skunks and weasels than among cats, and that 
if cats should be protected, these wild things 
should likewise be encouraged. If the whole¬ 
sale destruction of skunks and weasels is justi¬ 
fied, cats also should be indiscriminately de¬ 
stroyed, for the skunks and weasels are more 
effective in destroying mice and rats than are 
cats, and not more destructive to poultry and 
birds. Frank G. Pellett. 
Kidney Worms in Mink. 
Brewer, Me., May 5. — Editor Forest and 
Stream: Two or three springs ago, while talk¬ 
ing with an old and thoroughly experienced 
trapper, he told me that the week before he had 
taken a mink with a curious affection and pro¬ 
ceeded to explain the case to see whether I had 
ever known anything like it. He said that in 
skinning the animal he had perceived a hard 
bunch or ball in the stomach—stomach to him 
meaning, as I understood, almost any point in 
the middle of the beast—and he decided when 
he had finished removing the pelt to make an 
examination and find out what the mink had 
been eating. Much to his surprise, he said, he 
found something that, as he expressed it, “had 
grown in him” and “looked more like the stone 
of a peach” than like anything else he could 
think of. It was quite hard, and when he cut 
it open he found it to be full of “red worms.” 
He was altogether too good a man to doubt 
for a moment, and moreover a keen observer 
with a record of years spent in the field, so 
there was nothing to do but to accept the matter 
just as he had stated it, but I was wholly at 
loss for an explanation, never having seen any¬ 
thing like this in any animal. 
About April 2, my companion on a camping 
trip took a small mink out of a muskrat trap 
and tossed it the length of the canoe for me to 
examine, it being somewhat of a question what 
the fur would be worth so late in the season. 
As I passed my hands over it in rubbing the 
water out I noticed a strange ball of something 
about midway of the abdomen. It recalled the 
case already mentioned, and later when we skin¬ 
ned the animal, we made a careful examination. 
The mink was a small female with no trace 
of young. She was short and stocky and was 
rather fat. The fur was good considering the 
season. She seemed healthy. The hard object 
proved to be the right kidney, but so changed 
from the left, which seemed normal, and lay 
sligl tlj ’ower down that we should not have 
recognized it except by its location. It was of 
a sickly purple, mottled with white and corru¬ 
gated, resembling the inner skin of a fowl’s giz¬ 
zard more than anything which comes to mind. It 
appeared hard to the touch. On cutting it open 
we found two or three red worms at least three 
inches in length and of about the diameter of a 
small earth worm, somewhat rigid and with an 
open sucker at the end like a section of garden 
hose. In color they were of a light, but very 
bright scarlet, of a most disagreeable appearance, 
so that we threw them into the fire without the 
slightest ceremony. They made up the entire 
contents of the kidney, which collapsed upon 
their removal like a crushed turtle’s egg. 
These two mink were taken at points within 
ten miles of each other, and as mink are strong 
rangers, they might easily have known the same 
brooks in their time. 
Cases of this sort may be well known to scien¬ 
tific men and even to laymen, but these are the 
only instances I have ever heard of, and I men¬ 
tion the facts for what they may be worth. 
W. M. H 
[The worms here described belong to the group 
known as Nemathelminthes, or round worms, and 
occur as parasites in the kidneys of a number of 
carnivorous animals. It would be impossible to 
say definitely what these were without seeing 
them, but Prof. C. W. Stiles, on reading the de¬ 
scription, says that it sounds suspiciously like 
young specimens of the dog kidney worm ( Dioc- 
tophyme renale). —Editor.] 
Food of a Stray Wild Duck. 
A female king eider duck was captured by J. 
T. Lloyd on the Seneca River, New York, Nov. 
26, 1909. The bird was a long way from home, 
a rare straggler for Central New York, and was 
an interesting specimen. It was preserved for 
the Cornell University Museum, and its stomach 
and gizzard were examined for food. In a recent 
issue of Science, G. C. Embody has described 
the contents of this stomach which, in view of 
the lack of specific knowledge about the food 
of our wild ducks, is very interesting. The crop 
and stomach contained one fish of the sort known 
as Johnnie darter, two leopard frogs, three 
whirligig beetles (Cyrinus ), sixty-seven fresh¬ 
water “shrimps” ( Gammarus ) and one little 
shell ( Planorbis ). 
In the gizzard were found the bones of one 
frog, two whirligig beetles, two water boatmen 
(Corisa), six crustaceans, most of them “shrimp,” 
and a half dozen molluscan shells of one sort 
and another. There was also a little vegetable 
matter, two seeds and some pieces of leaves and 
a few grains of sand. 
Oddly enough all the food in stomach, crop and 
gizzard was quite fresh and had only recently 
been captured. We should be inclined to imagine 
that this with the small amount of sand in the 
gizzard showed that the bird had journeyed far 
and had not fed for a long time. 
Rochester’s Bird Day Man. 
Charles A. Green, president of Green’s Nur¬ 
sery Co., of Rochester, N. Y., is known in that 
city as “the Bird Day Man”; for he established 
—and for seven years past has annually cele¬ 
brated, with bands of music and speeches—Bird 
Day in Rochester. Mr. Green is the editor and 
proprietor of Green’s Fruit Grower. 
