972 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 18, 1910. 
May 30, after the nest was destroyed. Although 
the nest was examined occasionally and watch 
kept for a portion of many days, only the one 
chicken was known to have been killed. While, 
of course, it is quite probable that in time of 
short supply of the preferred food others were 
taken, a sufficiently careful observation was 
made to show positively that by far the greater 
portion of the food consisted of small mammals. 
This county has been paying a cash bounty of 
ten cents per head for the destruction of pocket 
gophers, and I feel safe in placing the number 
caught by this pair of hawks at not less than one 
hundred for the season. At the bounty rate they 
would be entitled to ten dollars for gophers, to 
say nothing of the hundreds of prairie squirrels 
and field mice. This amount wou’d pay ten per 
cent, interest on one hundred dollars. Allow¬ 
ing half of this to pay for the occasional chicken, 
it is still evident that a pair of red-tailed hawks 
are worth fifty dollars to any community that 
can afford to pay a bounty for gophers or prairie 
squirrels. Frank C. Pellett. 
Glacier National Park. 
x\kron, Ohio, May 31.— Editor Forest and 
Stream: I offer you my congratulations on your 
long continued and successful efforts toward the 
establishment of the Glacier National Park. I 
have never seen that region, possibly I may never 
get far enough from home to step within its 
borders, yet in common with all Americans of 
, to-day and of coming generations, I owe you a 
debt of gratitude. 
If I have never seen the Glacier National Park, 
at least I have read much about it. I think it 
was in 1885 or 1886 that Forest and Stream 
published a long serial, headed, I believe, “To 
the Walled-in Lakes,” which told of the lakes, 
the mountains,, of an Indian hunting party met 
there and a trip with them back into the hills 
‘for sheep. Again two or three years later came 
1 the series called “The Rock Climbers,” dealing 
with the same region, and so for years Forest 
.and Stream has devoted espeqial attention to 
this wonderful mountain country, and its atten¬ 
tive readers have not failed to get a clear idea 
of its beauties, the abundance of its indigenous 
life and its fitness for a game preserve. 
And now the Glacier National Park has been 
set aside forever as a pleasure ground for the 
American people, and chiefly through the efforts 
of Forest and Stream. I resist here the temp¬ 
tation to say finis coronat opus, for, as a matter 
of fact, the work of Forest and Stream will 
never be crowned save in the hearts of its faith¬ 
ful readers, and will never be ended so long as 
abuses continue to exist. W. G. DeG. 
New Mammals. 
In Article XII. of Volume XXVIII., of the 
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural 
History, Dr. J. A. Allen describes a small but 
interesting collection of mammals from Vene¬ 
zuela, collected for the museum by M. A. Carri- 
ker, Jr., during November and December, 1909. 
Among these is a new species of bat of the 
genus Chrotopterus , which Dr. Allen has named 
after the collector. 
Article XIII., in the same volume, by Dr. D. 
G. Elliott, deals with the genus Tarsius, small 
lemurs from the East Indian Islands, discussing 
Buff on’s name Le Tarsier, and describing two 
new species of Tarsius. 
Injury by Field Mice. 
New York City, June 10.— -Editor Forest and 
Stream: In Forest and Stream for June 11 
reference is made to the letter of a correspond¬ 
ent who stated that he had lost several thousand 
young white pine trees in Connecticut from the 
depredations of “field mice which ate the root¬ 
lets and root bark.” 
If your correspondent’s time is worth ten dol¬ 
lars per day, and if he will take six days for 
catching one of the “field mice,” I think he will 
find that it is a little smaller than the common 
field mouse, and that it corresponds to the de¬ 
scription of the pine mouse. The pine mouse 
appears to be one of the most destructive ro¬ 
dents in Connecticut, destroying not only young 
pine trees, but eating the bark of the roots of 
chestnuts, hickories, walnuts and various or¬ 
chard trees, beside its ordinary toll from the 
bottom end of all sorts of garden vegetables. 
It is the little beast that brings the mole into 
discredit, for it runs along beneath the surface 
very much like a mole, and it is difficult to dis¬ 
tinguish between their respective runways, ex¬ 
cepting that here and there we will find a small 
hole leading to outdoors in the course of the 
runway of the pine mouse. The common field 
mouse and the pine mouse also use the runways 
of the mole. I cannot hold yp my right hand 
and swear which one of the three has done any 
particularly mean job, because it is all that I 
can do to keep track of all that is going on on 
top of the ground in Connecticut, but I can hold 
up both hands and swear, and often do so, on 
discovering what has been done beneath the sur¬ 
face of the ground. The circumstantial evi¬ 
dence, however, would usually lead one to hang 
the pine mouse, but let us see you catch him 
to hang him. 
I have tried various kinds of poisons, begin¬ 
ning with one that was effective in the barn. 
Three parts of beef tallow were mixed with one 
part of barium carbonate and balls of the mass 
were dropped into mouse and rat holes. The 
rats were suspicious and lugged some of the 
balls out of their holes and hid them in some 
cut feed that was to be given to the prize heifer 
in the morning. Then they sat around to see 
what the stuff would do to the heifer. While 
they did not come close to observe the post 
mortem that we made at noon, they seemed 
satisfied with the general trend of testimony and 
left the balls alone subsequently. The two pet 
Angora cats got under the barn floor and ate 
what the rats and mice would not eat, and the 
only cat that was left was an old mongrel that 
we had tried to lose and could not. Having lost 
the heifer and the two Angoras, I was con¬ 
vinced that the mixture was deadly enough if 
we could only manage to get it into anything, 
and a number of the balls were placed in run¬ 
ways of pine mice. The balls were dug up 
later untouched. 
I have tried practically all of the poison for¬ 
mulas given in Government reports and in vari¬ 
ous agricultural publications, and the best one 
seems to be English walnut meats chopped up 
fine and poisoned with strychnine, one drachm 
of sulphate of strychnine sprinkled over five 
pounds of chopped nut meats and the whole then 
thoroughly mashed up together. The mixture 
is put back into empty nut shells and these are 
placed in runways of pine mice and field mice. 
I do not know that it kills any of the mice, but 
they eat a good deal of it. One of my men says 
that it constitutes a tonic and leads the mice to 
breed more frequently than they did heretofore. 
Your correspondent can protect his young 
white pines against mice by surrounding each 
tree with a circle of wire mosquito netting 
buried four inches beneath the ground. The 
pines will then grow large enough to attract the 
attention of red squirrels and rabbits, which will 
leave enough however to undergo destruction by 
the white aphis, unless they have been previously 
shaded out by thick growing verdure overhead. 
If one is fond of outdoor exercise and has 
natural concentration of attention, he can raise 
a few white pine trees in Connecticut. 
Robert T. Morris. 
Mr. Roosevelt’s Other Side. 
That portion of the public which devotes it¬ 
self to finding fault with the rest of the world— 
and this section is noisy, if not large—spends 
some of its time in holding up Theodore Roose¬ 
velt as a frightful example of a bloody-minded 
butcher, whose chief joy it is to kill things. 
It is not generally known—though it ought to 
be—that Mr. Roosevelt, while a good hunter, 
mountaineer, prairie man and now African 
traveler, is at heart a naturalist and enjoys few 
things so much as the observation of nature. 
No man but a close observer, and one whose 
soul drinks in with keen enjoyment the beauties 
of the American spring, could have written in 
Africa this description, which appears in the 
June Scribner’s: 
“In this part of Africa, where flowers bloom 
and birds sing all the year round, there is no 
such burst of bloom and song as in the northern 
spring and early summer. There is nothing Lke 
the mass of blossoms which carpet the meadows 
of the high mountain valleys and far northern 
meadows, during their brief high tide of life, 
when one short joyous burst of teeming and 
vital beauty atones for the long death of the 
iron fall and winter. So it is with the bird 
songs. Many of them are beautiful,, though, to 
my eyes, none quite as beautiful as the best of 
our bird songs. At any rate there is nothing 
that quite corresponds to the chorus that dur¬ 
ing May and June moves northward from the 
Gulf States and Southern California to Maine, 
Minnesota and Oregon, to Ontario and Sas¬ 
katchewan ; when there comes the great vernal 
burst of bloom and song; when the mayflower, 
bloodroot, wake-robin, anemone, adder’s tongue, 
liverwort, shadblow, dogwood, redbud gladden 
the woods; when mockingbirds and cardinals 
sing in the magnolia groves of the South, and 
hermit thrushes, winter wrens and sweetheart 
sparrows in the spruce and hemlock forests of 
the North; when bobolinks in the East and 
meadowlarks East and West sing in the fields; 
and water ousels by the cold streams of the 
Rockies, and canon wrens in their sheer gorges; 
when from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific 
wood thrushes, veeries, rufous-backed thrushes, 
robins, bluebirds, orioles, thrashers, catbirds, 
house finches, song sparrows—some in the East, 
some in the West, some both East and West— 
and many, many other singers thrill the gardens 
at sunrise; until the long days begin to shorten, 
and tawny lilies burn by the roads'de, and the 
indigo buntings trill from the tops of little trees 
throughout the hot afternoons.” 
