94 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[July 17, 1909- 
you rise, and instinctively picking your birds 
and giving them a strong swinging lead, you 
press the trigger. Two sharp reports, two birds 
cut down in their course as if by a thunderbolt, 
and two heavy splashes in the water outside 
your decoys tell the story. The handsome 
birds, still gracefully superb, drift lightly away 
on the tide. 
And so through the glorious sunrise and till 
late in the morning you lie ambushed on the 
bosom of the bay, the cloud-strewn blue spread 
above and the wind-stirred waters rippling past 
you The hay stacks on the distant meadow 
barely loom above the haze of the horizon, and 
take the appearance of a flock of birds feeding 
on the water. You are keenly alert to all that 
comes within your sphere of vision, and brant, 
ducks, geese, hawks, coots, cormorants, shore 
birds and gulls, pass and repass you in graceful 
flight, each bound on its own mission. The ex¬ 
pert catches sight of the birds when mere faint 
specks in the distance, and though he can barely 
see them, he recognizes each one by its char¬ 
acteristic flight and varying wing stroke. And 
ever must you be watchful lest some stray brant 
or duck slip upon you unawares and flash past 
your decoys and out of range before you can 
rise to shoot. And so with an occasional easy 
shot, and many difficult ones the morning 
passes and toward mid-day you lift the lig 
and pole back across the bay to the landing. 
However rapacious your hunger may be, it 
soon fades before the feast that is awaiting you 
at the farmhouse of John Wishart. As lor 
mine host himself, he is a man not easily foi- 
gotten; he belongs to the vanishing type that 
once roamed the untracked wilds of Canada. A 
big raw-boned grizzled Scotchman, he is still 
robust in spite of his sixty-odd years and still 
impresses you as a man of rugged strength and 
determination. In his youth, they say, he 
thought nothing of poling his canoe thirty-five 
miles to the nearest town in one day. Perhaps, 
if you have done some poling yourself, you will 
be somewhat incredulous, but if you could take 
one good look at the man himself you would 
not question it. 
On the whole the brant shooting of Tabusin- 
tac can be ranked as a decidedly difficult and 
strenuous sport. Brant are naturally among 
the tamest of wildfowl, but a very little shoot¬ 
ing soon transforms them into a highly cautious 
and suspicious bird. At the first of the season 
they will sometimes come right in over the de¬ 
coys and give you the easiest kind of a shot, 
but by far the greater part of the shooting is at 
fast erratic birds at long range—birds that head 
straight for your decoys and then suddenly 
sheer off and give you a hard shot just within 
the range limit of a 12-gauge. I should say that 
on my last trip at least half of my birds were 
killed outside of sixty yards. Of course this 
means a full choked gun, a heavy load, large 
shot, and many wasted shells. Luckily a 
wounded brant is almost never lost, as . they 
cannot swim under water and are easily picked 
up by the boatman. 
Usually the best shooting is in very stormy 
weather, when a fifty- or sixty-mile gale sweeps 
across the waters and breaks up the big bedded 
flocks. The birds then become restless, are 
constantly on the wing, and also decoy much 
better. On days like this none but the hardy 
and reckless venture out. The men who are 
able and willing to pole their frail canoes 
against the storms and to lie half a day in a 
sink box with the spray splashing over them 
and coating them with ice, can qualify as wild¬ 
fowl gunners of the first order. lhen, too, 
when you are bundled up in heavy clothes and 
your fingers are numb inside your frozen mits, 
it takes a shot to cut down a brant flickering 
overhead in the gale, and it takes a tiue 
sportsman to cheerfully face such hardships. 
Even in calm weather, poling across the bay be¬ 
fore daylight, with the salt-water ice freezing 
to the dripping pole between your grips, is no 
job for a tenderfoot. Those who are used to 
club shooting grounds, where they can sit in a 
comfortable blind and need only raise, their 
hand to pull a trigger, will hardly appreciate it. 
The goose shooting is at its best during 
November and early December. They are not 
so numerous as the brant, although there are 
sometimes several thousand gathered in the 
bay, and they are even shyer. Shots at geese 
from a battery are rather rare, as they usually 
fly high and are much too wary to be fooled 
by such a rig. But there is a chance to get 
them on the sandbars. The hunter buries an 
oblong water-tight box—just big enough to lie 
down in and locally called a batteau—level with 
the sand near the water’s edge, places his de¬ 
coys on the sand around him and in the water in 
front, and his concealment is nearly perfect. But 
even then flock after flock of geese will honk 
loudly and pause in their flight, only to pass 
onward just out of gun-shot. Often the young 
geese will set their wings for the decoys and 
then be called back by a sharp warning note 
from the older birds, but every now and then 
a flock will stray too near and a skillful shot 
will cause a huge bird to tumble high from the 
air, strike with a mighty splash and lie limp 
upon the water. One such magnificent bird is 
a glorious reward for hours of strenuous toil 
and patient waiting. The Canada goose can 
justly be called the big game of the heavens. 
From gray dawn till after sunset on an icy 
November day I have laid out on a baie sand¬ 
bar and returned in the gathering darkness 
more than satisfied with my three or four geese 
lying across the bow of the canoe. Such is the 
shooting of Tabusintac, and for those who love 
the call of the wild goose and the whirr of 
swiftly beating wings, it has a superb fascination. 
As for photographing wildfowl, it has an in¬ 
terest almost surpassing that of the shooting. 
A camera with a high-speed lens, and a rapid 
shutter, provided with a full-size, upright- 
image focusing mirror, is a necessity. Even 
then it is a matter of great difficulty to get a 
good picture of birds on the wing. Usually the 
light conditions are against you and you must 
use a wide stop to get sufficient exposure and 
high speed to arrest the motion, inevitably 
sacrificing sharpness of delineation and depth 
of focus. In practice I find that results are 
worthless with any shutter speed less than one 
six-hundredth of a second, and even this is too 
slow if the birds are in fast flight and close to 
you; then you must raise your speed to at least 
one one-thousanth of a second. It is best to 
previously focus your camera at the distance— 
usually universal focus for your lens at which 
you expect to snap your object, as it is almost 
hopeless to adjust the correct focus on a bird 
in flight. James Sullivan. 
The Louisiana Shooting Season. 
New Orleans, July 7.— Editor Forest and 
Stream: The new licenses for this season have 
been issued by the State Game Commission and 
entitle the holders to hunt in Louisiana from 
the present date until May 15, I 9 10 - 4 he only 
game which the law allows to be killed at the 
present time are rabbits and squirrels. Doves, 1 
snipe, sandpipers, chorooks and papabotte may 
be hunted from September 1. The season opens 
October 1 for geese, brant, sea and river ducks, I 
blue-wmged teal, rails, mudhens, coots, galli- 
nules, tattlers, curlew and plover. On Novem¬ 
ber 1 those with licenses may hunt wild turkeys 
(cocks only), quail and woodducks. Deer may 
be killed beginning in October and lasting five 
months, the exact time to be named by the 
police juries of the several parishes. Bucks 
only can be killed. The price of the licenses is 
put down at $1 for residents of Louisiana and 
$25 for non-resident hunters. The Game Com¬ 
mission has recommended to the Legislature 
that the license fee for non-residents be placed 
at $15 instead of $25. 
The law does not allow hunting between sun¬ 
set and sunrise and limits the bag of any indi¬ 
vidual to 25 birds in a single day. Two deer 
may be killed by a hunter in one day, but not 
more than six during a season. The season for 
otters, minks, muskrats and other fur-bearing 
animals begins in the fall, usually November. 
The commission has issued 100,000 license 
blanks and it is thought all of them will be sold. 
The licenses consist of specially prepared paper 
which is impervious to water, exceedingly dura¬ 
ble and cannot be torn by ordinary usage. 
Some of the members of the local Audubon 
Society have criticised President Miller and the 
Game Commission for the interpretation of the 
laws. The society as a body has not condemned 
the commission, but two or three of the mem¬ 
bers have done so in the local newspapers. Mr. 
Miller came out in a card denouncing one of 
the members and declaring that statements made 
in a reported interview about the commission 
and himself as president were untrue. Mr. Mil¬ 
ler denies that the commission has suspended 
the law or shown any favoritism in its adminis-, 
tration. Pie stated that the law was suspended 
only in one instance when it was shown the peo¬ 
ple of a certain community were suffering from 
the effects of floods and the destruction of their' 
crops by the weevil and relief was imperative. 
President Miller, who has just returned from 
a week’s trip to Breton, Audubon and other 
islands in the Gulf of Mexico near the Louisi¬ 
ana boundary, reports a complete destruction of 
young birds and eggs on the several islands. 
He says the entire group of twenty-five islands 
usually produces anywhere between 150.000 and 
250,000 birds a season, but this year he does not 
expect as many as 1,000. The destruction was 
caused by high waves, almost tidal waves. He 
says: “I never saw such utter and complete 
destruction of bird life in all my life; it was 
simply pitiable to see it. This group of islands 
can be counted on for at least 200,000 birds 
annually, but this year there will scarcely he 
one thousand. The principal birds inhabiting 
these islands are the royal tern, the laughin? 
gull, the Louisiana 
the Foster tern and 
greatly disappointed 
heron, the snowy heron 
the black skimmer. I was 
to find such chaos and 
