FOREST AND STREAM 
121 
WILD LIFE IN THE BERKSHIRES 
UNNOTICED BY THE SUMMER VISITOR 
BUT AN AMAZING LOT OF IT REMAINS 
By W. H. Spear. 
U P among the Berkshire Hills, famed 
far and near for their rugged gran¬ 
deur, and the Mecca of the summer 
visitors, live a denizen class, wild, strong 
and fierce. These are the wildcats of the 
Berkshires. Little is known outside of 
their reality, but ever since the days of the 
primitive savage they have made their home 
in the Berkshires and now and then the 
outer world gets an occasional glimpse of 
their existence when the newspapers men¬ 
tion one having been killed on the moun¬ 
tains near some well-known center of 
civilization, and then the people wonder 
and marvel over the .fact, and often are 
inclined to doubt the truth of the narrative. 
There is one individual, however, who 
does not doubt. He is the county treas¬ 
urer; the man who has to dip into the 
county’s strong box every time a wildcat 
is killed and has to hand over to its slayer 
$5 in the coin of the realm, as a bounty 
on the wildcat slain. This has been going 
on for years. It isn’t emphasized to any 
very great extent, and the world at large 
hears very little about it, but the treasurer 
knows, and the facts are entered from 
time to time upon his cashbook and ledgers 
and the records are all filed away. 
One hears of the wild game of the west, 
and it is exploited far and near that such 
and such an animal exists there, and has 
been slaughtered in numbers, but few there 
are who today realize that one has not to 
visit the west to find big game, nor to find 
a wooded country as wild and as rugged 
as ever yet awed the soul of the explorer. 
I can show you right here amid the Berk¬ 
shire Hills sections of country through 
which for more than eighty years the foot 
of man has probably never trod. 
There are sections of forest as primeval 
as they were in the days when the narrow 
trail of the Indian alone marked the path¬ 
way through these grand solitudes; a coun¬ 
try even to this day inhabited only by the 
wildcats, the bears, the moose, the elk, the 
fox, and the great variety of the smaller 
furred and feathered woods people. 
Strange, is it not, to think of big game 
within the very heart of New England civ¬ 
ilization? But it is here, and the sturdy 
hunter who is not afraid of encountering 
weariness and hardships of a wilderness 
journey, can be shown and the facts proven 
to his satisfaction, though he may have 
been raised in Missouri itself. 
I have spoken of the number of wild¬ 
cats that live in the Berkshires; let me 
here add a proof to that assertion, lest 
some nimrod reader of Forest and Stream 
doubt the truth of the claim. To clinch 
the fact, permit me to quote from the rec¬ 
ords of the county treasurer. These rec¬ 
ords show that in the last fourteen years 
254 wildcats have been killed in Berkshire 
County, upon which bounties have been 
paid. 
This does not include wildcats that have 
undoubtedly been killed during this period 
upon which no bounty has been collected, 
of which there have been many.' The ac¬ 
tual killings paid for have averaged eigh¬ 
teen every year for the past fourteen years, 
or since the bounty law went into effect 
in 1900. Last year’s record was twenty- 
eight. 
This shows that the number of these 
animals is not on the decrease in spite of 
the effort made at extermination. No one 
knows how many were killed prior to 1910, 
as no official records were then kept. 
That the home of the wildcat is not con¬ 
fined to any one section of the county is 
proved by the fact that of the thirty-one 
towns wildcats were killed in twenty towns 
and bounties paid on them. 
The county has paid in these fourteen 
years a total bounty of $1,270 on wildcats 
killed. Nor have the kills thus made been 
confined to isolated towns and villages. 
The largest towns and cities in the country 
have furnished their quotas, for wooded 
and mountainous country surround them 
all, and now and then a wildcat comes very 
close to the haunts of civilization. 
That the wilder sections, however, have 
yielded the largest returns in pelts, as is 
natural, is shown from the records, with 
Otis leading, with forty-five, Sandisfield 
but one behind, Monterey a close third 
with thirty-seven, New Marlboro next with 
twenty-nine, Sheffield with twenty-five, and 
stranger yet, Great Barrington, a town of 
6,000 inhabitants and one of the summer 
sections of the county with a record of 
eleven. 
When one takes into consideration the 
fact that this record represents only the 
animals actually killed on which bounties 
have been paid and not those that never 
came up for bounty, nor those that have 
escaped all these years the pursuit of hunt¬ 
ers, one may gain in a partial degree only, 
some idea of the number of these “varmint” 
that live in the Berkshires. It is a fair es¬ 
timate to reckon that not more than one 
in every thirty wildcats in the county was 
thus killed, and we have a conservative 
estimate of over 7,000 of these animals at 
large, within a total area of less than 1,000 
square miles, and within thirty-one town¬ 
ships. 
F AR back to the early settlement of the 
county more or less annoyance was 
felt by the settlers from wild animals. 
These comprised the black and brown bear, 
the wolf, which ranged the deep forests, 
and came at night to prey upon the cattle 
in the clearings. The catamount and wild¬ 
cat were thus early powerful enemies. 
Moose, red deer and bear were quite nu¬ 
merous and even now traces of beaver 
are met with in the meadows, where it 
felled trees to form a dam across the 
streamlets. 
I know of a pair of beavers at the pres¬ 
ent time living in a secluded section near 
the State line, Mass., that have formed a 
beaver house and when last noticed, just 
before winter set in, were forming a dam 
from a number of trees they had gnawed 
down for the purpose. I am watching 
them and hope the colony will grow, as I 
believe it will, unless some fool who has 
no love for nature or the study of the wood 
people accidentally blunders across it and 
shoots or kills the beavers before the coir 
ony has a chance to multiply. I have also 
been fortunate enough in my nature ram¬ 
bles to run across a pair of otter and have 
often been amused at their quaint antics. 
One day I came upon them on their slide, 
and, concealing myself, watched for some 
time their play as they tobogganed down 
the slide, for all the world like a pair of 
mischievous boys at play. 
T HE red fox, Canes vulpes, ranges the 
county and every season scores of them 
fall victims to the trappers’ and the 
hunters’ skill. The porcupine, the raccoon, 
Procyon lotor, are not uncommon, especially 
in the sparsely settled country regions. 
The mink and the muskrat are everywhere 
present, and their domain is as wide as 
the boundaries of the county. The wood¬ 
chuck and the polecat, Viverra mephitis, 
abound in almost every field and the for¬ 
mer are hunted by the pot hunters for 
their meat, which is sold to city restau¬ 
rants, later to masquerade as chicken and 
turtle soup, and the latter for their fur, 
which is worth from $3.75 to $5, according 
to size and quality. 
Nor is the hunter or the naturalist in 
his visit to the Berkshires confined to quad¬ 
rupeds alone, in his search for game or in 
his desire to study nature at her best. He 
will find there the quail, Perdix Virginiana, 
the partridge, Tetrao umbcllus, the wood¬ 
cock, Rusticulus minor, the snipe, Scolopax 
Wilsonii, and on most of the streams and 
lakes the wild duck of various species. 
In short, Berkshire County, Massachu¬ 
setts, has innumerable primitive sections 
where the real sportsman, the fellow who 
really loves to be near the great heart of 
nature, may revel amid scenery as grand 
as any that ever marked the grandeur of 
the Alps, or the sublimity of the Rockies; 
and yet he may be within easy walking or 
riding distance of advanced civilization. In 
fact, there are few sections of the country, 
which, considering the length of time they 
have been settled, offer better sport to the 
hunter or the naturalist than can be found 
amid the old Berkshire Hills. 
