338 
[Feb. 29, 1908. 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
Hunting in California. 
San Francisco, Cal., Feb. 7. —Editor Forest 
and Stream: Only about a week of the duck 
and quail season remains, and most of the gun 
clubs having lands on Suisun marsh are already 
closing up. The clubs of the north and south 
bay marshes will continue to hunt until the 
fifteenth. The recent rain storm caused the 
ducks to scatter in all directions, and sport is 
now poor in most sections. While ducks are 
numerous in the upper San Joaquin valley, they 
are said to be thin in flesh and in poor condi¬ 
tion for table use. 
The hunting has been very irregular most of 
the season. There has been a great deal of bad 
weather, and ducks have not been plentiful in 
most of the San Francisco Bay districts. The 
large flocks that usually congregate about the 
Alameda county tidewater have been conspicu¬ 
Sacramento Valley. The only game bird in¬ 
digenous to this State that may be killed after 
Feb. 15 is the English snipe. This bird is *well 
entitled to protection, and efforts have been 
made to have it included with other birds in 
the closed season, but the measure was defeated. 
The birds are becoming scarce in some sections 
where they were formerly met with in large 
numbers, and sportsmen are advocating a closed 
season of three years. 
A wholesale arrest was made last Saturday in 
Alameda, elqven hunters being gathered in from 
the mud flats for shooting after sundown. Two 
men were arrested last Thursday near Napa for 
hunting deer with dogs and were fined $50 each. 
Owing to bad weather the quail season h^s 
hardly been up to expectations, as the ground 
has been too soft for good hunting in the hilly 
country most of the time. The hunting has been 
rather scattered, with good sport in many places 
LAPLAND REINDEER. 
ous by their absence, and there has been little 
good shooting on the San Mateo shore. Good 
bags were taken on the Suisun marshes, espec¬ 
ially about two weeks ago, but most of the ducks 
have been in districts almost inaccessible to San 
Francisco hunters. Residents of the Fresno 
country say that there has been plenty of sport 
along the upper San Joaquin River and its tribu¬ 
tary sloughs, and there have been immense 
flocks in the overflow of last spring around 
Lake Tulare. Much of the Salton Sea coun¬ 
try around Imperial has also been submerged, 
and the few hunters who have visited that part 
have had fine sport. These districts, however, 
are so remote from San Francisco that few local 
hunters have gone there. At present the hunt¬ 
ing is very good around Petaluma, and the 
northern parts of the bay, where a good many 
snipe have been taken in the last few days. 
Many of the farmers in the vicinity of Peta¬ 
luma have decided to shut out hunters who for 
years past have had the privilege of shooting on 
their ranches. In future they intend to pro¬ 
tect the game for their own benefit, and have 
formed a club known as the Pleasure Seekers’ 
Hunting Club and intend to prosecute all tres¬ 
passers. 
The geese are affording excellent sport in the 
where there were few birds in former years, 
while some of the best places were very poor. 
On the whole a good many quail have been 
killed in places at some distance from San 
Francisco, but there has been so much hunting 
in this neighborhood that the birds arc becom¬ 
ing very scarce. Fanciers of quail shooting are 
in hopes that the fish and game commissioners 
will carry out their proposed scheme of trapping 
quail in lower California next season, when the 
birds are young, and planting them in parts of 
the country near at hand, where they will be 
protected by farmers until they accumulate. 
Such a measure would certainly be a boon to 
San Francisco sportsmen as comparatively little 
good quail hunting has been enjoyed in country 
accessible from this city for several years. 
A story comes from Reno that Michael Don¬ 
nelly and Harry McEwen, vaqueros of Elk 
county, Nevada, came upon a mountain lion 
lying by the roadside while on their way to 
their ranch in the interior. They lassoed the 
animal from both sides and held it stretched out 
between them, but McEwen’s rope broke and 
the lion started for Donnelly. His horse, how¬ 
ever, was able to keep ahead until the lion was 
exhausted, when Donnelly dragged it along until 
it choked to death. A. P. B. 
The Reindeer of Lapland. 
Within the last ten years, at least two cargoes 
of domesticated reindeer have been imported 
from Lapland to America, to say nothing of the 
much larger number introduced into Alaska 
from the land of the Tchukchi in Northern 
a 
Asia. 
But few people have visited Lapland and seen 
the domesticated reindeer of Northern Europe 
in their homes and cared for by their rude own¬ 
ers. Yet in Lapland and the highlands of Nor¬ 
way vast herds of these animals exist, and here 
too the wild reindeer are found, sometimes 
mingling with the tame ones, just as occasionally 
a tame one wanders off from his fellows and 
meeting a herd of the wild takes up the savage 
life of his ancestors. Their summer pasture 
consists of rolling uplands, 3,000 feet above the 
sea level; a treeless country, where grass and 
creeping shrubs and wide stretches of moss are 
the only vegetation, a land for the most part of 
utter solitude. Here the tame reindeer pastures, 
herded usually by a man and his wife, assisted 
by one or more dogs. The reindeer are absolute¬ 
ly tame and regard the approach of a human 
being with the indifference shown by the domes¬ 
tic cow. 
The Lapps, a people of Mongolian blood, are 
supported chiefly by the reindeer, whose scanty 
rich milk they use for making cheese and some¬ 
times butter; though there are some Lapps who 
cultivate the ground and raise small crops. 
The importation of reindeer to Northern New¬ 
foundland and Labrador has the same purpose 
as the importation of the Tchukchi reindeer to 
Alaska, and there is no apparent reason why 
both efforts should no.t succeed, nor indeed why 
the native caribou should not be domesticated 
as those of Northern Europe have been from 
time immemorial. In Northern Asia, they are 
used not only for hauling sledges on the snow 
in winter, but also as pack and even saddle ani¬ 
mals. 
The domesticated reindeer have lost their na¬ 
tive color and are sometimes white, sometimes 
brown, sometimes even almost black or spotted. 
Newfoundland Game. 
St. John’s, N. F., Feb. 10 . — Editor Forest and 
Stream: Ruffed grouse or partridge are not very 
plentiful at present. They sell readily for $t per 
brace where two or three years ago they could 
be had for half that price. 
Rabbits are not as plentiful either as they 
were a few years ago. Various causes are as¬ 
signed for the scarcity. Some persons who 
came in from the country last week reported 
that the lynx have killed numbers of them. 
They saw hundreds of rabbits lying around the 
woods in the interior, with pieces out of their 
throats, pointing to their destruction by lynx. 
A few years ago rabbits sold for twenty cents 
per brace, now they fetch thirty-five or forty 
cents and are not easily to be had for that price. 
The trouting season opened last month. A 
great many large catches were reported. Among 
others a local paper reported that one man from 
a neighboring village brought to town sixty 
dozen splendid trout and sold them for thirty 
cents per dozen. 
W. J. Carroll. 
