Forest and Stream 
Terms, $3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy. I 
Six Months, $1.50. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MAY 2, 1908. 
VOL. LXX.—No. 18. 
No. 127 Franklin St., New York, 
JGSLiPlI H. TAYLOR. 
A WEEKLY JOURNAL. 
Copyright, 1908, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
George Bird Grinnell, President, 
Charles B. Reynolds, Secretary. 
Louis Dean Sfeir, Treasurer. 
127 Franklin Street, New York. 
THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL 
will be to studiously promote a healthful interest 
in outdoor recreation, and to cultivate a refined 
taste for natural objects. 
—Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 1873. 
NOTICE OF REMOVAL. 
The business office and editorial rooms of the 
Forest and stream Publishing Company are now 
located at 127 Franklin street, New York city. 
WORK THE BIRDS DO. 
Just at present we hear frequently of the 
great sums of money beihg spent in San Fran¬ 
cisco to exterminate the common house rat, while 
from the other side of the world, western 
Europe, tHere rise loud lamentations concern¬ 
ing the destruction caused by rodents to British 
crops and merchandise. We know that all over 
this country rats, mice and other small gnawing 
animals of various sorts are causing in city and 
country damage which is beyond calculation. 
Individually trifling, the sum total of this de¬ 
struction amounts to a vast sum. It is said that 
in one county of the State of Washington a 
species of ground squirrel destroys a half mil¬ 
lion dollars' worth of wheat annually. If the 
destruction wrought by these various rodents 
1 could be stopped, the country would be richer 
each year by hundreds of millions of dollars. 
Traps, poisons, noxious gases and contagious 
diseases as yet seem powerless, not only to ex * 
terminate these rodents, but even to keep their 
numbers down. Last autumn we printed an ac¬ 
count of a plague of field mice in the Humboldt 
Valley which swept off its agricultural products 
almost as in times past the Rocky Mountain 
locusts have swept the valley of the Platte. 
It is generally understood by thoughtful peo¬ 
ple that our forests are decreasing at such a 
rate as to threaten a lumber famine in the course 
of twenty-five years. Even the people who are 
not thoughtful stop and think a moment when 
they are obliged to buy a little lumber, for the 
prices charged for it now are two or three times 
what they used to be. Besides the harm done 
by fires and by wasteful cutting, the forests that 
are left are being destroyed by the attacks of 
borers which kill the trees and so still further 
lessen the supply of lumber. 
Every farmer knows that one of his chief 
labors when his crops are growing in summer 
is fighting weeds, either with hoe or cultivator. 
Weeds grow from seeds, and presumably the 
more seeds the farmer can destroy the fewer 
weeds he is likely to have to fight, it is known 
that sparrows of all sorts for food depend 
largely' on the seeds of various weeds, and while 
the food of the individual sparrow may perhaps 
amount to no more than a quarter of an ounce 
of seeds each day, yet these birds are so.numer¬ 
ous that it has been figured by an elaborate cal- 
cujmion that in igo 6 the sparrows of the coun¬ 
try* saved the farmers $ 35 , 000 , 000 , merely by 
their destruction of weed seeds. 
The most useful aids to the farmer in de¬ 
stroying the hordes of small rodents that prey 
upon his crop, his fruit trees and the contents 
of his house and barn are the hawks and owls, 
whose food these small mammals are. These 
birds are striving day and night the whole year 
around to capture this food. How enormously 
valuable to man are the services of these hawks 
and owls has been pointed out many times I y 
the experts who have studied their food, and 
may be seen even by the non-expert, who will 
take the trouble to pull to pieces one of the 
pellets of undigested material disgorged by owl 
or hawk, and will notice what it consists of. He 
will find that it is made up of the fur, skulls 
and large bones of mice or rats—in other words 
of destructive rodents. The man who kills a 
hawk or an owl, unless it be one of the thre'e 
or four harmful species, performs an ill service 
for the community where he kills it. 
The woodpeckers spend all their time, winter 
and summer, searching for grubs which bore 
into trees, and for the eggs of noxious insects 
which lie hidden in the crevices of the bark and 
the cracks in the dry wood; and every insect, 
grub or batch of eggs that they devour is just 
so much help to the owner of the w : ood lot by 
reducing the number of his enemies. 
It was in 1 S 68 that the German Society of 
Farmers and Foresters became alarmed at the 
constantly increasing depredations of insects, 
which was due to the great destruction of birds, 
and began to urge that an International agree 
ment should be had for the protection of birds 
useful to agriculture and forestry. They worked 
on this subject for nearly thirty years, and at last 
in TS 95 a meeting w : as called in laris and at¬ 
tended by delegates from all the countries of 
Europe. It was unanimously agreed that 1 ene- 
ficial species should be protected, but there was 
absolutely no agreement concerning the useful¬ 
ness and- noxiousness of the various species 
The delegates did not know what the birds ate. 
and so they did not know whether the birds were 
useful or harmful. To find out about this for 
America is a part of the work now being done 
by the United States Biological Survey. 
Both in the Northwest and in England un¬ 
seasonable snow storms and low temperatures 
have prevailed during the present week. Not a 
few angling journeysJiave been cut short, but 
it is to be hoped the birds have not suffered 
material loss at the nesting season. 
Joseph N. Taylor, who had spent more than 
forty years on the old plains, died at his home 
at Washburn, N. D.. April 9. 
Mr. Taylor was known in person to many 
people 
who 
traveled 
along 
the Missouri from 
1875 to 
iqoo, and by 
the 
books that 
he had 
written, 
to 
many people interested in 
the old 
West, • 
who 
yet had 
never 
seen the 
Missouri 
River. 
Mr. ’ 
1 ‘ayl 
or enlisted 
in the Union 
Army in 
1865 , and after the close of the war found him¬ 
self among the foothills of. the mountains in 
New Mexico and Colorado. From there he 
drifted slowly northeasterly, crossing Kansas and 
Nebraska—in both of which Stales be remained 
for some time—and finally settled on the Mis¬ 
souri River in Dakota. He lived long at 1 aiuted 
Woods. He was passionately devoted to wild 
life, to hunting, to observation of natural things 
_wild birds and animals and wild Indians—and 
many of his observations, ideas and feelings he 
set down in writing. A printer by trade, he 
afterward put these observations into type and 
himself printed and bound his several books. 
Their titles are: ‘'Frontier and Indian Life," 
“Twenty Years on the Trap Line,” "Kaleido¬ 
scopic Lives” and “Beavers and 1 heir \\ ays , 
and it is understood that at the time of his 
death he had another book in preparation. 
Mr. Taylor was distinctly a rough diamond; 
a man self made, of great force, and with one 
of the noblest and kindest of hearts. He never 
did a mean or unkind thing, and perhaps no 
man who ever lived was more helpful to others. 
If he had possessed the literary skill to put into 
fitting words the thoughts which struggled with¬ 
in him for expression, he would have been a 
great writer, and a great historian of the Mis¬ 
souri River. 
There was no reasonable excuse for the fool 
hardy action resulting in the loss of two lives 
in the Piscataquis rapids in Maine last week. 
Twice a young man tried to run them in a 
canoe, and twice he nearly lost his life. But 
the second time he persuaded two friends to 
accompany him, and as usually happens in such 
cases, they were lost. It is great sport to run 
rapids, but in doing so it is well to follow the 
example set by Indian and Canadian canoemen. 
With them a rapid can be run, or it cannot. 
* 
In a special message to Congress on Monday 
of this week, President Roosevelt urged action 
on the Appalachian bill now pending. On this 
subject he said: “Forest reserves should be es¬ 
tablished throughout the Appalachian Mountain 
region wherever it can be shown that they will 
have a direct and real connection with the con¬ 
servation and improvement of navigable rivers.” 
