October, 1918 
FOREST AND STREAM 
595 
THE PLAYGROUNDS OF CANADA 
OR many years the Dominion of Canada has done 
much to protect the natural beauties and the wild 
life of her territory. She has established a great system 
of parks and is guarding them wisely. Long ago she 
came to see that these parks are a great financial asset; 
that the beauties of their scenery and their expanses of 
untouched nature possess a money value for the Domin¬ 
ion which should not be overlooked. In this country we 
are gradually awakening to the importance of this same 
fact, and in Washington time and thought are now being 
devoted to the exploitation of the national parks of the 
United States. 
The terrible struggle that is now going on lends pecu¬ 
liar force to a sentence or two from the last report of 
the Commissioner of Dominion Parks. “The fundamen¬ 
tal purpose behind the establishment and maintenance of 
national parks is the development and maintenance of 
rugged, forceful, intelligent manhood. The most com¬ 
mon and the most successful treatment a physician pre¬ 
scribes for a patient is an order to go to the mountains 
or the seaside or the country. And the logic underlying 
this prescription is the same logic which brought about 
the creation of national parks. The curative results 
which follow such an outing are recognized to be due to 
the recreation in the out-of-doors involved in the trip.” 
The outdoor man is likely to be in all respects the good 
citizen. 
In the parks of the Dominion of Canada occur may of 
the large wild animals once widely distributed over por¬ 
tions of the western part of America. Deer, elk, moose, 
sheep, antelope and white goats are to be found here un¬ 
disturbed and unafraid in places easily accessible to the 
public. Canada has the greatest herd of buffalo in the 
world and many of these it will be remembered were sold 
to Canada by a resident of Montana. This herd, which 
now numbers more than 2,400 head, is distributed in dif¬ 
ferent parks, large and small. Recently a fine herd of 
elk was imported to Canada from the Yellowstone Na¬ 
tional Park. Within a year or two a band of fifty wild 
antelope was captured by building a fence around the 
area in which they ranged. This experiment has been 
successful up to the present time; the antelope have 
thriven and for the year show an increase of over twenty- 
so that there are now seventy in the reserve. 
This report furnishes interesting reading for all out¬ 
door men. Copies may be obtained upon application to 
Commissioner, J. B. Harkin, Department of the Interior, 
Ottawa, Canada. 
THE NATIONAL CROW SHOOT 
A MONG the various campaigns in the interest of food 
conservation that are the outcome of the present 
world’s conflict, the national crow shoot developed by the 
DuPont Company will naturally claim the interest of 
sportsmen and it also promises to be the most practical 
and far reaching movement that this country has ever 
known for the protection of its game birds. 
The arch enemy of game birds is the crow, and it is 
truly stated that each crow destroys more wild life an¬ 
nually than the mink, wild cat, fox, weasel or even the 
human hunter. There is no more fascinating sport 
than crow shooting, and letters being received in this 
office indicate that the movement for a National Organ¬ 
ization of Crow Shooters is progressing rapidly. 
The pecan growers of Mississippi have gone so far as 
to board and pay for ammunition used by crow shoot¬ 
ers. Kentucky farmers are inviting sportsmen onto 
their fields and park commissioners in western cities 
have arranged to kill crows because they destroy young 
quail. For a number of years there has been an organ¬ 
ization of crow shooters in Canton, South Dakota, and 
in the last two hunts a total of 158 shooters took part 
and 516 crows were killed. The destruction of a few 
hundred crows may seem like a small thing in itself, but 
when we consider that a young crow while in the nest 
will consume an amount of food equal to three or four 
times its own weight and that most of the food is made 
up of eggs and young of other birds, it is easy to com¬ 
prehend what their destruction means to the game sup¬ 
ply of the country. The number of sportsmen who go 
into the field each year in search of game is a very 
small number compared with the immense number of 
crows that are at work every day in the year, each one 
of which destroys more game than any human hunter. 
The National Crow Shoot is a most important move¬ 
ment in the interests of game protection and every 
sportsman should get into communication with the Du¬ 
Pont Company and assist them in the organization of 
this practical work in food and game conservation. 
BOOKS FOR THE SOLDIERS 
FIE readers of Forest and Stream are invited to look 
over their libraries with a selective eye and weed out 
those books that can be spared for our men in the serv¬ 
ice. The American Library Association has undertaken 
to supply reading matter to the men of our army and 
navy, wherever they may be. During the last seven 
months the Association has distributed approximately 
two million gift books to men in large and small camps 
and stations, to hospitals, transports and overseas. 
Books and magazines of all kinds are available; good 
stories; technical books on military tactics, electricity, 
machine shop work, trench fighting, aeronautics, auto¬ 
mobiles, gas and such subjects; poetry; biography; books 
about the war; in fact, all books that men like to read 
should be sent direct to the Library War .Service Head¬ 
quarters, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. 
NO COMPROMISE WITH LAW 
HE ladies of Petersburg, Alaska, recently requested 
Governor Riggs to secure permission for them to 
make coats for American aviators and line them with 
deer skins tanned by the natives. 
In speaking of the matter, Governor Riggs said that 
he thoroughly approved of the idea and wired the Sec¬ 
retary of Agriculture asking permission to export for 
military purposes skins to which there was no profit 
attached for manufacture. The request was denied on 
the ground that it was against the law and experts of 
the Department considered that it might promote the 
illegal killing of deer. The ruling of the Department 
in this matter will meet the approval of sportsmen 
everywhere. 
MERITING THE ANGLER’S GRATITUDE 
HE Bureau of Fisheries at Washington, D. C., have 
recently published a book entitled “The Rangeley 
Lakes of Maine” with special reference to fish culture 
and angling, by Williarh Converse Kendall. We believe 
that every angler who secures a copy of this book will 
feel grateful to Mr. Kendall, for it is a clearly written 
and comprehensive work on a section of the country in 
which all anglers are interested. 
The author is to be congratulated upon the readable 
manner in which he has presented the result of his in¬ 
vestigations and all anglers will feel grateful to the De¬ 
partment for the beautiful illustrations of interesting 
varieties of the trout family. The price is 35 cents. 
