332 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Aug. 27, 1910. 
The little northwest fish crows rob them by su¬ 
perior cunning only. 
By the way, another of Mr. Green’s amazing 
discoveries is that these crows there breed quite 
frequently on the ground beneath a windfall, 
with trees all about. 
He also found red-throated loon and semi- 
palmated plover breeding commonly—the south¬ 
ernmost records for these birds on the Pacific 
Coast. Mr. Green is a thoroughly reliable ob¬ 
server and a keen ornithologist. 
• There is still much to be learned on the 
Queen Charlottes, especially on the north end of 
Graham Island, near Virago Sound, where the 
caribou are. Swans breed there, probably trum¬ 
peters, and ptarmigan are said to occur on the 
mountain tops. These will doubtless prove a 
new species. The mysterious marbled murrelet 
is said by Indians to breed on an islet to the 
north in large numbers. Edenshaw, a well 
known Indian of Masset, brought two hundred 
of their eggs for Mr. Green, but finding him 
absent, he ate them all—a priceless feast. 
The red-tail of the islands is of course the 
Western subspecies calunts. Allan Brooks. 
Weight of Ruffed Grouse. 
Brewer, Me., Aug. 16 .—Editor Forest and 
Stream: I see that in a pamphlet on the intro¬ 
duction of the Hungarian partridge into the 
United States the following figures are given as 
the measurements and weight of the ruffed 
grouse: 
Length, 16 to 18 inches. Extent, 23 inches. 
Weight, 30 to 40 ounces. 
I used to kill at least fifty ruffed grouse an¬ 
nually, and for many years we weighed many of 
the largest, and our record gives the weight of 
the largest of many hundreds. 
We found that the females weighed from 18 to 
20 ounces, a few going a trifle below or above 
these figures. The males weighed from 24 to 26 
ounces, occasionally one, two or three ounces 
heavier, and we have a record of one 31 and 
another 32 ounces. These are as large as I 
have ever shot in shooting some 2,000 of our 
Maine ruffed grouse, and I very much doubt if 
one weighing 40 ounces was ever killed in North 
America. As to length, we have a record of one 
22 inches and another 23% inches. 
Manly Hardy. 
National Parks in Germany. 
Consul-General Richard Guenther, of 
Frankfort, Germany, reports that the American 
national parks have excited admiration in 
Europe, and that a strong movement has been 
started in Germany and Austria to make similar 
reservations. The Kosmos Association of Natu¬ 
ralists in Stuttgart, the Duerer League and the 
Austrian Imperial Association for Ornithology 
In Vienna have united in an address to the pub¬ 
lic calling for subscriptions to create a Natural 
Protective Park, which is to be a small copy 
of the Yellowstone National Park. This address 
was published last spring and was followed by 
a convention in Munich of naturalists and scien¬ 
tists from all parts of Germany. An organiza¬ 
tion was effected with headquarters at Stuttgart. 
The plan advocated is to create three large parks 
in the mountains, the central highlands and the 
northern lowlands of Germany. The main object 
is to preserve and increase certain species of 
animal and plant life. 
Hunting With the Eyes. 
Concluded from page 292. 
Our next door neighbor had leased all of the 
unimproved property about us for farming pur¬ 
poses. He was a pessimist as well as a farmer, 
and never saw good in anything or anybody. 
During harvesting time he spent almost all of 
his time shooting crows. He said they stole 
too many of his chickens. I remonstrated with 
him for doing this, saying that he could' afford 
to let them have an occasional chicken, as they 
were great savers of his crops in the way of 
eating the insects and field mice that were de¬ 
structive to them. One day while we were stand¬ 
ing discussing the subject we heard the alarm 
cry of a mother hen. Instantly the little chickens 
scattered in every direction, but too late, for 
suddenly a crow darted like an arrow from his 
perch in a tree, and seizing one of the brood 
in his claws, bore it away. It was all done in 
an instant. The remarkable thing about it was 
that he used his claws as a means of carrying 
the chicken rather than his beak. 
“There!’’ said Mr. Tucker, watching the crow 
closely, “Eve seen that thing done a hundred 
times. That crow has been watching that brood 
of chickens maybe an hour, and before he left 
his perch his mind was made up which one he 
would take.” 
“Oil, well, Mr. Tucker,” I replied, “you do 
not dislike the crow. You only feel sorry for 
the chicken.” He smiled and walked away. 
I waited a long while for the frightened mother 
to reappear. At length I saw her steal cau¬ 
tiously out from her hiding place in the weeds 
and turn up first one eye and then the other as 
if to see that her enemy was gone. She seemed 
to become satisfied that the danger was over and 
in answer to her low clucking, her little ones 
gathered around her. She spread her wings, 
the little ones cuddled under them, and in a few 
moments everything was quiet. The mother be¬ 
gan to straighten out her feathers with her bill 
as if nothing had happened. If she missed the 
lost one at all she soon forgot it. 
I had no objection to the crow that often 
hovered over the tops of our trees until one day 
when he dropped his plunder, and when I picked 
it up. I saw it to be the remains of a quail. 
After that I did not have much use for the crow, 
for bobwhite and I are friends. Bunglers, in 
the garb of hunters, came about our premises 
a great deal and mutilated and abandoned to a 
lingering death more birds in the course of a 
day than they would actually bag in a week, I 
suspect. I have seen birds with broken wings 
or a torn leg dangling from the body, living in 
pain and misery for several days, skulking about? 
solitary and alone, half starved and parched with 
thirst, ultimately to fall victim to a hawk, or 
some other of its enemies. No doubt the bob- 
white of which I speak had met such a fate. 
There is no time in the summer that we can¬ 
not hear bobwhite whistling on some part of the 
lawn surrounding our home. I love to hear his 
cheery note from his favorite calling station on 
the o’d rail fence back of the house. Its familiar 
call on the quiet summer air suggests the open¬ 
ing lines of Donn Piatt’s beautiful poem: 
“I heard the bobwhite whistle in the dewy breath ‘of 
morn: 
The bloom was on the alder and the tassle on the com.” 
One hot day when the hose was playing on 
the lawn there gathered in the spray three robins, 
three blackbirds, two red-headed woodpeckers, 
one flicker, two brown thrushes, a dozen spar¬ 
rows and two wrens. It was during a long 
drouth, and that fact probably explained the 
peaceful presence of natural antagonists under 
one shower bath. Mr. Purdy said that we had 
seen nearly all of the common native birds right 
on the premises, but he never expected to see 
any of the game birds. Not many days after he 
had made this remark I noticed a commotion in 
the tall grass, and upon investigating found a 
woodcock that had become entangled and was 
trying to extricate himself. I knew that the 
woodcock is distinctly a bird of wet, low-lying 
lands and could not account for his presence so 
near to us. I knew also that no American game 
bird is more highly prized by hunters than the 
woodcock, and I wondered what Mr. Purdy 
would do if he saw him. I did not think he 
would shoot it, for he and I entered into a com¬ 
pact that if he never would shoot a bird I never 
would wear a feather of any kind in my hat. 
While I was turning this over in my mind the 
woodcock freed himself and flew away on 
whistling wings and we never saw him again. 
There had been a large fire, completely destroy¬ 
ing an amusement park on the banks of the 
river where there is much low, wet ground, and 
it had driven away all the birds native to that 
spot. We supposed that woodcock to be one of 
them. 
Owls and bats also invade our territory. One 
day I saw a small owl sitting among the branches 
of a scrubby oak in our back yard staring with 
his huge round eyes and looking very wise. I 
went nearer to him, but he did not move. The 
feathers on each side of his head stood up like 
cat’s ears and his legs to the claws were covered 
with pantalets of down. He was a strangely 
solemn-looking little creature, and one not used 
to him would have considered him the great 
philosopher of the feathered tribe. But in this 
he would have been mistaken. The owl is a 
sluggish, stupid animal, a living illustration of 
the adage, that appearances are sometimes de¬ 
ceitful. I called Jud, the colored man who does 
chores about the barn, to the tree to look at him. 
Jud could not understand why the owl did not 
fly away when we drew near, and I tried to ex¬ 
plain to him that they could not see very well 
except at night. Yet with all my expendi¬ 
ture of breath on the subject, Jud failed to un¬ 
derstand. He finally captured the owl and car¬ 
ried it off to show his colored friends. He 
stayed away until after dark,’ and his feathered 
friend got away from him, and I cannot say if 
this particular one came back to his home in the 
trees. I imagined, however,_ that I heard an un¬ 
usual amount of “hooting” going on that night. 
The solemn calls kept the household awake for 
many hours. 
Bats are harmless things, but I believe there 
is an old Southern superstition originating among 
the darkies that if a bat once gets into the hair 
it must all be cut off before the bat can be de¬ 
tached. We caught one on a summer night while 
it was flying about the room. We held if up to 
the light by its extended wings and found that 
it was both ugly and pretty, its wings being 
transparent and delicately constructed and its 
body like that of an. over-fed mole. Its head 
was small like a mouse’s, and when it opened 
its jaws it showed sharp teeth. Lender its tongue 
