Forest and Stream 
Terms, $3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy, ) 
Six Months, $1.50. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3 , 1910 . 
VOL. LXXV.—No. 23. 
No. 127 Franklin St., New York. 
A WEEKLY JOURNAL. 
Copyright, 1910, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
George Bird Grinnell, President, 
Charles B. Reynolds, Secretary, 
Louis Dean Speir, Treasurer, 
127 Franklin Street, New York. 
THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL 
will be to studiously promote a healthful in¬ 
terest in outdoor recreation, and to cultivate 
a refined taste for natural objects. 
—Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 1873. 
GAME BIRDS IN CONNECTICUT. 
The project to establish near Darien, Conn., 
a station for the breeding of upland game birds, 
to which may be joined also the breeding of 
wildfowl, has a wide public interest. The plan 
proposed combines the scientific and the practi¬ 
cal, and is in fact the carrying on—at another 
point and under other conditions—of the work 
so successfully initiated years ago by Dr. C. F. 
Hodge. It will be in charge of two enthusiasts, 
one of whom has had much experience in rear¬ 
ing wild birds in domestication, while the other 
is a devoted bird lover and thoroughly familiar 
with the literature of the subject. These quali¬ 
fications give good promise of success. 
That these experiments are to be continued is 
gratifying, for with what has been done by Dr. 
Hodge and others it would seem that we stand 
at the threshold of discoveries which will make 
the propagation of many wild birds absolutely 
simple, and the rearing of quail and grouse as 
commonplace as the rearing of hens. 
Past experience has demonstrated that there is 
nothing inherently intricate or mysterious about 
the hand-rearing of game birds. To make it 
successful are needed, besides some money, con¬ 
siderable intelligence and an abounding enthu¬ 
siasm which will fill the experimenter with 
eternal vigilance and everlasting hope. In Great 
Britain where the breeding of wild game has be¬ 
come commercialized, and where the keepers who 
consistently fail to rear the birds entrusted to 
them are considered incompetent, the work is 
carried on as a matter of course. The same 
thing may be done in the United States with 
our native species by the proper men. 
The breeding of wildfowl native to Connecti¬ 
cut should also be undertaken on a considerable 
scale. These wildfowl should be reared — in part 
at least—in open pens with liberty to go and 
come, just as wild ducks are bred in England. 
Raised under such conditions, the birds will go 
south in the fall, as wild birds do, and returning 
again in spring, will tend to breed on or near 
the land where they were hatched. Only a few 
years of work of this kind will be required to 
greatly increase the wildfowl and other birds 
accessible to Connecticut gunners. 
Although these experiments are to be con¬ 
ducted in Connecticut, the whole continent may 
watch them with absorbing interest. What is 
learned at this experiment station will be for 
the benefit of every State and Province, and may 
have the greatest promise for the men of to-day 
and their children after them. 
WOODS ACCIDENTS. 
The accidents by which men are shot by mis¬ 
take for deer, and which take place during each 
deer hunting season in various localities, are a 
disgrace • to American hunters. These unhappy 
events are accidents in the sense that they hap¬ 
pen without malicious intent on the part of the 
person who causes the injury, but they are the 
result of criminal carelessness, precisely as 
when a careless man drags his gun from a 
wagon, out of a boat or through a fence, hold¬ 
ing it by the barrels with the muzzle directed 
toward his person. The man who shoots him¬ 
self pays the penalty for his- carelessness. He 
who is shot by another is blameless in the matter. 
The writing done on this subject is for the 
most part wasted. People who are thoughtful 
enough to read and to remember such writings 
are not of those who shoot at a moving bush 
thinking that it is a deer. Hunters careless and 
thoughtless enough to do this do not heed the 
instruction so freely offered. 
There is a way by which these injuries and 
this loss of life may greatly be reduced in num¬ 
ber, and that is by making it illegal under a 
heavy penalty to kill deer without horns. In 
many regions where deer are found, such a law 
may not be needed to preserve the deer, but it is 
needed to preserve human beings who pursue 
the deer. A law prohibiting the killing of deer 
without horns, if enforced, would tend to make 
every hunter hold his fire until he saw his ani¬ 
mal clearly enough to know whether it carried 
horns or not. This pause to get a view of the 
game and thus to enable him to identify it would 
tend to make every man certain that what he 
saw was a deer and not a fellow-man. 
There is evidence to show that in States where 
the killing of hornless deer is forbidden, the 
ratio of accidents to hunters is far less than in 
those where any deer may be killed. Efforts to 
make men more careful by statute have failed, 
but such change in the game laws may make 
men wait long enough to see what they are 
shooting at. 
The attempts made during the warm season 
to shoot with rifles and revolvers from rapidly 
moving aeroplanes at targets placed on the 
ground were not productive of very satisfactory 
results. In fact, the so-called bomb throwing 
or dropping was the more accurate of the two 
methods practiced. Expert marksmen failed in 
their estimates of distance and in the probable 
speed of the air craft. Every big-game shooter 
knows how difficult it is to shoot accurately at 
an object far below him on a mountainside, but 
he who is being whirled rapidly through the air 
finds it increasingly difficult to shoot well. 
THE RIGHT TO HUNT. 
Compared with the season of 1909, there has 
been a marked decrease so far this season in the 
sale of guns by the Pennsylvania Game Commis¬ 
sion. The commission is not conducting a gun 
store; nevertheless it sold about one thousand 
firearms last year, and at a fair profit. Unlike 
business men, however, who deplore falling off 
in trade, the commission rejoices that its stock 
of guns is decreasing steadily. 
Formerly Pennsylvania was overrun by aliens 
carrying guns. They shot at everything wearing 
fur or feathers. Last year a new law was 
passed. It forbade hunting by unnaturalized 
foreign-born residents of Pennsylvania; it for¬ 
bade the ownership or possession by them of 
guns and rifles of any sort; it provided for a 
fine or imprisonment, and in addition to this, the 
confiscation and sale by the commission of fire¬ 
arms taken from these men. 
The measure is a drastic one, but it is needed, 
and so far the returns show that it has proved 
effective. Aside from saving non-game birds, 
it has no doubt saved wardens from death or 
injury at the hands of men who were ever ready 
to dispute the right of the State to interfere with 
their small bird shooting. 
Men who have been looking for small game in 
the vicinity of New York city this season have 
commented frequently on the scarcity of aliens- 
carrying guns, whereas a few years ago they 
flocked to the suburbs in season. Strong repres¬ 
sive measures have brought about this improved 
state of affairs, and have gone far toward the 
protection of small birds. In this region the 
game laws are no longer ignored, and the war¬ 
dens enjoy the confidence of responsible persons. 
Those who shoot do not grumble, as they for¬ 
merly did, over the payment of a dollar for a 
resident’s license. Instead, they regard the sum 
paid out as a contribution to the work of pro¬ 
tection and propagation, and in addition to this 
it has become in a way a guarantee of good in¬ 
tentions and an effective means of identifying 
those who have a legal right to hunt game, while 
those who have no permit assist in their own 
punishment if called to account. 
The skill of the old hunter is not to be de¬ 
spised when a man hunt is organized. We have 
already told how one fugitive from justice was 
trailed and taken by a warden. This was in 
New England. Again, more recently, an old 
hunter followed the trail of two fugitives from 
justice in that section, while in Wisconsin a 
posse composed in part of deer hunters, assisted 
by hounds, trailed a hunter who ran away after 
shooting a man, apparently mistaking him for 
a deer. The victim’s red coat and cap did not 
save him. The ways of the would-be deer hun¬ 
ter are indeed strange, but to hunt him down 
with hounds is novel. 
