
Bar-headed, white-fronted, snow, Nile, Ross, 
North America. Conservation 
is much older—many of the magazines, 
newspapers, clubs, societies, govern- 
ments, individuals, have discussed con- 
servation of forests, of flowers, of wa- 
ter, and finally, of wild life, with the 
result that nearly everyone is inter- 
ested in such work. Owing to our care- 
lessness and heedlessness in the past, 
many varieties of birds have become ex- 
tinct, like the passenger pigeon, or al- 
most extinct, like the beautiful whoop- 
ing crane and the trumpeter swan. But 
even with the assistance of government, 
in establishing different varieties of 
game birds in various sections of the 
country and proclaiming a closed season 
for so many years, in my opinion the 
time is past when we can sit back and 
rely upon good Mother Nature to pro- 
vide us with plenty of game for shoot- 
ing. We must help her to provide more 
game by seeing to its breeding. We 
must enlarge our native varieties by 
drawing upon other countries in order 
to make up for those varieties we 
have already exterminated. We must 
also exert an intelligent control of de- 
structive vermin. Lastly, we must 
learn to breed our own game and not 
depend upon importations of wild birds 
from Europe, Asia, Africa, South 
America, Australia, or-upon importa- 
tions of domestic-bred game from Eu- 
ropean breeders. It may take us a full 
half century to accomplish this pur- 
pose but it must be done. 
ORTH AMERICA, with its varied 
climate, its immense tracts of waste 
land, is an ideal home for many of the 
game birds of other countries and there 
is no reason why we should not have 
a greater abundance and variety of 
Chinese and Toulouse 
geese, and a shelldrake in the front row 
AME Breeding as a means of 
conservation is in its infancy in 
game birds-than we had fifty years ago. 
Even if we consider the breeding of 
game birds from the standpoint of use- 
fulness only, it would be exceedingly ad- 
visable to plant the whole country with 
as many varieties as possible so that 
they may keep the hordes of grasshop- 
pers, caterpillars, other injurious in- 
sects, numerous and noxious weeds, un- 
der control. The day is past when 
fathers provide their sons with guns so 
that they may go out and kill whatever 
they find of wild life in woods and 
fields but the day has come when fa- 
thers should encourage their boys to 
use their skill in controlling vermin, 
the trapping or shooting of which 
affords real sport. 
HUNTING a predatory animal or 
bird requires much more skill of 
the hunter, who has to match his brains 
against the cunning of an animal ac- 
customed to stalking his own prey, than 
does the killing of quail or partridge, 
pheasant or turkey, duck or goose, 
which subsist on seeds, berries and 
small insects. 
Farmers who are interested in keep- 
ing their boys on the farm must make 
their farm life more interesting. I 
realize this, myself, because half of my 
boyhood days were spent in town, the 
other half in the country. I recall, 
when quite a small boy, that father sub- 
scribed to FoREST AND STREAM, and I 
have read it, fairly constantly, for fifty 
years—not every issue, for I have often 
been where I could get nothing to read. 
Boys take the keenest delight in de- 
stroying vermin and all normal boys are 
deeply interested in breeding birds and 
animals, but especially rare and beau- 
tiful game and ornamental birds that 
will bring extra money. The ease with 
which pigs and common fowl breed gen- 
Game Breeding 
In America 
A Large Step Toward 
Conserving Wild Life 
By GEORGE HEBDEN CORSAN 
erally brings dullness and flatness of 
mind for the average boy but if he ob- 
tained $75 for a pair of birds, such as . 
the brown-eared Manchurian pheasant, 
he would be alert and intensely inter- 
ested in his home, in the conservation 
of wild life, in the art of game-breed- 
ing—believe me, it is an art—and in 
the destruction of vermin. 
Fork the past twenty years, my work 
has given me an opportunity of tra- 
veling all over United States and parts 
of Canada and I have thus had the 
pleasure of visiting a majority of the 
parks and zoos of North America, as 
wel. as a great number of game farms. 
I have found that many of the parks 
and zoos do not give adequate housing 
to any of the birds, so that quite a num- 
ber of them die and few of them are 
able to breed. This is sometimes the re- 
sult of insufficient money, sometimes 
the result of carelessness or ignorance. 
Many of the men who are running game 
farms are city men who have preferred 
to live in the country and who liked 
birds, or have found it necessary to 
leave town to improve their health by 
a life in the open; others have lived 
in the country and have taken up the 
work because they liked it, or because 
it was more or less forced upon them 
and they became interested almost in 
spite of themselves. Of these latter, is 
a farmer in northern Alberta, a few 
miles from Edmonton. | 
E became tired of plowing up the 
nests of wild ducks and finally col- 
lected the eggs as he came to them— 
eggs of canvasbacks, redheads, shovel- 
lers and other varieties—and placed 
them under domestic ducks who hatched 
the eggs and brought the little wild 
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