
FOREST AND STREAM. 

JAN. 27, 1906. ] 
a total of 2,871 specimens comprising 656 
species. 
At the Aquarium a tank for the storage of 
sea water has been built, and before long a con- 
stant supply of sea water will be available, 
which will enable the Society to keep on ex- 
hibition a collection of invertebrates which can- 
not now be maintained owing to the diluted 
quality of the salt-water supplied to the tank. 
The Aquarium collections number over 2,500 
specimens, and no aquarium in the world has 
such full collections. 
Officers, committees and the scientific council 
were re-elected as follows: 
President, Levi P. Morton; Vice-Presidents, 
Henry Fairfield Osborn and John L. Cad- 
walader; Secretary, Madison Grant; Treasurer, 
Percy R. Pyne. 
Executive Committee—Charles T. Barney, 
Chairman; John S. Barnes, Philip Schuyler, 
Samuel Thorne, Madison Grant, William White 
Niles, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Levi P. 
Morton. 
Scientific Council—William T. Hornaday, 
Chairman; J. A. Allen, Frank M. Chapman, 
William Stratford, Charles L. Bristol, George 
Bird Grinnell, Alfred G. Mayer, Henry Fairfield 
Osborn, Charles B. Davenport, Charles H. 
Townsend, Madison Grant and Charles T. 
Barney. 
Aquarium Committee—Charles H. Townsend, 
Chairman; Charles L. Bristol, Bashford Dean, 
Alfred G. Mayer, Charles B. Davenport, Thomas 
H. Morgan, Edmund B. Wilson, William E. 
Damon, and Roswell: Morse Shurtleff. 
Crow and Mussel. 
Toronto, Ont., Jan. 14.—Editor Forest and 
Stream: Being confined to my room by illness 
and in a strange country, I took up my Forest 
AND STREAM and reread most of the paper until 
I came to the “Crow in Winter,” by Edward A. 
Samuels. I was much interested in his des- 
cription of the bird, for it is true to nature, and 
I thought that it might interest your readers 
to hear how a crow really gets at the meat of 
a clam or mussel such as may be found in our 
fresh-water streams of New Jersey. It was 
there that I saw one do the trick, and paid the 
price for my knowledge. 
It was on a clear, frosty morning and I was 
on my way to school, and while crossing the 
bridge over Mantua Creek, I saw a flock of 
crows walking on a sandbar left bare by the 
falling tide. There was a rush and a fight for 
something they had found on the bar, and, boy- 
like, I stopped to see the fight and soon forgot 
school and books. The scrap lasted for some 
minutes, when all except a dozen or so of the 
crows left the bar and flew to the nearby trees, 
where they set up a series of long-drawn caws 
that seemed to attract all the crows in the 
neighborhood, for they came in singles and by 
dozens. 
By this time the ownership of the find was 
made plain, for might makes right with crows 
as well as with the Standard Oil or the Beef 
Trust. A clean-looking, well-feathered crow 
rose from the rest with a large mussel in his 
beak, and when about fifty feet from the ground, 
he began to bear away toward the shore, and it 
looked as if he meant to dine alone; but it was 
not to be so. His two or three hundred fellows 
had very different ideas on the subject, for they 
began to close in on him, and there was no 
place to go but straight up, that being the line 
of least resistance as far as crows were con- 
cerned. They did not hurry him much, but a 
few kept him rising, while the others kept some 
fifty yards out from the line of flight. 
The one holding the prize kept on rising until 
he must have been a thousand feet in the air. 
Whether he dropped his prize from choice, or 
because the others worried him until he could 
hold it no longer, I am unable to say; but I 
think that I can say, thruthfully, the eyes of 
every crow in the air for 100 yards around was 
on that mussel,-from the time it started down 
until it was crushed on the frozen earth. 
Now the law of falling bodies applied to the 
mussel, but had nothing to do with that crow. He 
just turned on end, head down, and became one 
shining greenish-black streak. I think he 
would have shown twenty feet long with an 
ordinary camera. The fall seemed too fast to 
be followed by the eye. 
When the mussel struck, the crow was the 
next to arrive, and well for him that he was, 
and I then understood why the others had 
left a few of them to do the work. Each crow 
now headed for the spot where the prize would 
land, but the owner again proved his right to a 

WINTER TWIG OF SHELLBARK HICKORY. 
portion of the spoils, for he seized a piece and 
escaped to a tree close by, and there ate it in 
peace. 
On the ground things were hot. Every crow 
had got there, and they went in like shot at a 
target. It was a sight to remember. Two or 
three would be fighting over a shred or shell, 
when half the flock would jump in with beak 
and claws. They all seemed out for blood. 
I thought at the time the price that I paid for 
that show was too high, but after thirty-five 
years, I think that I got it cheap. On going 
into school forty minutes late the teacher called 
me to the front and asked for my excuse, and I 
told him what I had seen. He said tell the 
scholars what you have just told me, and I 
did so. Then he took a vote on the story as 
to the likelihood of its being true, and the vote 
was in the affirmative. I was happy, but then 
he said, ‘William, stand before the desk. You 
are forty minutes late. Divide that by four and 
you will see the number of recesses that you 
lose. That is for being late. Now you will 
lose the same number of noons (one hour and 
a half) for lying and deceiving the scholars in 
this shameful way. Don’t say a word, and I 
warn you the next time you see a muskrat wash- 
ing his breakfast at an air hole, or any more 
yellow animals sliding down the hill, I will just 
skin you alive.” 
I am alive yet. W. H. Tuurtow. 
Detroit, Mich., Jan. 12—For nearly a quarter 
of a century (to be exact for twenty-four years), 
I have been a contributor to and a reader of the 
Forest AND STREAM, and as one of the ‘Old 
Guard,’ I offer you my congratulations on the 
fine appearance the paper makes in its new form, 
and wish you another quarter century’s success; 
and may the coming generations take as much 
pleasure from the perusal of the tales of the 
sportsman’s life as I have. The new form is a 
much better one than the old, as it is more easily 
handled; and then again the addition of photo- 
graphic reproductions as a regular thing, which 
I understand is your purpose, will lend much to 
the interest. F. F. Frispie (Prairie Dog). 

Some Notes on Wolves. 
AMONG the various folk beliefs which have 
come down to us from more primitive times, 
none is stronger than the faith in the ferocity 
of certain wild animals. Stories of ravening de- 
struction by lions, bears, and wolves are told 
to small children as soon as they can understand 
spoken words, and are enphasized to them by 
books and pictures which give accounts of bear 
families large and small, and of “Little Red 
Riding Hood’ and the disguised wolf. When 
we have moved a few years further along, we 
are regaled by Sunday school tales about the 
bears that “tare forty and two” little brats that 
emade fun of good old Elijah, and in the time of 
Christ by allusions to wolves in sheep’s clothing. 
In North America there are two sorts of 
wolves, the big and the little. The big ones are 
commonly named from their color, their habits 
or the situation in which they are found, and we 
call them gray, white, black, red, buffalo, timber, 
or wood wolves. 
The little wolves which are grouped under the 
general name of prairie wolf, coyote and bark- 
ing wolf, vary less in color than the gray wolves. 
They are reddish-gray or sometimes red or even 
black, but we have not heard of any that were 
white. There are a dozen or fifteen sorts of 
them, all very much alike in appearance. 
It has often been pointed out that wolves are 
merely wild dogs, and it is believed that the dog 
was the first animal to be domesticated. Orig- 
inally an animal of high intelligence, association 
with man no doubt increased this intelligence 
and broadened its field. 
The especially interesting thing about our 
wolves, as well as about the dogs of many other 
lands, is that they possess a certain power of 
organization. They carry on organized hunts, 
which seem to be the result of prearrangement. 
As has frequently been pointed out in Forest 
AND STREAM, a pack of wolves, large or small, 
will pursue an animal, driving it in a circle and 
relieving one another, so that there is constantly 
at the heels of the victim a fresh pursuer. 
The range of the large American wolf is very 
extensive, for it is found from the furthest north 
down into the hot country of Mexico, and from 
ocean to ocean. In most places it has now been 
exterminated, but it is still found in some num- 
bers on the plains and in the mountains of the 
further west, rarely perhaps in the Mississippi 
Valley, and even in the mountains of western 
North Carolina. In old times the big wolf was 
an honest hunter, lived on big game, and pulled 
down its prey in fair chase. Sometimes it does 
this still, and on the cattle ranges one or two 
wolves will kill a cow or a yearling, without par- 
ticular trouble, while three are enough to pull 
down a full-grown steer. 
The coyote group have a more southern 
range than the big wolves, and on the plains do 
not occur much north of the Saskatchewan 
River. They also do some hunting, killing deer, 
antelope and jack rabbits. ; 
Much that is interesting on the subject of 
wolves may be found—by any one who cares 
to follow the subject up—in one of the volumes 
of the Boone and Crockett Club’s publications, 
“Trail and Camp Fire,’ in which two articles, 
“Wolves and Wolf Nature’ and “On the Little 
Missouri,” record observations on wolves and 
coyotes, some of which are quite opposed to 
one another. The article “On the Little Mis- 
souri,” is from the pen of President Roosevelt, 
while the article on “Wolves” was written by 
Mr. Grinnell. 
There have recently come into our hands two 
papers on wolves which are of very great inter- 
est, and which, not being accessible to the gen- 
eral public may properly be published here. 
One of these is by Mr. R. MacFarlane, chief 
factor of the Hudson’s Bay Co., a veteran who 
entered the service of that company in 1852, and 
who has sent to the Smithsonian Institute at 
Washington, great numbers of specimens of 
birds and their eggs, of mammals and of other 
natural history objects from the far North, 
where he was long stationed. The other paper 
records the observations of Mr. Vernon Bailey, 
trained naturalist and student of mammals, at 
almost the other extremity of the wolf’s range, 
