Forest and Stream 
Terms, $3 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. | 
Six Months, $1.50. y 
The object of this journal will be to studiously 
promote a healthful interest in outdoor recre- 
ation, and to cultivate a refined taste for natural 
objects. Announcement in first number of 
Forest AND STREAM, Aug. 14, 1873. 
THE AUDUBON SOCIETIES. 
Tue National Asscciation of Audubon Socie- 
ties is an incorporated body constituted of thirty- 
six State societies, which have combined for 
united effort in the field of bird protection. The 
purpose of the Association is one which has at- 
tracted cordial support. This support will be 
more generous as the character of the work un- 
dertaken and the methods of accomplishing it 
shall become better known. ‘The control of the 
Association is such as to command public confi- 
dence in it. The movement had its origin largely 
in sentiment, but the objects sought and the means 
employed to attain them are practical and busi- 
ness-like, as evidenced by the annual report of 
President William Dutcher, summarizing the rec- 
ord for the year 1905, which was the Association’s 
first year of work. 
The Association maintains headquarters at No. 
141 Broadway, New York, where a growing cor- 
respondence is conducted and an enormous vol- 
ume of printed matter is sent out relating to the 
protection of birds, and comprising also educa- 
tional leaflets devoted to the life histories of use- 
ful birds and to the promotion of an intelligent 
interest in them. 
The Association concerns itself with bird and 
game legislation wherever Legislatures are in ses- 
sion. The Audubon model law for the protection 
of birds not game has been pushed by the con- 
stituent Audubon Societies until now it is in force 
in thirty-four States, five of these having been 
added in 1905. The Audubon’s agency in the 
establishment of bird reservations has already 
been alluded to in these columns. The reserva- 
tions consist of islands and groups of islands and 
the surrounding waters, which are the breeding 
grounds of sea birds and game birds. Through 
the Audubon four new reservations were estab- 
lished by executive order of President Roose- 
velt in 1905 as preserves and breeding grounds for 
. native birds. These comprise islands belonging 
to the Federal Government in South Lake, North 
Dakota, used by gulls, terns, ducks and snipe; 
Passage Key, near the mouth of Tampa Bay, 
Florida, used by terns, herons and several varie- 
ties of shore birds which breed there, while all the 
sea birds in the locality and ground doves resort 
to it nightly to roost; the unsurveyed islands of 
the Huron Island group and the Siskiwit, or 
Menagerie group, in Lake Superior, occupied by 
large colonies of herring gulls, with a few ducks. 
In addition to these territories in Federal pos- 
session and so available for such reservation by 
the President, six other reservations or bird 
refuges have been secured by the Audubon Socie- 
ties by purchase or lease, and negotiations are in 
progress for the establishment of others. 
Copyright, 1906, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1906. ( 
The Association has in its employ a large num- 
ber of wardens to protect the reservations and 
other breeding grounds, and the system will be 
extended as rapidly as the needs of different sec- 
tions may be ascertained and the funds may be 
provided for meeting the expense. “The magnifi- 
cent result that has been obtained on the coasts 
of Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, 
North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana and Oregon 
and in the interior in New York and Michigan,” 
says Mr. Dutcher, “make the directors of the 
Association feel fully warranted in enlarging this 
valuable means of bird protection.” 
It is proposed, as opportunity may offer, to pro- 
vide for additional protection on the coasts of 
South Carolina, Georgia, parts of Florida, and 
especially the Gulf coast from west of the mouth 
of the Mississippi River to the Rio Grande. 
The very substantial results accomplished by 
the National Association of Audubon Societies 
must be credited in generous measure to President 
William Dutcher. Mr. Dutcher has devoted him- 
self to the work with enthusiasm, intelligence 
and perseverance. What he has done and what 
the Association has done, deserving of the 
highest praise because it is altogether unselfish 
is 
and for the common good. 
We shall hereafter allude in detail to some of 
the phases of the Audubon Societies’ work in the 
several States. 
THROUGH AN ICE WINDOW. 
EveN though it be the close season, the outdoor 
man still wishes to be out of doors. If winter 
has fairly set in and the law bars him from the 
pursuit of upland game, if the streams and lakes 
are locked in ice and the rod and line are useless, 
he can still take long walks over bare brown 
fields, through silent winter woods, or through 
swamps where the ice crushes noisily under his 
feet and the twigs which brush against his face 
sting sharply in the cold air. 
Perhaps near his home is some wide, shallow 
pond, where in spring broad lily pads cover the 
surface of the water, varied later by the sweet 
white blooms, where in summer bullheads may be 
caught in great numbers by him who knows their 
favorite haunts, and where giant snapping turtles 
sometimes raise their moss-covered backs to the 
heat of the sun. 
If a time of still, bitter cold, following mild 
weather, freezes the surface of this pond, the out- 
door man enjoys to cover its glassy surface on 
skates, It is curious to note how plainly things 
at the bottom are revealed through the black, 
clear ice. It is like looking through a pane of 
glass, through one of those water telescopes of 
which people tell us who have lived on the shores 
of tropic seas. They describe to us the waving 
water grass, the sea fans, the anemones busy at 
their work, and among them varicolored fishes 
of great beauty passing to and fro; so through 
this clear ice the skater sees at the bottom of this 
muddy pond a vegetation quite unknown to him; 
VOL. LXVI.—No. 6. 
| No. 346 Broadway, New York. 
long, wavy water moss, the roots of the pond lily, 
the leaves lying among the moss, green as they ° 
will be when they reach the surface, and here and 
there a flower-stalk with a bud upon it standing 
up from the bottom, as we may the 
crinoids stood in the ancient seas. There is no 
tor 
imagine 
motion and there is no animation here, the 
pond has no current and the fishes and all the 
other animal life of the pond are indulging the 
long winter sleep; nevertheless, the view 1s worth 
studying, for it is a glimpse of hidden things 
which it is given to few men to see, 
(42S, JPIROVAO SIERO) KORN IAEA ON JOT SS 
THE proposal of Hon. Jean Prevost, Minister 
of Fisheries of Ontario, that the Province should 
levy a hunting tax of $25 on non-resident mem- 
bers of game with 
genuine consternation by the class affected. We 
print to-day a letter addressed to the Minister by 
Mr. W. R. White, K. C., of Pembroke, in which 
is set out in cogent lines of argument the mani- 
clubs has been received 
fest injustice of such a tax as being in direct vio- 
lation of the contract which was entered into by 
the Crown when the lease of club territory was 
made. A club member so held up by the demand 
for $25, before he could enjoy the rights which 
he had paid for and which the Crown in taking 
the lease had guaranteed to him, could 
not but feel outraged at the demand. 
Another consideration that 
number the Americans who resort to Canada for 
their summer and autumn outings are of a class 
which can ill afford such an added expense. They 
are persons often who, even under present condi- 
mone 
is this, in large 
tions, are obliged to consider ways and means, and 
to economize carefully that they may bear the 
expense of the outing. It may not be appreciated 
by the Canadian officials, but it is a fact never- 
theless, that just this new tax of $25 added to the 
expenses already involved in the Canadian visit, 
would be sufficient to deter many from visiting the 
Provinces. In behalf of this contingent of Ameri- 
can sportsmen, we express the hope that the pro- 
posed tax may not be levied. 

Times change and men and ways change with 
them. The files of the Forest AND STREAM for 
the past thirty years yield an instructive exposi- 
tion of the change of sentiment respecting differ- 
ent phases of sport. In 1879 a correspondent who 
was a northern man visiting Florida, wrote of the 
Gulf coast: “On the islands, or keys as they are 
called, countless numbers of pelican, ibis, heron, 
crane, cormorant, gulls, etc., are to be found, and 
one can shoot the same until he tires of the 
sport.’ No one would think of writing just that 
now, not for print at least; nor would it be 
printed. The years which have intervened be- 
tween that date and this have wrought an entire 
change, if not in the practice of useless bird kill- 
ing, in public sentiment regarding it. 
