JUNE 30, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
\s 

Wild Pigeons, Beaver and Other 
Things. 
New York, N. Y., June 13.—Editor Forest and 
Stream: Some weeks ago you published several 
articles on the wild pigeon, which interested me 
very much, as I have always hoped and believed 
that with the better protection which birds enjoy 
nowadays, we should be able occasionally to see’ 
some of the birds again. The passenger pigeon 
is characteristically American, and the wanton 
destruction of these noble birds, which, unlike 
that of the buffalo, might have been prevented, 
will forever remain a blot upon our civilization. 
I am now pleased to report that I saw a pair of 
passenger pigeons yesterday. There is not the 
slighest doubt that they were our wild pigeons, 
and not doves or any other birds. They were 
seen also by Mr. George Church, an old timer, 
who has seen thousands of them in his younger 
years, and he and I drew the attention of the 
others to the birds at the same time. The birds 
came from the south, and flew directly over the 
lawn surrounding Stag Lodge. To make iden- 
tification doubly sure, they turned west when 
approaching the Jake, and after having been out 
of sight for a few seconds, and while we ex- 
citedly talked about them, the birds came 
again into plain view, almost within shooting 
distance, and we all had a chance to observe 
them again plainly. The birds seemed to be 
looking for a place to light, which I feel sure 
they did in the woods northwest of Stag Lake. 
These are the first wild pigeons I have seen in 
some twenty years. 
Reports are coming in that the young ruffed 
grouse are doing well. While driving to the 
station last night, an old hen with some voung, 
the size of half-grown quail, started close to the 
horses from the bank along the road, and I had 
to pull the horses in short to prevent hitting 
one of the young brood, which flew across the 
road. How many there were I could not tell, 
as they scattered well. I have heard of other 
full broods, and as an old turkey hen, roaming 
the place with eleven young chicks, has gone 
through: the last wet spell without losing any, 
I don’t think that the wet has hurt young 
grouse. 
Last fall I planted wild rice in some parts of 
Stag Lake. In some places no sign of rice 
can be found while in others it is doing 
finely, growing in from four to five feet of 
water. In pulling up some of the grass-like 
plants, the seeds were found attached to the 
roots, so that there is no chance of mistaken 
identity of the plant. Some of my friends in 
Sussex County, N. J., have never been success- 
ful with the planting of wild rice. About thirty 
years ago, I planted wild rice in the Hackensack 
marshes, and the same may now be found scat- 
tered all along the Penborn and Cromakill 
Creeks for miles. 
Beavers are doing well, judging from fresh 
signs. 
I never knew that woodchucks could climb 
trees. The other day I found one which had 
climbed a young oak tree, bare of all lower 
limbs and as smooth as a mast. The little chuck 
was hanging on by placing his head and one 
paw over a little branch about twelve to fifteen 
feet off the ground, while two strange hounds, 
whose barking had attracted my attention, held 
watch below. I climbed up and took him to 
the lodge alive, after sending the dogs home. 
Crows and potatoes are a funny combination. 
I keep a live great horned owl, which we use 
to decoy crows and hawks, and by means of 
which we kill hundreds of crows and a good 
many hawks during the winter and spring. One 
of my potato fields is the graveyard of hundreds 
of crows. They were plowed under in spring, 
and the potatoes look as well as any I have seen, 
so the crow seems good for something after all, 
although I have had doubts as to this. Two years 
ago the crows got on to the egg stealing racket, and 
they got away with some hundreds of duck eggs 
and destroyed many duck nests around the lake. 
With a good glass I often watched them in the 
act, but could not prevent their depredations, as 
the ducks insisted upon laying where they 
pleased. As there was little cover, the foliage not 
being out yet, we succeeded in killing but few 
until I got my owl and learned to call them and 
to talk ‘to them, and since that time a live crow 
is a vara avis at Stag Lake, and for some distance 
around the place. I give some hawks quarter, 
but never a crow. I consider the crow one of 
the greatest game and bird destroyers we have 
and a nuisance in general. 
Five years ago red squirrels only were ob- 
served in the immediate vicinity of Stag Lodge. 
The “kids” were turned loose on the “reds,” and 
this year only gray squirrels were observed. 
They have now taken possession of an unoccu- 
pied little farm house, which formerly was the 
home of red squirrels. Last fall one black 
squirrel was seen, but purposely not killed, the 
only one I have ever heard of in our part of 
the country. Justus Von LENGERKE. 
The Sad Penguins. 
New York, May 30—Editor’ Forest and 
Stream: The world is full of people who, travel- 
ing along their own little rut in the road of life, 
believe that all who follow any other path than 
theirs are wrong. The stature of such people is 
not great enough to enable them to see over the 
sides of their own particular rut. Their horizon 
is bounded by these sides and, like the ancient 
Greeks, they regard as barbarians all who are 
not of their way of thinking and acting, and feel 
for them an honest contempt, or a sincere pity. 
We see this feeling about us constantly, though it 
must be acknowledged that within the last 
twenty-five or thirty years the world has 
broadened a good deal. At the same time there 
are to-day many millions of people whose out- 
look is just as narrow as I have said. It seems 
to be a quality of human nature to wish to 
persuade others to do and think as we ourselves 
do and think, and yet as the conditions that sur- 
round no two men or women are wholly alike, 
it is obvious that what will do for one will not do 
for another, that what is one man’s meat, may 
well enough be another man’s poison. 
The people who feel sorry for others who live 
under conditions which they themselves believe 
that they would not enjoy, may be broader 
minded than the first class, but are hardly less 
numerous. We see frequent examples of this 
feeling in literature, for instance, in the familiar 
stories of Mr. Hamlin Garland and Miss Mary E. 
Wilkins. Garland used to write harrowing tales 
about the sufferings of the poor settlers, who 
lived out on the Dakota prairies, where the wind 
blew all the time, where the ground was level and 
there was nothing to see except the earth and 
the sky. Miss Wilkins drew moving pictures of 
elderly widows or spinsters, who inhabited little 
New England villages, and who, from her point 
of view, had a frightfully bad time. As a matter 
of fact the sufferings of Dakota settlers and New 
England spinsters existed solely in the imagina- 
tion of the writers. Mr. Garland thought it 
would be mighty hard on him if he had to live out 
in the flat prairie, with nothing particular to look 
at; Miss Wilkins had lady-like hysterics over the 
sufferings that she would have .endured in a 
monotonous New England town. Neither author 
for a moment considered the real feelings of their 
heroes and heroines, nor realized in the least that 
those characters were having just about as good 
2 
' ——aa 
and just about as bad times as other human 
beings have, wherever they may be situated. 
The absolute inability to put oneself in the 
place of another human creature is responsible 
for a great deal of suffering on the part of those 
who read books of the imagination and take 
them seriously. 
You published some weeks ago an article by 
Mr. Frank Moonan entitled, “Penguins of the 
Antarctic.” I have read and enjoyed many con- 
tributions by Mr. Moonan in the Forest AND 
STREAM, and I certainly never expected to see 
him put himself down on paper as he did in this 
article. Of the penguins, he says: 
“For three or four months following they (the 
penguins) haunt every bay and headland, usually 
sitting idly with an expression of profound sad- 
ness. Can we wonder they are sad, seeimg they 
are doomed to live among such scenes. By all 
accounts the Antarctic in the crude horror of its 
desolation beggars description.” 
_ I will not do Mr. Moonan the injustice to 
imagine that he means anything like what he 
says. No doubt he wrote what sounded to him 
like a well turned sentence without thinking 
whether it meant anything or not. It is of course 
inconceivable that he should have intended to 
say what he did, for he could not suppose that 
the penguins are familiar with the tropics or the 
temperate zone, or with country houses or with 
city flats or with automobiles. If the penguins 
were saddened by their surroundings, it was— 
according to these words—because they were 
comparing their present condition with some 
happier and more enjoyable existence of which 
they were aware. What was that condition? 
The penguins, so far as I can learn from 
popular natural history works, are hatched and 
spend their lives on the borders of the ice, in a 
land which happens to strike Mr. Moonan as 
desolate and forbidding. What reason has he to 
believe that penguins regard their native land as 
desolate and forbidding? If they do so, why do 
they not go away? They might follow up the 
coast of South America and swim up the Amazon 
or go into the Caribbean Sea. “The world is all 
before them, where to choose.” 
Mr. Moonan and I might think it a dreadful 
hardship if we were obliged to live for a few 
years with the Eskimo of northern Labrador, 
Alaska or Kamtschatka; but would not these 
Eskimo regard it as just as great hardship if they 
were obliged to come to New York and live like 
Mr. Moonan or me? And if we didn’t like it up 
there, or they didn’t like it down here, wouldn’t 
we and they move out, where it would be possible 
to look cheerful? 
There are other animals—and people—who live 
in situations and under conditions that might 
seem very disagreeable to Mr. Moonan and to 
me. What does Mr. Moonan think of the brant, 
many of which are reported in the spring to go to 
breeding grounds far beyond those reached by ex- 
plorers, places where the horror of the desolation 
of the Arctic is probably quite as crude as that of 
the Antarctic? Does he imagine that the scenes 
which surround these brant make them sad? The 
white goat, or goat antelope, spends its life 
among the rocky peaks and far-reaching snow 
banks of the high mountains of the west. It is 
said to be a slow, unsuspicious and rather dull 
animal and might even be called sad. Are the 
scenes which surround it responsible for this 
sadness? I trow not. 
My experience of penguins is probably about as 
extensive as that of Mr. Moonan; in other words, 
I have.seen three or four of these birds in 
menageries; but I am quite sure that I have read 
—though I should be hard put to it if I were 
asked for the reference—that they are as gay, 
lighthearted and playful as any birds. 
Cynic. 
