


Dec. 28, 1907. ] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 

ing, pursued, say, by an eagle—for eagles are 
not uncommon in that locality—how in utter ex- 
haustion the heron dropped into my blind; how 
I winged the eagle with one barrel and ‘killed 
it with the Ether. how with gentle hand I folded 
the wings and stroked down the ruffled plumage 
of the then helpless heron; patted its head and 
chucked it under the chin; how I fed it with the 
crusts of my ham sandwich and poured into the 
cup-shaped, in-bent crown of my sou’wester hat 
a half pint of Apollinaris, which it gratefully 
scooped up with its huge bill; how it then 
showed and expressed its eternal thanks by 
ducking its head a few times before it resumed 
its flight; how it came back and made a polite 
visit the next day; how a day or two later it 
“got on to” my game of shooting, and skirmished 
around the adjacent bays, stirring up the wild 
geese, brant and duck, and driving them to my 
blind and so on. Any fake writer can supply 
the rest. 
Now, as between the cold facts of what ac- 
tually took place, as I have above stated them, 
and a fake story as I have just outlined it, I 
have no doubt the average reader would con- 
sider the latter to be the more credible of the 
two, and most likely would swallow it whole. 
The former, however, I know to be absolutely 
true in every detail; the latter any fool can be- 
lieve that wants to. 
This tendency to attribute all animal actions 
to human motives is an error of some good 
naturalists as well as of bad ones. Thus Prof. 
Shaler in his book on “Domesticated Animals,” 
a very instructive book, by the way, tells us 
(pp. 34, 35) how he once incurred the lifelong 
enmity of a dog, simply by laughing at it, he 
giving that as the reason for the dog’s enmity. 
The learned professor clearly assumed | too much. 
It may have been true, or may not. Nobody 
knows what the dog’s reason was.’ I think it 
much more probable that the particular odor of 
the professor’s person happened to be, in the 
dog’s nose, an offensive odor, and that the dog 
acted accordingly. There is ample evidence to 
show that the friendship or enmity of dogs to- 
ward particular individuals is sometimes based 
on whether or not that particular dog is pleased 
or the reverse by the odor which that particular 
individual gives off. 
Briefly stated these pseudo naturalists are such 
partly because they uniformly undertake to ex- 
plain all animal action on the theory that the 
animal is always governed by the same rules as 
man under like conditions; a theory which the 
facts do not always support. Some nature 
writers who are not fakirs, sometimes uncon- 
sciously or thoughtlessly, make the same mis- 
take. Really we know scarcely anything as to 
why animals perform what look to us like ab- 
normal acts. In most cases they seem to have 
reasons of their own, and reasons which do not 
correspond to anything which is found in human 
mentality. Among other studies I have been try- 
ing for twenty years to find out the reasons or 
laws or conditions which govern the feeding 
habits of black bass, but I know as little about 
it to-day as when I began. 
Besides all this I strongly suspect that some 
of our so-called nature writers are lacking in 
power of accurate observation, or. possess an 
over-developed imagination whereby they some- 
times see things which are not there, or are 
unable to describe without embellishment just 
what they saw. Perhaps I shall have something 
to say later about the nature writers who are 
thus defective, merely adding for the present 
that it is extremely rare for two observing by- 
standers to give the same account of even a 
dog fight, and rarer still for either of them to 
tell it in the same way after a week’s interval 
of time. SHAGANOSS. 

Firelighters Active. 
A CORRESPONDENT in North Carolina says: ‘‘A 
sportsman friend tells me that in Carteret 
county, near Beaufort, the firelighters are after 
the ducks, and that in one day fifty crates of 
ducks were shipped North by boat from one 
place, Marshallburg. These, it is asserted, were 
killed by firelighters.” 


CANADA 
From 
Carrying Skunks by Their Tails. 
Mitituurst, N. J., Dec. 20.—Editor 
Stream: During several weeks past I have 
much interested in the articles in ForEST AND 
STREAM in reference to taking skunks by their 
tails. Once and only once have I seen it done, 
and that was when I was a lad of some ten years. 
It was at my home in northeastern Connecticut 
some time during early spring time. 
While we were at dinner at noon someone 
said that a big skunk had just passed through 
the front yard and had gone into the garden. 
Jumping up from the table I went out and soon 
found its tracks, as it was a warm day and the 
ground thinly covered with melting snow. Fol- 
lowing the tracks I found Mephitis in a corner 
of the garden among the quince bushes. Boy 
fashion I commenced pelting it or rather at it 
with anything I could lay hold of, sticks, snow- 
balls, stones or brickbats. In a few minutes an 
aged maiden aunt of mine, who lived by herself 
in a part of the house, came out to see what I 
was at, and as soon as she saw the skunk said: 
‘Arndra,” she always called me that, “what 
do you want to cruelize that poor dumb creeter 
that way for? Why don’t you take hold of it 
and kill it right off and not torment the poor 
thing as you are doing?” 
Seeing that I would not go very near it, she 
went back. of the low stone wall, reached over 
and taking a firm “tail holt” she whacked its 
head several times against a projecting stone in 
the wall and soon knocked the life out of it, and 
I do not recollect that the surrounding atmos- 
phere was scented in the least with mephitic 
perfumery. ANDREW LINCOLN Lyon. 
Forest and 
been 

Pheasants in Massachusetts. 
A RECENT press dispatch to the New York 
papers from Plymouth, Mass., declares that pro- 
tection is to be taken off the Mongolian and 
other Asiatic pheasants in Massachusetts, and 
that the Massachusetts Fish and Game Commis- 
sion at a meeting recently held at the State 
House, had practically decided to recommend to 
the Legislature that the game laws be so changed 
that both male and female pheasants can be shot 
at any time. 
This dispatch is altogether erroneous. It is 
not the fact that the Massachusetts Fish and 
Game Commission is opposed to the pheasants, 
or, if they are so opposed, they have kept it a 
JAY ON 
a photograph by 
CARIBOU HEAD. 
William H. 
Ehrich 
secret up to the present time. The Massachu- 
setts commission is and always has been in favor 
of propagating these birds, but it is understood 
that some of the ornithologists believe that they 
do harm, and that the Fish and Game Protective 
Association of Massachusetts has gone on record 
in Opposition to them and contemplates prepar- 
ing a bill against them for presentation to the 
Legislature 
We know of no good evidence 
ants destroy the nests of native birds, or, in- 
deed, interfere at all with our game birds in 
Massachusetts except that—as any other bird or 
mammal would do—they sometimes drive quail 
away from food put out for them in winter. 
There are not a few of our Eastern sportsmen 
who, in the absence of our native birds, have 
become strong partisans of the pheasant as game 
birds and would heartily regret any action which 
would tend to lessen their numbers. 
that the pheas- 
In that excellent volume “Useful Birds and 
Their Protection,’ by Edw. H. Forbush, we find 
certain statements about the pheasants received 
from three persons out of 300 correspondents to 
whom circulars had been sent inquiring about 
injuring crops and killing game birds. The 
testimony there given seems vague. The state- 
ments are these: “Several reputable persons 
assert that since pheasants have become common 
they have found ‘both partridges and quail with 
their heads pecked open.’ Other birds of these 
species were said to have borne evidence of hav- 
ing been slain in combat with a larger bird. One 
man is reported to have seen a pheasant kill a 
partridge. I watched the quail and pheasant 
feeding together at Wareham, and once saw a 
pheasant strike a quail on the head with its beak 
exactly as a hen will sometimes strike and kill 
a strange chicken. In this case, however, the 
quail escaped, but gave the pheasant a wide 
berth thereafter. One observer reports that a 
lady was feeding quail in winter and that a 
cock pheasant habitually drove the quail away 
and ate the grain.” 

WHERE QUALITY IS FIRST. 
Campers and sportsmen who demand the best 
should note that the equipment of every scientific 
and exploring expedition for the past fifty years 
has included a supply of Borden’s Eagle Brand 
Condensed Milk. Keeps in any climate and 
under all conditions. The original and leading 
brand since 1857.—Adv, 

