aA USD UB: OsNaB UIP GB FTN 13 
November Bird Meeting 
By CONSTANCE NICE 
OUR DRIVE to the Wilson Ornithological Club Thanksgiving meeting at 
Minneapolis was a particular pleasure because we passed through country 
new to us. Western Wisconsin is much wilder, boggier country than I had 
realized, punctuated by abrupt crags, all that remains of the layers of 
sandstone which formerly covered the territory several hundred feet thick. 
The University of Minnesota, where the meeting was held, is built on 
a huge scale. Perhaps the great open spaces between buildings and the 
vast size of the buildings themselves explain the muscle of Minnesota’s 
football team. 
The meeting concerned itself with bird behavior in a manner as inter- 
esting to the amateur as to the professional. The symposium on wildlife 
management was particularly encouraging. Dr. Lawrence Hicks, Director 
of the Ohio Wildlife Research Station, described the great increase in the 
pheasant crop in northwestern Ohio, which has been produced by combining 
scientific research and publicizing of the results with a state game refuge 
management system and the interest and cooperative organization of the 
farmers in raising and harvesting more pheasants. 
Prof. Aldo Leopold, of the University of Wisconsin, described the 
progress that had been made through Farmer Cooperatives in interesting 
Wisconsin farmers in wildlife. Farmers, after all, own most of the suitable 
country and determine by their farming practices whether wildlife will be 
able to exist. In the case of most species of resident game, the population 
is not limited so much by overshooting as by lack of winter food or winter 
shelter or the “housing situation.” The practice, advocated by foresters, 
of cutting “wolf” trees (the partially hollow or injured veterans) has made 
many otherwise desirable squirrel and raccoon residential sections un- 
desirable. Another requirement for wildlife, privacy, or the ability to 
escape from the attack of an enemy to the barbed or mazy entanglements 
of a briar patch, grape bower or evergreen thicket, is now being provided 
by many Wisconsin farmers. Their interest in game is extending itself 
to non-game species, and pride in their neatness in burning pasture junipers 
is being replaced by pride in the growth of their junipers and pines. 
Warren Chase, of the U. S. Conservation Service, spoke of the benefits 
to wildlife of contouring for erosion control due to the variety of “edges’”— 
the more irregular the patches of cover, the more birds and animals. 
Therefore the leaving of fencerows to halt erosion is of immense value to 
wildlife. 
As a climax to the two-day meeting, motion pictures showed us the 
life of many birds which it would require hundreds of miles of travel and 
many hours of cramped watching in a blind to see half so well. Bird 
photography in color is so beautiful that there is some danger of forgetting 
the scientific for the artistic value. I mention in particular Dr. O. S. 
Pettingill’s exciting pictures of the birds of a great western marsh refuge, 
hundreds of eared grebes fleeing from their nests, avocets brooding, etc. 
Earl G. Wright’s motion pictures of the “Wildlife of the Arid Southwest,” 
