The introduction of old-world pheasants, and the attempted introduction of the Hungarian partridge, are efforts designed first of all to furnish sportsmen something to shoot, and incidentally to provide a new food supply for the table.  The people of this country are not starving, nor are they even very hungry for the meat of strange birds; but as a food-producer, the pheasant is all right.

It disgusts me to the core, however, to see states that wantonly and wickedly, through sheer apathy and lack of business enterprise, have allowed the quail, the heath hen, the pinnated grouse and the ruffed grouse to become almost exterminated by extravagant and foolish shooters, now putting forth wonderfully diligent efforts and spending money without end, in introducing foreign species!  Many men actually take the ground that our game “can’t live” in its own country any longer; but only the ignorant and the unthinking will say so!  Give our game birds decent, sensible, actual protection, stop their being slaughtered far faster than they breed, and they will live anywhere in their own native haunts!  But where is there one species of upland game bird in America that has been sensibly and adequately protected?  From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon there is not one,—­not a single locality in which protection from shooting has been sensible, or just, or adequate.

We have universally given our American upland game birds an unfair deal, and now we are adding insult to slaughter by bringing in foreign game birds to replace them—­because our birds “can’t live” before five million shot-guns!

Our American game birds CAN live, anywhere in the haunts where nature placed them that are not to-day actually occupied by cities and towns!  Give me the making of the laws, and I will make the prairie chicken and quail as numerous throughout the northern states east of the Great Plains as domestic chickens are outside the regular poultry farms.  There is only one reason why there are not ten million quail in the state of New York to-day,—­one for each human inhabitant,—­and that reason is the infernal greed and selfishness of the men who have almost exterminated our quail by over-shooting.  Don’t talk to me about the “hard winters” killing off our quail!  It is the hard cheek of the men who shoot them when they ought to let them alone.

The State of Iowa could support 500,000 prairie chickens and never miss the waste grain that they would glean in the fields; but now the prairie chicken is practically extinct in Iowa, only a few scattered specimens remaining as “last survivors” in some of the northern counties.  The migration of those birds that unexpectedly came down from the north last winter was like the fall of a meteor,—­only the birds promptly faded away again.  Why should New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts exterminate the heath hen and coddle the ring-necked pheasant and the Hungarian partridge?