Our Vanishing Wild Life eBook

William Temple Hornaday
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 632 pages of information about Our Vanishing Wild Life.

Our Vanishing Wild Life eBook

William Temple Hornaday
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 632 pages of information about Our Vanishing Wild Life.
districts, but they do not destroy insects, and are of comparatively little value as destroyers of the noxious rodents that prey upon farm crops.  While a few persons may dispute the second half of this proposition, the burden of proof that my view is wrong will rest upon them; and having spent eighteen years “on the farm,” I think I am right.  If there is any positive evidence tending to prove that the small carnivores that we class as “vermin” are industrious and persistent destroyers of noxious rodents—­pocket gophers, moles, field-mice and rats—­or that they do not kill wild birds numerously, now is the time to produce it, because the tide of public sentiment is strongly setting against the weasels, mink, foxes and skunks. (Once upon a time, a shrewd young man in the Zoological Park discovered a weasel hiding behind a stone while devouring a sparrow that it had just caught and killed.  He stalked it successfully, seized it in his bare hand, and, even though bitten, made good the capture.)

The State of Pennsylvania is extensively wooded, with forests and with brush which affords excellent home quarters and breeding grounds for mammalian “vermin.”  The small predatory mammals are so seriously destructive to ruffed grouse and other ground birds that the State Game Commission is greatly concerned.  When the hunter’s license law is enacted, as it very surely will be at the next session of the legislature (1913), a portion of the $70,000 that it will produce each year will be used by the commission in paying bounties on the destruction of the surplus of vermin.  Through the pursuit of vermin, any farmer can easily win enough bounties to more than pay the cost of his annual hunting license (one dollar), and the farmers’ boys will find a new interest in life.

In some portions of the Rocky Mountain region, the assaults of the large predatory mammals and birds on the young of the big-game species occasionally demand special treatment.  In the Yellowstone Park the pumas multiplied to such an extent and killed so many young elk that their number had to be systematically reduced.  To that end “Buffalo” Jones was sent out by the Government to find and destroy the intolerable surplus of pumas.  In the course of his campaign he killed about forty, much to the benefit of the elk herds.  Around the entrance to the den of a big old male puma, Mr. Jones found the skulls and other remains of nine elk calves that “the old Tom” had killed and carried there.

Pumas and lynxes attack and kill mountain sheep; and the golden eagle is very partial to mountain sheep lambs and mountain goat kids.  It will not answer to permit birds of that bold and predatory species to become too numerous in mountains inhabited by goats and sheep; and the fewer the mountain lions the better, for they, like the lynx and eagle, have nothing to live upon save the game.

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Our Vanishing Wild Life from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.