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.