Page 100 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

78 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
ants, woodcock, snipe, mallard duck, shore birds and other species that nest on the ground, should be killed. Since we must choose between the two, the birds have it ! Weasels and foxes and skunks are interesting, and they do much to promote the hilarity of life in rural 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
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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 StateGameCommissionisgreatlyconcerned. Whenthehunter'slicense law is enacted, as it very surely will be at the next session of the legis- lature (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 ofthesurplusofvermin. Throughthepursuitofvermin,anyfarmer 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 in- terest 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 theirnumberhadtobesystematicallyreduced. Tothatend"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, muchtothebenefitoftheelkherds. Aroundtheentrancetotheden 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^^l mountain lions the better, for they, like the lynx and eagle, have TTothing to live upon save the game.
or that they do not kill wild birds
The wolves and coyotes have learned to seek the ranges of cattle.