A GAME PRESERVE
If you live on a big farm or ranch well wooded and watered, your conditions are ideal for creating a private game preserve. If a few wild birds are known to be already at home on your place, encourage them. Let them breed in security and plant their favourite food crops. Small areas of land in various out of the way places can be ploughed and planted in spring to buckwheat and millet, wheat, rye, and barley.
The bob-white has become so rare that you will probably have to plant some seed birds, as they say. They can be bought for five to ten dollars a dozen. Care should be taken that the birds are not frightened when liberated. To spend ten dollars for birds, only to lose them by carelessness, is poor business. These suggestions are given by an experienced game warden: "Take the boxed birds out near some good, thick shelter where they can hide and gain confidence. Attach a long rope to a soap box, scatter grain about near the end of the box nearest the cover, and scatter sheaf grain along toward the cover. Take only three cocks and three hens from the shipping box and put them in the liberating box. Go some distance off and be deliberate. Let the quail get rested and quiet. Pull the long rope, lifting the box gently and steadily. The birds will see the grain and hop out. Watch them from your safe distance following the wheat toward the cover. Keep up the supply of wheat until they are accustomed to their new home, and can find their way back after roaming. Birds should not be planted later than May first."
PROTECTING THE WILD FLOWERS
The country would be a better place to live in the whole or part of the year or to visit for a day or a week or a month if there were more wild flowers there. Even the man who doesn't know one flower from another will acknowledge, if asked, that wild flowers make the woods and the roadsides and the meadows prettier to look at.
The country over, our loveliest wild flowers have met the same fate as the bright-feathered birds. They have been hunted for their blossoms and the gatherers have not cared whether they pulled the plants up by the roots or not. The case of trailing arbutus is a particularly sad one. In localities where it used to flourish, selfish and wanton hands have literally rooted it out until none remains.
Only lately has any effort been made to protect the wild flowers and multiply them. Now, in the general awakening of the public to the fact that we are blundering and wasteful, a widespread interest has grown up in saving the wild flowers.
In your own locality you can help this good work. Refrain from destroying the plants yourself. When you gather flowers in woods or meadow do so in moderation. A few loose, graceful sprays will give you as much pleasure as a huge bunch inartistically crowded into a vase. Have you not often seen children returning from a walk in the woods bearing handfuls of columbine? These frail blooms wilt in the hot sun, and the roadway is often strewn with forlorn bunches of them, dropped by tired children. How much better that each child should gather a few and put them all in a botanical case or wet paper to be distributed when they reach home. Those hundreds on the dusty road will never be visited by the ruby-throated humming-bird, nor set any seed for next year's flowers. Older boys and girls can do much to influence the younger ones to gather sparingly.
Another way to increase the wild flowers in your locality is to propagate them. Gather their seeds and plant them in your garden where you can protect the young seedlings from harm. Where they are big enough, set them out where they will have natural conditions. Or undertake a bit of wild gardening right in the woods or the roadside where the plants grow naturally. Clear out less desirable sorts, lessening the struggle for your favourites. Cultivate them a little. See that they do not suffer from too much sun or rain or drought.
If you know of a plot of woodland soon to be denuded or a piece of wild land to be improved, get permission to gather bulbs, roots, and plants there. If you know the flowers the year 'round, you will be able to recognize the lilies, the orchids, the blood roots, the wild ginger, hepatica, violets, and can transplant them to your own woods or garden.