Pass Christian is an ideal place for a man to go who wishes to get away from the Northern cold for a few weeks, and be where climate, people, and surroundings are all delightful, and the fishing and shooting excellent. There is a good chance, too, that the fish and game will be preserved for use, instead of recklessly exterminated; for during the last dozen years Louisiana and Mississippi, like the rest of the Union, have waked to the criminality of marring and ruining a beautiful heritage which should be left, and through wise use (not non-use) can be left, undiminished, to the generations that are to come after us. As yet the Gulf in front of the houses swarms with fish of many kinds up to the great tarpon, the mailed and leaping giant of the warm seas; and with the rapid growth of wisdom in dealing with nature we may hope that there will soon be action looking toward the regulation of seining and to protection of the fish at certain seasons. On land the quail have increased in the neighborhood of Pass Christian during the last few years. This is largely due to the activity of my host and his two sons as hunters. They have a pack of beagles, trained to night work, and this pack has to its credit nearly four hundred coons and possums—together with an occasional skunk!—and, moreover, has chivied the gray foxes almost out of the country; and all these animals are the inveterate enemies of all small game, and especially of ground-nesting birds. To save interesting creatures, it is often necessary not merely to refrain from killing them but also to war on their enemies.
One of the sons runs the Parker stock-farm in upper Louisiana, beside the Mississippi. There are about four thousand acres, half of it highland, the other half subject to flood if the levees break. Five years ago such a break absolutely destroyed the Parker plantations, then exclusively on low land. Now, in event of flood, the stock can be driven, and the human beings escape, to the higher ground. Young Parker, now twenty-two years old, has run the plantation since he was sixteen. The horses, cattle, and sheep are all of the highest grade; the improvement in the stock of Louisiana and Mississippi during the last two decades has been really noteworthy. Game, and wild things generally, have increased in numbers on this big stock-farm. There is no wanton molestation of any animal permitted, no plundering of nests, no shooting save within strictly defined limits, and so far as possible all rare things are given every chance to increase. As an example, when, in clearing a tract of swamp land, a heron's nest was discovered, the bushes round about were left undisturbed, and the heron family was reared in safety. Wild turkeys have somewhat, and quail very markedly, increased. The great horned owls, which destroyed the ducks, have to be warred against, and the beasts of prey likewise. Surely it will ultimately again be recognized in our country that life on a plantation, on a great stock-farm or ranch, is one of the most interesting, and, from the standpoint of both body and soul, one of the most healthy, of all ways of earning a living.
At four on the morning of the 8th our party started from the wharf in front of Pass Christian. We were in two boats. One, good-sized and comfortable, under the command of Captain Lewis Young, was the property of the State Conservation Commission of Louisiana, the commission having most courteously placed it at our disposal. On this boat were my host, his two sons, John, Jr., and Tom, myself, and a photographer, Mr. Coquille, of New Orleans. The other boat, named the Royal Tern, was the property of the Audubon Society, being allotted to the work of cruising among and protecting the bird colonies on those islands set apart as bird refuges by the National and State Governments. On this boat—which had a wretched engine, almost worthless—went Mr. Herbert K. Job and Mr. Frank M. Miller. Mr. Miller was at one time president of the Louisiana Conservation Commission, and the founder of the Louisiana State Audubon Society, and is one of the group of men to whom she owes it that she, the home state of Audubon, of our first great naturalist, is now thoroughly awake to the danger of reckless waste and destruction of all the natural resources of the State, including the birds. Mr. Herbert K. Job is known to all who care for bird study and bird preservation. He is a naturalist who has made of bird-photography a sport, a science, and an art. His pictures, and his books in which these pictures appear, are fascinating both to the scientific ornithologist and to all lovers of the wild creatures of the open. Like the other field naturalists I have known, like the men who were with me in Africa and South America, Mr. Job is an exceptionally hardy, resolute, and resourceful man, following his wilderness work with single-minded devotion, and continually, and in matter-of-fact manner, facing and overcoming hardship, wearing toil, and risk which worthy stay-at-home people have no means whatever of even gauging. I owed the pleasure of Mr. Job's company to Mr. Frank M. Chapman, at whose suggestion he was sent with me by the National Audubon Society.
The State Conservation Commission owes its existence to the wise public spirit and farsightedness of the Louisiana Legislature. The Audubon Society, which has done far more than any other single agency in creating and fostering an enlightened public sentiment for the preservation of our useful and attractive birds, is a purely voluntary organization, consisting of men and women who in these matters look further ahead than their fellows, and who have the precious gift of sympathetic imagination, so that they are able to see, and to wish to preserve for their children's children, the beauty and wonder of nature. (During the year preceding this trip, by the way, the society enrolled one hundred and fifty-one thousand boys and girls in its junior bird clubs, all of which give systematic instruction in the value of bird life.) It was the Audubon Society which started the movement for the establishment of bird refuges. The society now protects and polices about one hundred of these refuges, which, of course, are worthless unless thus protected.
The Royal Tern is commanded by Captain William Sprinkle, born and bred on this Gulf coast, who knows the sea-fowl, and the islands where they breed and dwell, as he knows the winds and the lovely, smiling, treacherous Gulf waters. He is game warden, and he and the Royal Tern are the police force for over five hundred square miles of sand-bars, shallow waters, and intricate channels. The man and the boat are two of the chief obstacles in the way of the poachers, the plume-hunters, and eggers, who always threaten these bird sanctuaries.
Many of these poachers are at heart good men, who follow their fathers' business, just as respectable men on the seacoast once followed the business of wrecking. But when times change and a once acknowledged trade comes under the ban of the law the character of those following it also changes for the worse. Wreckers are no longer respectable, and plume-hunters and eggers are sinking to the same level. The illegal business of killing breeding birds, of leaving nestlings to starve wholesale, and of general ruthless extermination, more and more tends to attract men of the same moral category as those who sell whiskey to Indians and combine the running of "blind pigs" with highway robbery and murder for hire.
In Florida one of the best game wardens of the Audubon Society was killed by these sordid bird-butchers. A fearless man and a good boat are needed to keep such gentry in awe. Captain Sprinkle meets the first requirement, the hull of the Royal Tern the second. But the engines of the Tern are worthless; she can catch no freebooter; she is safe only in the mildest weather. Is there not some bird-lover of means and imagination who will put a good engine in her? Such a service would be very real. As for Captain Sprinkle, his services are, of course, underpaid, his salary bearing no relation to their value. The Biological Survey does its best with its limited means; the Audubon Society adds something extra; but this very efficient and disinterested laborer is worth a good deal more than the hire he receives. The government pays many of its servants, usually those with rather easy jobs, too much; but the best men, who do the hardest work, the men in the life-saving and lighthouse service, the forest-rangers, and those who patrol and protect the reserves of wild life, are almost always underpaid.
Yet, in spite of all the disadvantages, much has been accomplished. This particular reservation was set apart by presidential proclamation in 1905. Captain Sprinkle was at once put in charge. Of the five chief birds, the royal terns, Caspian terns, Cabot's terns, laughing gulls, and skimmers, there were that season about one thousand nests. This season, ten years later, there are about thirty-five thousand nests. The brown pelicans and Louisiana herons also show a marked increase. The least tern, which had been completely exterminated or driven away, has returned and is breeding in fair numbers.
As we steamed away from the Pass Christian dock dawn was turning to daylight under the still brilliant crescent moon. Soon we saw the red disk of the sun rising behind the pine forest. We left Mississippi Sound, and then were on the Gulf itself. The Gulf was calm, and the still water teemed with life. Each school of mullets or sardines could be told by the queer effect on the water, as of a cloud shadow. Continually we caught glimpses of other fish; and always they were fleeing from death or ravenously seeking to inflict death on the weak. Nature is ruthless, and where her sway is uncontested there is no peace save the peace of death; and the fecund stream of life, especially of life on the lower levels, flows like an immense torrent out of non-existence for but the briefest moment before the enormous majority of the beings composing it are engulfed in the jaws of death, and again go out into the shadow.
Huge rays sprang out of the water and fell back with a resounding splash. Devil-fish, which made the rays look like dwarfs, swam slowly near the surface; some had their mouths wide open as they followed their prey. Globular jellyfish, as big as pumpkins, with translucent bodies, pulsed through the waters; little fishes and crabs swam among their short, thick tentacles and in between the waving walls into which the body was divided. Once we saw the head of a turtle above water; it was a loggerhead turtle, and the head was as large as the head of a man; when I first saw it, above the still water, I had no idea what it was.