Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation

by William T. Hornaday

DEADFALL TRAPS IN BURMA

A Long Series set Across a Valley, by the Kachins of the Burma-Chinese Border. A Wholesale Method of Wild-life Slaughter, Photographed by C. William Beebe, 1910

As a contrast to the millinery hunter of fifty years ago it is refreshing to find that at last sincere efforts are being made in British possessions to stop this traffic. I happened to be at Rangoon when six large bales of pheasant skins were seized by the Custom officials. A Chinaman had brought them from Yunnan via Bhamo, and was preparing to ship them as ducks' feathers. Two of the bales were opened for my inspection. The first contained about five hundred Lady Amherst pheasant skins, falling to pieces and lacking heads and legs. The second held over four hundred silver pheasants, in almost perfect condition. The chief collector had put the absolutely prohibitive fine of £200 on them, and was waiting for the expiration of the legal number of days before burning the entire lot. They must have represented years of work in decimating the pheasant fauna of western China.

Far up in the wilderness of northern Burma, and over the Yunnan border, we often came upon some of the most ingenious examples of native trapping, a system which we found repeated in the Malay States, Borneo, China and other parts of the Far East. A low bamboo fence is built directly across a steep valley or series of valleys, about half way from the summit to the lower end, and about every fifteen feet a narrow opening is left, over which a heavy log is suspended. Any creature attempting to make its way through, treads upon several small sticks and [ ] by so doing springs the trap and the dead-fall claims a victim. When a country is systematically strung with traps such as these, sooner or later all but a pitiful remnant of the smaller mammals, birds and reptiles are certain to be wiped out. Morning after morning I have visited such a runway and found dead along its path, what must have been all the walking, running or crawling creatures which the night before had sought the water at the bottom; pheasants, cobras, mouse-deer, rodents, civets, and members of many other groups. In some countries nooses instead of dead-falls guard the openings, but the result is equally deadly.

I have described this method of trapping because of its future importance in the destruction of wild life in the Far East. The Chinaman in all his many millions is undergoing a remarkably swift and radical evolution both of character and dress. In many ways, if only from the viewpoint of the patient, thrifty store-keeper he is a most powerful factor in the East, and is becoming more so. In many cases he imitates the white nations by cutting off his queue and altering his dress. In some mysterious correlated way his diet seems simultaneously affected, and while for untold generations rice and fish has satisfied all his gastronomic desires, a new craving, that for meat, has come to him. The result is apparent in many parts of the East. The Chinaman is willing and able to pay for meat, and the native finds a new market for the creatures about him. Again and again when I wished a few specimens of some certain pheasant I had but to hail passing canoes and bid a few annas or "cash" or "ringits" higher than the prospective Chinese purchaser would give, and the pheasants were mine.

In the catalogues of the brokers' sales of feathers we read of many thousands of the wonderful ocellated wing feathers of the argus pheasant, but no less horrible is the sight of a canoe crammed with the bedraggled bodies of these magnificent birds on their way to some Chinese hamlet where they will be sold for a pittance, the flesh eaten to the last tendon and the feathers given to the children and puppies to play with. The newly-aroused appetite of the Mongolian will soon be an important factor in the extermination of animals and birds, few species being exempt, for the Chinaman lives up to his reputation and is not squeamish as to the nature of his meat.

Before we leave the subject of Chinamen let us consider another recent factor in the destruction of wild life which is at present widely operative in China itself. This is the cold storage warehouse, of which six or eight enormous ones have gone up in different parts of the East. To speak in detail only of the one at Hankow, six hundred miles up the Yangtze, we found it to be the largest structure in the city. Surrounded by a high wall, with each entrance and exit guarded by armed Sikhs, it seemed like the feudal castle of some medieval baron. Why such secrecy is necessary I could not learn, as there are no laws against its business. But so carefully guarded is its premises that until a short time ago even the British consul-general of Hankow had not been allowed to enter. He, however, at last refused to sign the papers for any more outgoing shipments until he should be allowed to see what was going on within the warehouse. I hoped to be able to look over some of the frozen pheasants for interesting scientific material, but of course was not allowed to do so.

Although here in the heart of China, outside changes are not felt so strongly and the newly-acquired meat diet of the border and emigrant Chinese is hardly apparent, these warehouses have opened up a new source of revenue, which has met with instant response. Thousands and tens of thousands of wild shot or trapped pheasants and other birds are now brought to these establishments by the natives from far and near. The birds are frozen, and twice a year shipped on specially refrigerated P. and O. steamships to England and the continent of Europe where they seem to find a ready sale. Pigs and chickens also figure in the shipments. Now the pheasants have for centuries existed in enormous numbers in the endless ricefields of China, without doing any damage to the crops. In fact they could not be present in such numbers without being an important factor in keeping down insect and other enemies of the grain. When their numbers are decimated as they are being at present, there must eventually result a serious upsetting of the balance of nature. Let us hope that in some way this may be avoided, and that the present famine deaths of thirty thousand or more in some provinces will not be increased many fold.