Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation

by William T. Hornaday

A gentlemen of my acquaintance, who admires the European magpie, and is well aware of its acceptable residence in various countries in Europe, once requested my cooperation in securing and acclimatizing at his country estate a number of birds of that species. As in duty bound, I laid the matter before our Department of Agriculture, and asked for an opinion. The Department replied, in effect, "Why import a foreign magpie when we have in the West a species of our own quite as handsome, and which could more easily be transplanted?"

The point seemed well taken. Now, I had seen much of the American magpie in its wild home,—the Rocky Mountains, and the western border of the Great Plains,—and I thought I was acquainted with it. I knew that a few complaints against it had been made, but they had seemed to me very trivial. To me our magpie seemed to have a generally unobjectionable record.

Fortunately for me, I wrote to Mr. Hershey, Assistant Curator of Ornithology in the Colorado State Museum, for assistance in procuring fifty birds, for transplantation to the State of New York. Mr. Hershey replied that if I really wished the birds for acclimatization, he would gladly procure them for me; but he said that in the thickly-settled farming communities of Colorado, the magpie is now regarded as a pest. It devours the eggs and nestlings of other wild birds, and not only that, it destroys so many eggs of domestic poultry that many farmers are compelled to keep their egg-laying hens shut up in wire enclosures!

Now, this condition happened to be entirely unknown to me, because I never had seen the American magpie in action in a farming community! Of course the proposed experiment was promptly abandoned, but it is embarrassing to think how near I came to making a mistake. Even if the magpies had been transplanted and had become a nuisance in this state, they could easily have been exterminated by shooting; but the memory of the error would have been humiliating to the party of the first part.

The Old World Pheasants In America. —In 1881 the first Chinese ring-necked pheasants were introduced into the United States, twelve miles below Portland, Oregon; twelve males and three females. The next year, Oregon gave pheasants a five-year close season. A little later, the golden and silver pheasants of China were introduced, and all three species throve mightily, on the Pacific Coast, in Oregon, Washington and western British Columbia. In 1900, the sportsmen of Portland and Vancouver were shooting cock golden pheasants according to law.

The success of Chinese and Japanese pheasants on the Pacific Coast soon led to experiments in the more progressive states, at state expense. State pheasant hatcheries have been established in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa and California.

In many localities, the old-world pheasants have come to stay. The rise and progress of the ring-neck in western New York has already been noted. It came about merely through protection. That protection was protection in fact, not the false "protection" that shoots on the sly. It is the irony of fate that full protection should be accorded a foreign bird, in order that it may multiply and possess the land, while the same kind of protection is refused the native bob white, and it is now almost a dead species, so far as this state is concerned.

In looking about for grievances against the ring-necked and English pheasant, some persons have claimed that in winter these birds are "budders," which means that they harmfully strip trees and bushes of the buds that those bushes will surely need in their spring opening. On that point Dr. Joseph Kalbfus, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, sent out a circular letter of inquiry, in response to which he received many statements. With but one exception, all the testimony received was to the effect that pheasants are not bud-eaters, and that generally the charge is unfounded.

The introduction of old-world pheasants, and the attempted introduction of the Hungarian partridge, are efforts designed first of all to furnish sportsmen something to shoot, and incidentally to provide a new food supply for the table. The people of this country are not starving, nor are they even very hungry for the meat of strange birds; but as a food-producer, the pheasant is all right.

It disgusts me to the core, however, to see states that wantonly and wickedly, through sheer apathy and lack of business enterprise, have allowed the quail, the heath hen, the pinnated grouse and the ruffed grouse to become almost exterminated by extravagant and foolish shooters, now putting forth wonderfully diligent efforts and spending money without end, in introducing foreign species! Many men actually take the ground that our game "can't live" in its own country any longer; but only the ignorant and the unthinking will say so! Give our game birds decent, sensible, actual protection, stop their being slaughtered far faster than they breed, and they will live anywhere in their own native haunts! But where is there one species of upland game bird in America that has been sensibly and adequately protected? From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon there is not one,—not a single locality in which protection from shooting has been sensible, or just, or adequate.