Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation

by William T. Hornaday

THE SOUTHERN-NEGRO METHOD OF COMBING OUT THE WILD LIFE

"Our colored sportsman is gregarious at all times, but especially so in the matter of recreation. He may slouch about alone, and pot a bevy or two of quail when in actual need of something to eat, or when he has a sale for the birds, but when it comes to shooting for fun he wants to be with the 'gang'."—Charles Askins.

Our colored sportsman is gregarious at all times, but especially so in the matter of recreation. He may slouch about alone and pot a bevy or two of quail when in actual need of something to eat, or when he has a sale for the birds, but when it comes to shooting for fun he wants to be with the "gang." I have seen the darkies at Christmas time collect fifty in a drove with every man his dog, and spread out over the fields. Such a glorious time as he has then! A single cottontail will draw a half-dozen shots and perhaps a couple of young bucks will pour loads into a bunny after he is dead out of pure deviltry and high spirits. I once witnessed the accidental killing of a young negro on this kind of a foray. His companions loaded him into a wagon, stuck a cigar in his mouth, and tried to pour whiskey down him every time they took a drink themselves as they rode back to town. This army of black hunters and their dogs cross field after field, combing the country with fine teeth that leave neither wild animal nor bird life behind.

There comes a time toward the spring of the year after the quail season is over when the average rural darky is "between hay and grass." The merchants on whom he has depended for supplies make it a practice to refuse credit between January first and crop time. The black has spent his cotton money, his sweet potato pile has vanished, the sorghum barrel is empty, he has eaten the last of his winter's pork, and all that remains is a bit of meal and the meat his gun can secure. He is hunting in grim earnest now, using all the cunning and skill acquired by years of practice. He eats woodpeckers, jaybirds, hawks and skunks, drawing the line only at crows and buzzards. At this season of the year I have carried chicken hawks up to the cabins for the sake of watching the delight of the piccaninnies who with glowing eyes would declare, "Them's mos' as good as chicken." What happens to the robins, doves, larks, red birds, mocking birds and all songsters in this hungry season needs hardly to be stated.

It is also a time between hay and grass for the rabbits and the quail. The corn fields are bare and the weed seeds are exhausted. A spring cold spell pinches, they lose their vitality, become thin and quite lack their ordinary wariness. Then the figure-four trap springs up in the hedgerow and the sedge while the work of decimation goes more rapidly along. The rabbits can no longer escape the half-starved dogs, the thinning cover fails to hide the quail and the song birds betray themselves by singing of the coming spring.

With the growing scarcity of the game now comes the season of sedge and field burning. This is done ostensibly to prepare the land for spring plowing, but really to destroy the last refuge of the quail and rabbits so that they can be bagged with certainty. All the negroes of a neighborhood collect for one of these burnings, all their dogs, and of course all the boys from six years old up. They surround the field and set it on fire in many places, leaving small openings for the game to dash out among the motley assembly. I have seen quail fly out of the burning grass with flaming particles still attached to them. They alight on the burnt ground too bewildered to fly again and the boys and dogs pick them up. Crazed rabbits try the gauntlet amidst the barking curs, shouting negroes and popping guns, but death is sure and quick. The few quail that may escape have no refuge from the hawks and nothing to eat, so every battue of this kind marks the absolute end of the birds in one vicinity; and the next day the darkies repeat the performance elsewhere.

At this season of the year, the first of May, the blacks are putting in some of their one hundred working days while the single breech-loader rusts in the chimney corner. Surely the few birds that have escaped the foray of the "gang," lived through the hungry days, and survived their burned homes can now call "Bob White" and mate in peace. But school is out and the summer sun is putting new life into the bare feet of the half-grown boys, and the halfbreed bird dogs are busier than they were even in winter. The young rabbits are killed before they get out of the nest, and the quail eggs must be hidden rarely well that escape both the eyes of the boys and the noses of the dogs. After all it is not surprising that but three bevies remained of the sixty. Doubtless they would not, except that nature is very kind to her own in the sunny South.

Not every white man in the South is a sportsman or even a shooter; many are purely business men who have said let the "nigger" do as he likes so long as he raises cotton and buys our goods. But Dixie has her full share of true men of the out-of-doors and they have sworn in downright Southern fashion that this thing has got to end. Nevertheless their problem is deep and puzzling. In Alabama they made an effort and a beginning. They asked for a law requiring every man to obtain written permission before entering the lands of another to hunt and shoot; they asked for a resident license law taxing every gun not less than five dollars a year; for a shortened season, a bag limit, and a complete system of State wardens. Unfortunately, a lot of white farmers were in the same range as the blacks, and being hit, too, they raised a great outcry. The result was that the Alabama sportsmen got everything they asked for except the foundation of the structure they were trying to build, the high resident license or gun tax which alone could have shut out three dollar guns and saved the remnant of the game. Under the new law the sale of game was forbidden, neither could it be shipped out of the State alive or dead; the ever popular non-resident license was provided for; the season was shortened and the bag limited; the office of State game warden was created with deputies to be paid from fines; hunting upon the lands of another without written permission became a misdemeanor; and then the whole thing was nullified by reducing the resident license to nothing where a man shot upon his own land, one dollar in his own county, and two dollars outside of it. In its practical workings the new law amounts to this: A few northern gunners have paid the non-resident license fee, and enough resident licenses have been taken out by the city sportsmen to make up the handsome salary of the State warden. The negro still hunts upon his own land or upon the land of the man who wants corn and cotton raised, with perfect indifference to the whole thing. Who was to enforce the law against him? Not the one disgusted deputy with three big counties to patrol who depended for his salary upon the fines collected from the negroes. It would take one man to every three miles square to protect the game in the South.

The one effective way of dealing with the situation in Alabama was to have legislated three dollar guns out of existence with a five dollar tax, adding to this nearly a like amount on dogs. Hardly a sportsman in the South will disagree with this conclusion. But sportsmen never had a majority vote either in the South or in the North, and the South's grave problem is yet unsolved.