CARIBOU FAWNS
In the New York Zoological Park
I believe that the mountain goat will be the last of the big-game species of the open mountains of North America to be exterminated by man. The sheep, moose, caribou and musk-ox will go long in advance of the ubiquitous goat. In protected areas like Glacier Park and the Elk River Game Preserve of southeast British Columbia, the species should endure for a century, or perhaps for two centuries. Why not? In such protected sanctuaries they should finally increase to such an extent that the natural overflow will make legitimate goat-hunting in the surrounding mountains. I should be sorry to see goat-hunting become a lost art; for it is mighty fascinating,—provided you stop with two goats and can return with a clear conscience.
The Caribou
Europe and Asia have the reindeer, but North America has a truly grand array of caribou species. In size and geography they range all the way from the absurd little Peary caribou of Ellesmere Land, which looks like a goat with deer antlers upon it, to the giant of the Cassiar Mountains, known as Osborn’s caribou. Roughly speaking, our North American species are divided by their antlers into two groups, the Woodland and the Barren Ground. The important species of the latter are the Greenland caribou, the Peary, the Barren Ground, the Grant and Kenai. Of the Woodland group the leading species are the Newfoundland, Canadian, Black-Faced, and Osborn’s. The gravure shown herewith is a very fine presentation of the Canadian Woodland species from an oil painting by Carl Rungius, now owned by the Duquesne Club, Pittsburgh.
ELK
Its antlers are “in the velvet”—only half developed. The animal has its summer coat of hair
The Barren Ground caribou exists in the greatest numbers of any mammalian species, great or small, now inhabiting the earth. The immense throngs that have been seen by Warburton Pike, C. J. Jones and others, while on their annual southward migration, literally stagger the imagination. Undoubtedly there are millions of individuals, and they offer a sharp commentary on the ability of Nature to multiply her live stock, and keep it up to the highest standard, without any help from man.
