AMERICA’S GAME

Taranaki Daily News, 20 December 1929, Page 13

AMERICA’S GAME

SANCTUARIES FOR BIRDS. ARCTIC CIRCLE TO MEXICO. Vancouver, Nov. 13. The present season is witnessing a concentrated effort by public and private organisation’s throughout North America to increase game sanctuaries. This effort has extended to the point of planting rice, wild celery, and other food stuffs for ducks and geese and assuring them a plentiful supply of good clean water, green stuff for food, and room to sport about unmolested as they halt for a few days’ rest on their long migration between the Canadian Arctic to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. There are thirteen wild life sanctuaries and reserve areas in the Canadian Prairie, down the Mackenzie River, and in the treeless “Barren Lands” west of Hudson Bay to the Arctic Ocean. The Mallard duck and the blue goose, most difficult of all birds to bring down, are now passing over in countless thousands, and they will find on their southward trek much more comfort than was the case a year go. The Louisiana marshes, according to naturalists, harbour 75 per cent, of the ducks and geese and other game birds that w’inter in the couth. The State of Louisiana deserves the commendation of the sporting world and of all nature-loverg for the funds it votes year by year to maintain game patrols and provide accommodation for the feathered speedsters over an area of a million acres, where their winter quarters are more or less restricted, compared with their vast northern habitat. The State authorities are always solicitous, for their comfort, particularly in periods of drought, in establishing and maintaining a food supply in the numerous bay fringed lakes. JOINT ADMINISTRATION. There are two main divisions in which the feathered army moves down from the summer breeding places in the Arctic to the sub-tropical region. One of these moves down eastward of the 100th Meridian of Longitude; the other makes its southward flight west of the “sunsetway,” in the Dakotas, through Western Kansas anad Western Texas. This latter division stretches across the streams, lakes, and reservoirs <of plain, mountain, and desert, with Great Salt Lake, in Utah, as its most frequented harbour. Millions of ducks and geese stop for a day or two each year on the lakes of Montana, Eastern Oregon, and Northern California for rest, food, and recuperation. Duck-shooting is now being brought into reach of the city man in his office. He may leave his desk at 4 p.m., motor to the duck club, where he will be provided with horses to take him to concrete or steel “blinds,” spend a couple of hours shooting after dawn, and be back in his office by 11 a.m. Under the Migrating Bird Game Treaty administered by a joint Cana-dian-American Commission, the close season is rigorously observed in both countries. Private property owners set aside small lakes and “sloughs” as sanctuaries for the migrants and remark on the yearly increase in the number of their guests.