Show POOR sportsmanship according to one of our local I 1 farmers too many rabbit hunters i are arc f forgetting that the pheasant jsckson acason closed last november when basked asked what made him think so he replied when you see a flock of I 1 birds take the air hear the report I 1 lot of a shot gun or two and see two or three birds fall you can be assured that it rabbits being shot this sort of thing is by no means sportsman like and should be stopped immediately for the most part farmers in this valley arent kicking about feeding the birds the year round but it seems to irk them no little bit to feed them for a bunch who have no more sense of sportsmanship about them than to gun them all winter and sum mer and they have in our opinion every right to become hostile when such practices are allowed to continue local game organizations have been trying for years to build up a flock large enough to afford hunt ers a couple or three days of good shooting in the fall if present practices are repeated many times all the work done by them is for nothing their efforts will have been wasted the local club has been fairly successful up to now in getting enough pheasants in th III valley to allow a two or three day open season this will not long be continued if men are going to hunt the year round and kill off all the breeding stock it really doesn doean t take long to tear down what has i been acen done along this line As every man who has ever hunted them knows pheasants furnish on of the finest kinds of shooting to 0 be found in our locality if every man who hunts would show enough interest in the flocks to see that he pick one up occasionally io we could in a very short time build up to where a three day season acason with a three bird daily limit be at all out of the question if we dont watch however we are going to find ourselves back in the same place we were ten or twelve years ago A place where it was a rare thing to even see one of these beautiful birds to say nothing of being allowed allowe to shoot at it after we ve have denounced the 2 legged creditor pr editor who works on our game it might be well to suggest anat since the nesting period is very near at hand some of our other game enemies should be eradicated skunks are perhaps the worst enemy of the pheasant and quail flocks in this valley they locate a rest nest and just keep working on it an egg at a time until the nest is empty and the mother bird is driven away it seems to make very little difference to the skunk that the mother is on the nest if he wants the eggs he steals them out from under her one of the most effective methods of le eradicating this pest seems to be with eg eggs os filled with poison set in or around places where skunks are known to live house cats and crows seem to be about the next in line these predators work on the young birds more than on the nests and crows however do carry oft off lots of pheasant eggs it at all untimely to ask sportsmen who are in in the valley at this time of year to be on the lookout for stray cats and use a shot on them crows are much harder to get at with a gun but tor for every one killed it v 1 l mean the saving of many birds I 1 even the christmas tree has its by products recent experiments have shown that balsam needle oil will probably be manufactured to be used for scenting soap b bath salts and bath oils also these needle extracts will be used in paint and varnish and in air conditioning equipment to give the air an odor of the outdoors |