Our Vanishing Wild Life Part 36

Since the above was written, I have read in the _Outdoor World_ for April, 1912, the views of a veteran sportsman and writer, Mr. Emerson Hough, on the wild-life situation as it seems to him to-day. It is a strong utterance, even though it reaches a pessimistic and gloomy conclusion which I do not share. Altogether, however, its breadth of view, its general accuracy, and its incisiveness, ent.i.tle it to a full hearing. The following is only an extract from a lengthy article ent.i.tled, "G.o.d's Acre:"

EMERSON HOUGH'S VIEW OF THE SITUATION

The truth is none the less the truth because it is unpleasant to face. There is no well posted sportsman in America, no manufacturer of sporting goods in America, no man well versed in American outdoor matters, who does not know that we are at the evening of the day of open sport in America. Our old ways have failed, all of them have failed. The declining fortunes of the best sportsman's journals of America would prove that, if proof were asked. Our sportsmans.h.i.+p has failed. Our game laws have failed, and we know they have failed. Our game is almost gone, and we know it is almost gone. America has changed and we know that it has changed, although we have not changed with it. The old America is done and it is gone, and we know that to be the truth. The old order pa.s.seth, and we know that the new order must come soon if it is to work any salvation for our wild game and our life in the open in pursuit of it.

There are many reasons for this fact, these facts. Perhaps the greatest lies in the steady advance of civilization into the wilderness, the usurpation for agricultural or industrial use of many of the ancient breeding and feeding places of the wild game.

All over the West and now all over Canada, the plow advances, that one engine which cannot be gainsaid, which never turns a backward furrow.

Another great agency is the rapid perfection of transportation all over the world. Take the late influx of East African literature. If there really were not access to that country we would not have this literature, would not have so many pictures from that country. And if even Africa will soon be overrun, if even Africa soon will be shot out, what hope is there for the game of the wholly accessible North American continent?

It is all too easy now for the slaughterer to get to his work, all too easy for him to transport the fruits of the slaughter. At the hands of the ignorant, the unscrupulous and the unsparing, our game has steadily disappeared until it is almost gone. We have handled it in a wholly greedy, unscrupulous and selfish fas.h.i.+on. This has been our policy as a nation. If there is to be success for any plan to remedy this, it must come from a few large-minded men, able to think and plan, and able to do more than that--to follow their plans with deeds.

I have seen the whole story of modern American sportsmans.h.i.+p, so called. It has been cla.s.s legislation and organized selfishness--that is what it has been, and nothing else. I do not blame country legislators, game dealers, farmers, for calling the sportsmen of America selfish and thoughtless. I do not blame them for saying that the so-called protective measures advanced by sportsmen have been selfish measures, and looking to destruction rather than to protection. At least that has been their actual result. I have no more reverence for a sportsman than for anyone else, and no reverence for him at all because he is or calls himself a sportsman. He has got to be a man. He has got to be a citizen.

I have seen millions of acres of breeding and feeding grounds pa.s.s under the drain and under the plow in my own time, so that the pa.s.sing whisper of the wild fowl's wing has been forgotten there now for many years. I have seen a half dozen species of fine game birds become extinct in my own time and lost forever to the American people.

And you and I have seen one protective society after another, languidly organized, paying in a languid dollar or so per capita each year, and so swiftly pa.s.sing, also to be forgotten. We have seen one code and the other of conflicting and wholly selfish game laws pa.s.sed, and seen them mocked at and forgotten, seen them all fail, as we all know.

We have seen even the nation's power--under that Ark of the Covenant known as the Interstate Commerce Act--fail to stop wholly the lessening of our wild game, so rapidly disappearing for so many reasons.

We have seen both selfish and unselfish sportsmen's journals attempt to solve this problem and fail to do so. Some of them were great and broad-minded journals. Their record has not been one of disgrace, although it has been one of defeat; for some of them really desired success more than they desired dividends. These, all of them, bore their share of a great experiment, an experiment in a new land, under a new theory of government, a theory which says a man should be able to restrain himself, and to govern himself. Only by following their theory through to the end of that experiment could they know that it was to fail in one of its most vitally interesting and vitally important phases.

But now, as we know, all of these agencies, selfish or unselfish, have failed to effect the salvation of American wild game. Not by any scheme, device, or theory, not by any panacea can the old days of America be brought back to us.

Mr. Hough's views are ent.i.tled to respectful consideration; but on one vital point I do not follow him.

I believe most sincerely--in fact, _I know_,--that it is _possible_ to make a few new laws which, in addition to the many, many good protective laws we already have, will bring back the game, just as fast and as far as man's settlements, towns, railroads, mines and schemes in general ever can permit it to come back.

If the American People as a whole elect that our wild life shall be saved, and to a reasonable extent brought back, then by the Eternal it will be saved and brought back! The road lies straight before us, and the going is easy--_if_ the Ma.s.s makes up its mind to act. But on one vital point Mr. Hough is right. The sportsman alone never will save the game! The people who do not kill must act, independently.

PART II.--PRESERVATION

CHAPTER XXII

OUR ANNUAL LOSSES BY INSECTS

"You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live."

"In no country in the world," says Mr. C.L. Marlatt, of the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, "do insects impose a heavier tax on farm products than in the United States." These attacks are based upon an enormous and varied annual output of cereals and fruits, and a great variety and number of trees. For every vegetable-eating insect, native and foreign, we seem to have crops, trees and plant food galore; and their ravages rob the market-basket and the dinner-pail. In 1912 there were riots in the streets of New York over the high cost of food.

In 1903, this state of fact was made the subject of a special inquiry by the Department of Agriculture, and in the "Yearbook" for 1904, the reader will find, on page 461, an article ent.i.tled, "The Annual Loss Occasioned by Destructive Insects in the United States." The article is not of the sensational type, it was not written in an alarmist spirit, but from beginning to end it is a calm, cold-blooded a.n.a.lysis of existing facts, and the conclusions that fairly may be drawn from them.

The opinions of several experts have been considered and quoted, and often their independent figures are stated.

With the disappearance of our birds generally, and especially the slaughter of song and other insect-eating birds both in the South and North, the destruction of the national wealth by insects forges to the front as a subject of vital importance. The logic of the situation is so simple a child can see it. Short crops mean higher prices. If ten per cent of our vegetable food supply is destroyed by insects, as certain as fate we will feel it _in the increased cost of living_.

I would like to place Mr. Marlatt's report in the hands of every man, boy and school-teacher in America; but I have not at my disposal the means to accomplish such a task. I cannot even print it here in full, but the vital facts can be stated, briefly and in plain figures.

CROPS AND INSECTS.

CORN.--The princ.i.p.al insect enemies of corn are the chinch bug, corn-root worm (_Diabrotica longicornis_), bill bug, wire worm, boll-worm or ear-worm, cut-worm, army worm, stalk worm, gra.s.shopper, and plant lice, in all a total of about fifty important species! Several of these pests work secretly. At husking time the wretched ear-worm that ruins the terminal quarter or fifth of an immense number of ears, is painfully in evidence. The root-worms work insidiously, and the moles and shrews are supposed to attack them and destroy them. The corn-root worm is charged with causing an annual loss of two per cent of the corn crop, or $20,000,000; the chinch bug another two per cent; the boll or ear-worm two per cent more. The remaining insect pests are charged with two per cent, which makes eight per cent in all, or a total of $80,000,000 lost each year to the American farmer through the ravages of insects. This is not evenly distributed, but some areas suffer more than others.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CUT-WORM, (_Peridroma Sancia_) Very Destructive to Crops]

WHEAT.--Of all our cereal crops, wheat is the one that suffers most from insects. There are three insects that cause to the wheat industry an annual loss of about ten per cent. The _chinch bug_ is the worst, and it is charged with five per cent ($20,000,000) of the total loss. The _Hessian fly_ comes next in order, and occasionally rolls up enormous losses. In the year 1900, that insect caused to Indiana and Ohio alone the loss of 2,577,000 _acres_ of wheat, and the total cost to us of that insect in that year "undoubtedly approached $100,000,000." Did that affect the price of wheat or not? If not, then there is no such thing as a "law of supply and demand."

_Wheat plant-lice_ form collectively the third insect pest destructive to wheat, of which it is reported that "the annual loss occasioned by wheat plant-lice probably does not fall short of two or three per cent of the crop."

HAY AND FORAGE CROPS.--These are attacked by locusts, gra.s.shoppers, army worms, cut-worms, web worms, small gra.s.s worms and leaf hoppers. Some of these pests are so small and work so insidiously that even the farmer is p.r.o.ne to overlook their existence. "A ten per cent shrinkage from these and other pests in gra.s.ses and forage plants is a minimum estimate."

COTTON.--The great enemies of the cotton-planter are the cotton boll weevil, the bollworm and the leaf worm; but other insects inflict serious damage. In 1904 the loss occasioned by the boll weevil, chiefly in Texas, was conservatively estimated by an expert, Mr. W.D. Hunter, at $20,000,000. The boll worm of the southwestern cotton states has sometimes caused an annual loss of $12,000,000, or four per cent of the crops in the states affected. Before the use of a.r.s.enical poisons, the leaf worm caused an annual loss of from twenty to thirty million dollars; but of late years that total has been greatly reduced.

FRUITS.--The insects that reduce our annual fruit crop attack every portion of the tree and its product. The woolly aphis attacks the roots of the fruit tree, the trunk and limbs are preyed upon by millions of scale insects and borers, the leaves are devastated by the all-devouring leaf worms, canker worms and tent caterpillars, while the fruit itself is attacked by the codling moth, curculio and apple maggot. To destroy fruit is to take money out of the farmer's pocket, and to attack and injure the tree is like undermining his house itself. By an annual expenditure of about $8,250,000 in cash for spraying apple trees, the destructiveness of the codling moth and curculio have been greatly reduced, but that money is itself a cash loss. Add to this the $12,000,000 of actual shrinkage in the apple crop, and the total annual loss to our apple-growers due to the codling moth and curculio is about $20,000,000. In the high price of apples, a part of this loss falls upon the consumer.

In 1889 Professor Forbes calculated that the annual loss to the fruit-growers of Illinois from insect ravages was $2,375,000. In 1892, insects caused to Nebraska apple-growers a loss computed at $2,000,000 and, in 1897, New York farmers lost $2,500,000 from that cause. "In many sections of the Pacific Northwest the loss was from fifty to seventy-five per cent." (Yearbook, page 470.)

FORESTS.--"The annual losses occasioned by insect pests to forests and forest products (in the United States) have been estimated by Dr. A.D.

Hopkins, special agent in charge of forest insect investigations, at not less than $100,000,000.... It covers both the loss from insect damages to standing timber, and to the crude and manufactured forest products. The annual loss to growing timber is conservatively placed at $70,000,000."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GYPSY MOTH, (_Portheria dispar_) Very Destructive to the Finest Shade Trees]

There are other insect damages that we will not pause to enumerate here. They relate to cattle, horses, sheep and stored grain products of many kinds. Even cured tobacco has its pest, a minute insect known as the cigarette beetle, now widespread in America and "frequently the cause of very heavy losses."

The millions of the insect world are upon us. Their cost to us has been summed up by Mr. Marlatt in the table that appears below.

ANNUAL VALUES OF FARM PRODUCTS, AND LOSSES CHARGEABLE TO INSECT PESTS.

_Official Report in the Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1904_.

% OF PRODUCT VALUE LOSS AMOUNT OF LOSS

Cereals $2,000,000,000 10 $200,000,000 Hay 530,000,000 10 53,000,000 Cotton 600,000,000 10 60,000,000 Tobacco 53,000,000 10 5,300,000 Truck Crops 265,000,000 20 53,000,000 Sugars 50,000,000 10 5,000,000 Fruits 135,000,000 20 27,000,000 Farm Forests 110,000,000 10 11,000,000 Miscellaneous Crops 58,000,000 10 5,800,000

Total $3,801,000,000 $420,100,000

Animal Products 1,750,000,000 10 175,000,000 Natural Forests and 100,000,000 Forest Products Products in Storage 100,000,000