The Madison Daily Leader

GAME CENSUS MOVE.

Audubon Society's Plan to Ascertain Amount Hunters Kill.

SPORTSMEN ARE INTERESTED

Purpose Is to Find Out How Fast Birds and Animals Are Being Exterminated—Attempt to Be Made In All Legislatures to Get Laws Permitting a Count.

To measure the contents of Uncle Sam's game bag during the new year is the object of a concerted effort in which sportsmen from every section of the United States and the National Association of Audubon Societies in New York city are joining hands. It is proposed that detailed records of each day's shoot be secured from every true sportsman and required by law of every one else in all states where the Audubon and sporting interests can obtain the necessary legislation. Unless the annual inroads upon the rapidly decreasing game of America are thus determined, so the leaders of the new movement declared the other day, shooting as a healthful recreation will soon be killed in almost every region of the continent.

That the health, crops and woods, as well as the sport, of many extensive localities are today seriously menaced by the threatened extinction of game birds will be demonstrated through the latest scientific investigations by government authorities at Washington. Waterfowl and shore birds will be shown in their natural capacity of destroying the anopheles mosquito, as well as many other recognized disturbers of deadly germs. Gulls and many other varieties of sea and inland water birds will be proved by ornithological experts to be wholesale destroyers of grasshoppers and a multitude of the insects which cause an annual crop and forest loss of nearly a billion dollars, or more than the entire national debt, according to the most recent calculations of the government bureau of entomology. The case of Salt Lake City, whose people have erected a monument to the gulls that saved all their crops from destruction by an insect plague, will also be cited.

In every one of the forty-four state legislatures which convene in the new year special efforts will be made to obtain legal provision for this game census, says the New York Post. Where a hunters' license law is already in force the addition of a law to enforce the recording of all game birds and animals shot will be urged. It is proposed, in order to protect the true sportsmen and to detect market hunters, to punish failure to report the season's shoot by a forfeiture of license and false returns by proceeding as against perjury. Special blanks for the purpose are being prepared as an attachment to all hunters' license cards.

When the purpose and necessity of this widespread checking up of the nation's game bag are realized by the people at large, the labor of compiling the records of the individual prowess of millions of hunters will be begun. In this gigantic task the officers of the National Association of Audubon Societies have been promised the hearty assistance of the director of the national conservation commission, of which their organization has become a co-ordinate branch by special invitation of the authorities at Washington. This conservation movement they will forward as one of their principal activities for the new year, together with their regular work of education, bird care on reservations and legislative campaigning for general bird protection.

"The conservation of the dying races of the game birds and animals of this continent is an object for which we are finding every true sportsman ready and eager to co-operate," said William Dutcher, president of the National Association of Audubon Societies, at its headquarters in New York city the other day. "The proposed census is the only sure way of determining the extent of the existing commercial bird butchery and the means to check it. Though we shall, of course, have to fight the organized and financially powerful market hunters at every step toward this end, I feel sure that the support of the sportsmen will help us greatly and that we may rely upon the support of every patriotic American as well. The whole public debt of this nation has first been reported as $997,349,751. With a known annual loss of many millions more than this due to the growing inroads of the insects which our game birds destroy, I do not think Americans can ignore this subject much longer."