WILD ANIMAL PRESERVATION

Mr. G. O. Shields, author, hunter, explorer, and president of the League of American Sportsmen, gave an illustrated lecture last evening in the Union on "Snow Slides in the Canadian Rockies." The views thrown on the screen were unusually excellent, especially those of the snow-capped peaks and glaciers of British Columbia. The illustrations of moose, elk, and caribou in their native haunts added much to an interesting discussion of the present state of game preservation on the North American continent.

Mr. Shields prefaced his talk on snow slides with a lengthy treatment of the economic value of the game birds to agriculture. Contrary to the common belief, the owls and hawks so generally detested by farmers are a great factor in the destruction of insects harmful to crops. Even the quail, one of the most valued game birds of this section, would do much toward saving the great loss from insects, if it were adequately protected from extermination. The lecturer gave a vivid illustration of the good done by such common birds as the kingbird by stating that although the latter is accused of eating bees, one family of kingbirds destroy annually from 12,000 to 15,000 harmful insects.

Mr. Shields then showed several beautiful slides of the larger wild animals, many of which are being saved from extermination only by the laws recently passed at the instigation of the League of American Sportsmen. One picture, showing five miles of bleached buffalo bones, was unusually effective in illustrating the result of the wholesale slaughter indulged in by the skin-hunters in destroying the immense herds of the middle west. In fact the establishment of the Yellowstone National Park has been the sole means of protecting many of the western animals from complete extinction. At present there are 25,000 elk in this park and very few in any other sections of the west. The antelope, one of the few strictly American animals, was at one time threatened with extinction when there were only about 200 left on the continent. The laws lately enacted for their preservation, however, have been so effective that in Montana it is not a rare sight to see a herd of 400 grazing on the uplands. The bears are now so common in the Yellowstone Park that they have lately become a nuisance to tourists and the law will doubtless be taken off them shortly.

Snow slides are quite like miniature glaciers, being formed by forty or fifty feet of snow drifting info a deep mountain gulch. When the spring rains come, the water percolates through this body, causing the bottom of it to melt away. The immense mass, weighing hundreds of tons, then starts on its swift course down the chasm, tearing everything before it. One picture showed how a slide had cut a straight, narrow path directly through a forest, and in one instance had driven a log completely through a larger tree. The momentum of these slides coming from such a height and in such great mass is almost incalculable.