Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and PreservationHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
History
Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Game-laws -- United States; Wildlife conservation -- United States
As a contrast to the millinery hunter of fifty years ago it is
refreshing to find that at last sincere efforts are being made in
British possessions to stop this traffic. I happened to be at Rangoon
when six large bales of pheasant skins were seized by the Custom
officials. A Chinaman had brought them from Yunnan via Bhamo, and was
preparing to ship them as ducks' feathers. Two of the bales were opened
for my inspection. The first contained about five hundred Lady Amherst
pheasant skins, falling to pieces and lacking heads and legs. The second
held over four hundred silver pheasants, in almost perfect condition.
The chief collector had put the absolutely prohibitive fine of 200
pounds on them, and was waiting for the expiration of the legal number
of days before burning the entire lot. They must have represented years
of work in decimating the pheasant fauna of western China.
Far up in the wilderness of northern Burma, and over the Yunnan border,
we often came upon some of the most ingenious examples of native
trapping, a system which we found repeated in the Malay States, Borneo,
China and other parts of the Far East. A low bamboo fence is built
directly across a steep valley or series of valleys, about half way from
the summit to the lower end, and about every fifteen feet a narrow
opening is left, over which a heavy log is suspended. Any creature
attempting to make its way through, treads upon several small sticks and
by so doing springs the trap and the dead-fall claims a victim. When a
country is systematically strung with traps such as these, sooner or
later all but a pitiful remnant of the smaller mammals, birds and
reptiles are certain to be wiped out. Morning after morning I have
visited such a runway and found dead along its path, what must have been
all the walking, running or crawling creatures which the night before
had sought the water at the bottom; pheasants, cobras, mouse-deer,
rodents, civets, and members of many other groups. In some countries
nooses instead of dead-falls guard the openings, but the result is
equally deadly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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