Our Feathered Game; A Handbook of the North American Game Birds (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill GAME CLUBS, PARKS, AND PRESERVES. THERE are now in the United States many private parks and game preserves where game birds are as carefully propagated and protected by individuals as they are on the preserves in England- There are also hundreds (I am almost prepared to say thousands) of clubs or associations formed to own and control the shooting over vast areas of both marsh and upland. All of the private parks and most of the clubs are of very recent date. In Forester's day, as I have observed, there was none, and there is nothing about them in any of our books on field-sports. Private parks or preserves owned by individuals are comparatively few in number in the United States, but as wealth increases there will be more. The management of the private park is similar to that in England. Game-keepers are employed to protect the game from poachers, to destroy its natural enemies, and to feed it and care for it at all seasons. There are hatcheries for the imported birds, the pheasants, where many birds are propagated each season, as described in the chapter on these birds. Many of the private parks are miles in extent, and contain large game as well as small. Mr. Whitney'sOctober Mountain in the Berkshires, Biltmore in the South, the Austin Corbin estate in New Hampshire, Rockefeller's Adirondack Park, the Rancocas game- preserve in New Jersey, and other private estates, including some of vast proportions on the Pacific Coast, have been created in the past few years. By far the greater number of private game-preserves are in the hands of associations or clubs. These are of limited membership. One or two on Long Island and at Currituck have but a half-dozen mem- bers. Others, like the Nittany Club in Pennsylvania, have as many as two hundred. The average member...