The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-01-16
TO BREED GAME BIRDS
PROPOSITIONT TO EXP1ND WORK OF
 '. s. FISH COMMISSIo

The House of Representatives Has Just Passad Blll to Enlarge the Scope o1
 the Fish Commissions Work so as to
 Make 1t Include the Propagation oi
 Useful Feathered Creatures.
 Will the United States Fish Commis.
 sion go into the business of propagating
 game birds?
 There is no doubt that it will do SO if NY the bill providing for such an enlarge a ment of the scope of its work becomes
 law. The measure passed the house last
 week, and now goes to the senate
 Since 1880 the fish commission by ar-
 tificial matching has raised the number
 of shad annually marketed from little
 over five million to nearly twenty mill
 lion. Representative Lacy, of Oskaloo- sa, Iowa, the author of the bill referred
 to, believes that an equivalent increase S of the game birds of the country could
 be obtained by similar methods. Of course it is not practicable to put birds
 eggs by thousands into hatching-iars x and turn out the young ones wholesale,
 but much can be accomplished, es- pecially with certain species, by suitable processes.
 It is urged that the availability of certain genera of birds for at least par tial domestcation has never been ade- d, fa, ,1o
 what has been done with the jungle fowl" of India, which represents the earliest ancestry of all the chickens. It is a very wild bird, of no great size, and 9 lays only few eggs. How wonderful i. the improvement secured in this case by Artificial breeding, which has devel- oped a feathered creature that lays practically all the year round, produces its own weight in eggs every six weeks, and is modified as to coloring of both feathers and eggs, according to the wish of the fancier! The sky-bue or epeck1ed pink hens egg is a future possibility.
 Wet the naturalists of the fish and game commission take hold of this pro- blem, and by following similar methods they may evolve a quail the size of a ] a turkey as large as a young ostrich, and so on ad infnitum. The up-to-date chicken is to great extent an artificial animal. It has been developed into a series of really extraordinary varieties, some of which are equal in weight to good -sized turkeys. The small white egg of the primitive jungle fowl of 1n- dia has been transformed into large brown egg, most prized for the break fast table. White chickens, unknown in nature, are frequent in the farm yard. For some reason not at all understood < dOmestication has tendency to pro- duce Whiteness-as witness white cats, white dogs, white rabbits, white mice, etc, White turkeys are not uncommon and white ducks, which do not exist in nature, are everyday birds. The white Picking ducks are as big as ordinary geese.
 Why, for example, should it not be feasible to establish the common quail on basis of characterization? Let the fish commission begin at one of the matching stations with covey of these ] birds for a starter. They are specially available for the purpose because they are so prolific; as many as twenty six GEES were found by Professor Robert Ridgway, of the Smithsonian Institu- ton, in q single quail nest. It is easy to imagine future quail-hatchery thus established, with a series of gas ncu- batOrs in operation, the newly matched birds being carried, after continuous method, through a warm room for dry ing their feathers, and thence out into the open air, where they would be fed and cared for until able to look out for themselves In this way they would be protected from the enemies which de- stroy most of the young, in the egg or out of it, under natural conditions. Ac- cording to no other principle is the method adopted for the matching of young Holsters, which are being put into the sea by the millions at Woods Hole every summer
 You see game birds are threatened by variety of dangers during infancy. | Snakes, rats and other predatory ami mals-particularly schoolboys-attack | them, capturing the eggs and young. Other birds also devour them. And it is obvious that in the way described such | dangers to birdlife would be almost | wholly done away with. The liberated | adolescent Holsters have passed their period of greatest peril. and so likewise 1t will be with semi-domesticated quail | and other feathered species. As mat ter of course a large percentage of the artificially bred birds will be kept for egg-laying, and thus the stocy will be rapidly and indefinitely increased Small beginnings may make big end- ings, as poor Richard remarked. The fry; 1t planted three hundred million in the rivers in 1898.
 By artificial breeding game birds may be induced to lay greatly increased number of eggs, just as the female de- scendant of the primitive chicken has been persuaded to produce at least six times the number of potential offspring yielded by her primitive ancestress of the forests of India. Here--if this ex- pectation should be realized--is the op- portunity for the incubation. When human beings learned to nourish their progeny with the milk of other animals their rate of propagation was multi piled, inasmuch as the mother could go on with the business of child bearing unimpeded by the necessity of affording to offspring already brought into the world. A similar ben eft where brd-life is concerned is af- forded by the incubator, which attends