Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 57, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 October 1916 — WILDFOWL IN INDIANA [ARTICLE]

WILDFOWL IN INDIANA

Indiana, forty years ago, was famous for the wild fowl shooting it afforded. Hunters came from all pa.rt-4 of the country to the Kankakee marshes and returned to their homes with good bags of wild geese, Canadian and Mexican brant, ducks of all kinds, and specimens of swans, the last named for mounting. Pittsburg members of an English lake club usually had a carload of game to distribute among friends as trophies of a spring butchery. The supply of wild fowl seemed to be inexhaustible. Great flocks of geese, mallard ducks, redheads, woodducks, pintails, spoonbills, teals* butterballs, and a few canvasbacks, came from the South each spring. Indiana was a link in one of the four great flyways from the Gulf of Mexico region to the wilds of Canada, the other routes being the Mississippi river valley, the Atlantic coast district, and the Pacific coast. The marsh region of northern Indiana was a favorite resting and feeding place during o the spring and fall migratory flights. The geds’e and brant fed in the corn fields for 100 miles about their resting places, pulling ears of corn from the shocks and gorging themselves, and the wily hunter, knowing the habits of the birds, made a “blind’’ in a corn shock and shot them at close range. Mallards and redheads flew each morning to the oak woods and fed on acorns and chinquapins until they became almost as fat as their cousins, the butterballs, and wooddocks feasted on the aromatic peashaped seeds of the spatter dock (.yellow water lily) and wild rice, which grew in abundance along the Kankakee river. Other ducks found succulent roots to feed qn and patches of wild celery that grew here and there delighted the canvasbacks, though they did not scorn the w*ld rice and the seeds of the spatter dock.

Perhaps the greatest refuge for wild fowl in the country thirty years ago was the Gaff reservation in Newton county in the northwestern part of Indiana. Thousands of of marsh land, including Little Beaver lake, were fenced in and policed by a force of constables in the employ of the Gaffs of Cincinnati, who used the land in the summer time for grazing cattle. Big Beaver lake had been drained and converted into corn fields. Mallards and woodducks bred in the reservation, and other migratory wild fowl, Including white swans, rested there in comparative security, except for the fussilade of shotguns that assailed them as they entered and left the reservation. The writer on several occasions spent a few days on the reservation and what he saw

and heard there will always be remembered. What was known as the south marsh was the roosting place of the wild fowl at night. It comprised about 100,000 acres, and it is no exaggeration to say that almost every foot of the marsh was covered with wild fowl. The various flocks left the marsh at dawn for the corn fields, oak woods and other feeding grounds, and the roar of their wings as they took flight was terrific, and at night as they returned, the noise was pandemonium. Geese, brant, mallards and redheads, which had flown long distances, sometimes did not return till 9 or 10 o’clock and then there was an indescribable bedlam of squawking and whirr of wings. As the belated flocks dropped into the marsh the earlier flocks seemed to take offense and voiced their feelings in shocking bird language. Occasionally it seemed as though each wild fowl had taken wing and shifted its place, so great was the noise. One of the prettiest sights on the reservation was the view of six or eight flocks of swans high above the marsh, seemingly playing leapfrog under direction of a leader. One of the swans could be heard

giving a call, then others would take short flights and make somersaults In. the air. TJie wild swan, whether floating on the water, or playing in the air, with the sun shining on its white feathers, is the most graceful of birds. Owing to the draining of the marshes and the unrestricted spring shooting for many years, wild fowl are becoming scarce In Indiana. The Gaff reservation has vanished as a refuge and only a few flocks of geese and ducks mav now be seen where once the wild fowl numbered millions. The lordly sandhill crane, with legs three to four feet long, that strode about the water covered marsh, always just keeping out of range of the hunter, is now merely a memory or a curiosity, though thirty years ago the cranes were numerous. The (1,000,000 or more shotguns in nee in the United States and the market hunter’s eight and ten-guage guns tell the story, mainly, •of the fast waning flights of wild fowl, just as the game butcher and the cutting down of mast-bearing trees, told the story of the extinction of the wild passenger pigeons, which, sixty years ago, darkened the sky with their countless numbers.—lndianapolis News.