Goodnight Buffaloes

An exciting buffalo hunt next November with cowboys yippee-ing, Kiowa Indians hiyah-ing, and rich Eastern sportsmen shooting from the saddle was talked about in Texas last week. The killers were to pay from $250 to $400 per buffalo, according to size and trophy value.

The herd--195 adults, 50 calves--is on the 20,000-acre Goodnight ranch, 40 mi. southeast of Amarillo, Tex. That whole region until the 1870's was the grazing ground of vast buffalo herds. Pioneers wanted the prairies for cattle-raising, between 1868 and 1878 deliberately killed practically every buffalo.

Foremost of the cattlemen was the late Col. Charles Goodnight. His first wife-persuaded him to preserve four buffalo calves. The present herd is their progeny.

Seven years ago Goodnight sold his ranch and buffaloes to Joseph Irving Staley of Wichita Falls, Tex. Mr. Staley made a fortune in oil, reached out into ranching, banking, aviation. Depression has pinched him. Ready cash is precious. The proposed buffalo hunt might realize $75,000. Besides, except in zoos and National Parks, kept buffaloes are an expensive nuisance.

Other Texans view the Goodnight buffalo hunt with alarm. Last week they raised hullabaloo before the Texas Legislature. J. Frank Dobie, Texas historian & author (Coronado's Children) flayed what he termed "going into a corral and shooting down so many milk cows." The Texas Senate passed a bill authorizing the State Game Commission to buy all the buffaloes it sees fit and forbidding the killing of all females and any bulls under ten years. Out of vast herds there now remain in North America about 22,000 known buffaloes (protected by the U. S. and Canadian Governments), in Europe 59 known bison (protected through the European Bison Society). Most important European herd is the Duke of Bedford's at Woburn Abbey, England, where he has successfully crossbred the American and European strains. Next week Director William Reid Blair of the New York Zoological Society sails to Europe to study the possibilities of a bison breeding park in Poland. If he finds the project feasible, his Society will appropriate $15,000 for the plan.

New York Nutria

Six dozen coypus, husky South American rodents (second cousin of the chinchilla) with stiff, reddish-brown fur, orange-colored teeth, and partially webbed hind toes, reached Manhattan from the Argentine last week. They were sent up the Hudson River on whose banks they were to be released to live on water plants, to breed, multiply and furnish a domestic supply of the fur which, when shrewdly treated, resembles badger and is called nutria.

Fish Fight

Not since 1916, when there was a real "scare" and loss of human life, have there been so many sharks as this year off the New Jersey and Long Island coasts. And not for several seasons has swordfishing been so successful in the same waters. *Last week, six miles off Sea Bright, N. J., fishermen Harry Munson and George Swenson beheld what few men have seen --a fight to death between a shark and a swordfish. Usually a shark will vanish at sight of its mortal enemy with the sharp-bladed nose, but this shark "about 25 feet long," was intent on stealing a big bluefish that the men were pulling in. Shooting out of the blue deep came the swordfish. The shark turned to flee but it was too late. For 35 minutes the sea was lashed into bloody froth. Then all was calm and the shark, his long white belly gashed to ribbons, floated dead on the surface, drifted away to make a meal for his own kind.

Cat

Biggest catfish in the world is Old Blue who inhabits the Missouri River and is so big he once got stuck trying to go through a canal lock. But Old Blue exists only in the imaginations of Missouri River boatmen. Last week a real catfish was caught by one Manuel Trigleth in Bee Lake, near Lexington, Miss., which made Manuel Trigleth shout for his father and brother to help pull in the line. Weight: 116 Ib.

Sorry

Dog-Catcher Clarence Robinson of Orange, N. J. was vexed one day last week. The twelve dogs he had impounded had all got free. From dog-catching he turned to boy-catching. Fred Martine, 15, admitted that he and his friend John Stozink. 15, had done it. When Fred Martine explained to the judge, "We were sorry for the dogs," the judge let Fred Martine go free too.

Swallowing Match

What might happen if a small, green, succulent frog were placed before three hungry, venomous snakes? Frederick William Fitzsimons, for 25 years director of the snake park and museum at Port Elizabeth, South Africa, lately found out. He took progressive photographs of the affair and sent them to the London Graphic, which published them last fortnight under the headline, "Dinner for Three: Digestion for One."

First to come at the small, green, succulent frog was a four-foot schaapstecker (sheepsticker) snake. As the frog began disappearing head first down the schaapstecker's narrow gullet, a puffy night adder moved near. Seeing the adder, the schaap-tecker gulped hard to get its meal down safely; but the quick adder got hold of the frog's right hind leg, started swallowing the prize from that end.

As the two snakes glared into each other's cold beady eyes, along came snake No. 3, a six-foot Cape cobra, which coiled itself nearby and raised its hooded head to inspect the tug-of-frog.

Then the cobra put down its head and glided forward. With a hungry gape of its flexible lower jaw it seized the frog by the middle and started swallowing it in a third direction. The schaapstecker and the adder, to their undoing, held on grimly.

Soon, by a series of forward jerks, the cobra shoved its jaws over the heads of the other two snakes. Its fangs sank home, its venom flowed, the adder and the schaapstecker went limp and helpless. Then slowly down the cobra's jerking, gullet passed frog, snakes and all. proving that in the snake world, victory is to him whose mouth holds most.

*She died 1926. In 1928 he, 90, married a 26-year-old Butte, Mont, girl who had been his nurse. In 1929 he died.*Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania with rod & reel landed a 157-lb. specimen off Block Island last month.

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