Farmed Game

To Connecticut farmers' means of livelihood the Connecticut Board of Fisheries & Game last week added pheasants. It announced regulations for privately-owned pheasant-shooting preserves whose owners may lease shooting privileges to outsiders. The Board's purpose was "to test and demonstrate the claim that private shooting areas . . . are not harmful to the public interest and are beneficial to the majority of sportsmen by producing more game birds of which many will spread out from the intensively developed areas to restock surrounding covers." The regular pheasant season of one month will be enforced on preserves which release at least 25 pheasants per 100 acres in the ratio of not less than one cock to each five hens. Preserves which release 100 birds per 100 acres get a five-week extension.

To restore the country's diminishing game supply, the American Game Conference in 1930 originated the program of persuading farmers to use their woodlots to raise game birds. More Game Birds in America Inc. has actively backed it. State Legislatures, anxious to help farmers as well as to please sportsmen, have begun to fall into line. Finally, their wits sharpened by Depression, farmers have begun to cooperate. New York, which has a regular pheasant season of only six days, with a two-bird bag limit and shooting of cock birds only, now allows farmers to sell hunting rights on artificially-raised pheasants without limit on season, bag or sex. Many a new York farmer is doing a nice business at $6 to S:15 per gun per day. Texas, where gamewise farmers have been compensated for nine years, this year has 3,700.000 privately-owned acres open to hunters of deer, quail, ducks, wild turkeys. The gunner pays the farmer not more than $4 a day or 25^ per acre per season. Georgia's game commission has begun sending out lists of game farms. - Nebraska and Colorado have a scrip scheme whereby hunters pay farmers one coupon for each bird shot, the coupons being sold and cashed by the State. Iowa has banned all quail shooting for 17 years. New Jersey's northern counties have been closed to it for some ten years. This autumn New Jersey will allow farm-raised quail to be hunted. Iowa will launch a long-range program for increasing its quail supply. In twelve experimental areas State College researchers are studying methods of determining how many quail a given area contains, how many of them may wisely be shot each year. To be licensed for quail-raising a farm must have 640 continuous acres, be provided with adequate food and cover. Next year lowans will shoot quail. New Jersey farmers may release their propagated quail before hunting, let gunners shoot 80% of them. Or they may release birds before the spring breeding season, allow five times the number re-leased to be shot in season. Further limits will be set by the State from year to year through the sale of tags, to be placed on all birds killed. When the tags are used up, shooting must stop.

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