Wildlife Conference

When 2,000 sportsmen, scientists and sentimentalists, organized by Cartoonist Jay Norwood ("Ding") Darling, met in Washington three years ago for the first North American Wildlife Conference, it seemed pure fantasy to hope that they would agree on a common program. For years animal-lovers and hunters had fought each other far more vigorously than they fought for conservation of the nation's wildlife resources. Meanwhile lakes dried up, marshes were drained, forests cut over, rivers polluted, birds, beasts and fish killed off by the million.

At the Conference "Ding" Darling formed his National Wildlife Federation, a fish-flesh-&-fowl made up of all factions in the conservation movement. Since then the Pittman-Robertson Act has set aside the 10% excise tax on sporting arms & ammunition for wildlife propagation and research. Hunters and animal-lovers, unified at last, have pushed through many a national and State fish-&-game law. Last week, when the fourth annual North American Wildlife Conference opened in Detroit, the Federation was going strong.

Although optimism was the conference's keynote, speakers warned conservationists not to relax their efforts. Less than a third of the $3,250,000 excise tax, for example, has been passed along by Congress to the State Governments, which have the spending of it./- Other pressing problems: some of the most desirable species of fish (sturgeon, Lake Erie cisco, bloater, black & blue fins) are now extinct in the Great Lakes, and the famed Lake Superior whitefish are fast disappearing; municipalities often have to be forced to stop pollution of streams; the increasing number of hunters (448,000 in 1935, 1,000,000 in 1938) may require tighter limitations on duck hunting.

> To stop indiscriminate selling of hunting licenses, John H. Baker, executive director of the National Association of Audubon Societies, proposed examinations comparable to automobile drivers' tests. An applicant, he mildly suggested, should be made to show his knowledge of how to load, carry, fire and unload a gun, prove his ability to read game laws and posted signs, know by sight the game birds and animals in his vicinity.

>Sore spot of the Conference was the mosquito problem. According to conservationists, drainage ditches of the eastern U. S. (end to end, they would belt the world at the equator three times) have dried up swamp vegetation, starved out wildlife. And all for nothing, according to Dr. Clarence Cottam, chief of the Biological Survey's division of food habits. Said he: "The millions of dollars spent on mosquito control had resulted in more U. S. mosquitoes last year than there had been in the previous ten." Some of the mosquito projects, he said, were "comparable to curing dandruff by scalping."

As the National Wildlife Federation, now a powerful propaganda agency which claims to represent some 20,000,000 conservationists, met last week in conjunction with the North American Conference, President "Ding" Darling as usual blazed away with both barrels at U. S. bureaus and agencies, called some of them outright "enemies of conservation." Of the Bureau of Fisheries: "The exhaustion of fish resources has no parallel." Of the CCC: "The opportunity for tremendous advancement was largely muffed." Of the Bureau of Public Lands: "... a past record of exploitation crimes which prohibit its claim to any part in national conservation." Of the average citizen: "As unconscious of the objectives ... of national planning as Ferdinand the Bull. . . . Both of them just love to smell flowers, but that is as far as they go." And having said his say, disgruntled "Ding" resigned.

/- Each State must add 25% to the money awarded it.

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