Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/179

Rh them to market by the ton. Recently, in an effort to save this fine bird from extermination, a prize of one hundred dollars has been offered for the first person reporting a pair of breeding passenger pigeons.

A couple of decades before the passenger pigeon's extermination, flocks of hundreds of Carolina paroquets used to swoop down on the apple orchards of Kentucky and southern Indiana. Naturally the farmers took their guns and wreaked vengeance on the birds, and to-day the Carolina paroquet is all but extinct. And it has long been driven from the region I have just mentioned.

The economic factor was an important one in the extermination of these birds, but the rapidity of their extermination was due to the fact that they flocked together and were killed by the wholesale.

Beasts of prey are more courageous than weaker animals and all of the larger ones are gone from thickly settled communities. The rabbit is notorious for its timidity and still abounds everywhere outside of city limits. True, fecundity and small size play an important part in the preservation of the rabbit, but suppose that possessing these characteristics, the instinct of self-defense were stronger than the instinct to flee? The inevitable result would be the destruction of the race.

No mental trait has been of greater value to an animal species warred upon by man than timidity. The trait next in order of value is cunning.

The fox has always been justly considered as a type of the cunning animal, but the trait has not been equally developed in all kinds of foxes. In eastern North America there are two very distinct races, the gray fox and the red, cross and silver foxes being mere varieties of the latter. It is highly probable that the American red fox is descended from animals brought from England by gentlemen emigrating from that country during the eighteenth century, although this fact has not been clearly established. It is certain, at least, that it was either rare or absent in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois during the days when these states were frontier regions, and at that time the native gray species was abundant. Now the gray fox is extinct except in the rougher and more wooded districts, while his red relative is a pest in even the most densely settled valleys. The two species are nearly equal in size, fecundity, value of fur and destructiveness to poultry. They eat the same food, they live in the same kind of places, with the exception that the gray species seldom makes its den in the open fields, while the red often does. The vital point of difference seems to be in their cunning. The red fox, if not the sly renard of Europe, is certainly a close counterpart in cunning, while its gray cousin is lacking in this respect. In these two species, at least, the difference between survival and extermination depends upon cunning.