season.  Some of the dead ducks were forwarded to the Biological Survey and were turned over for examination to the Bureau of Animal Industry, by the experts of which the disease was diagnosed as intestinal coccidiosis.

Various plans of relieving the situation were tried.  The irrigation ditches were closed, thus providing the sloughs and ponds with fresh water, and lime was sprinkled on the mud flats and duck trails.  Great improvement followed this treatment, and experiments proved that ducks provided with abundant fresh water and clean food began to recover immediately.  These methods promised success, but later it was proposed that the marshes be drained and exposed to the sun’s rays—­a course which cannot be recommended.  That coccidia are not always killed by exposure to the sun is shown by their survival on the sites of old chicken yards.  An added disadvantage of the plan is that draining and drying the marshes would have a bad effect on the natural duck food, and upon the birds themselves.

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CHAPTER X

DESTRUCTION OF WILD LIFE BY THE ELEMENTS

It is a fixed condition of Nature that whenever and wherever a wild species exists in a state of nature, free from the trammels and limitations that contact with man always imposes, the species is fitted to survive all ordinary climatic influences.  Freedom of action, and the exercise of several options in the line of individual maintenance under stress, is essential to the welfare of every wild species.

A prong-horned antelope herd that is free can drift before a blizzard, can keep from freezing by the exercise, and eventually come to shelter.  Let that same herd drift against a barbed-wire fence five miles long, and its whole scheme of self-preservation is upset.  The herd perishes then and there.

Cut out the undergrowth of a given section, drain the swamps and mow down all the weeds and tall grass, and the next particularly hard winter starves and freezes the quail.

Naturally the cutting of forests, clearing of brush and drainage of marshes is more or less calamitous to all the species of birds that inhabit such places and find there winter food and shelter.  Red-winged blackbirds and real estate booms can not inhabit the same swamps contemporaneously.  Before the relentless march of civilization, the wild Indian, the bison and many of the wild birds must inevitably disappear.  We cannot change conditions that are as inexorable as death itself.  The wild life must either adjust itself to the conditions that civilized man imposes upon it, or perish.  I say “civilized man,” for the reason that the primitive races of man are not deadly exterminators of species, as we are.  I know of not one species of wild life that has been exterminated by savage man without the aid of his civilized peers.