ands along the shores and the
disease raged unabated until late fall. Shooting clubs found it
necessary to declare a closed 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.

* * * * *

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