Animals: Three Ducks Less

A squiggle of President Roosevelt’s pen last week lifted a load from the minds of hundreds of thousands of U. S. sportsmen, set them to polishing guns, planning vacations. Two months later than usual came the announcement, released by the President’s signature, of 1933-34’s migratory game laws.

Last year’s season of two months is retained. Only major change in this year’s laws is a lowering of the daily bag limit on wild ducks from 15 to 12. Of these not more than eight may be canvasback, redhead, scaup, teal, shoveler or gadwall. (Last year’s limit on this list, which included ringneck, was ten.) Brant may be shot on the Pacific Coast, not on the Atlantic where their principal food, eel grass, has almost disappeared (TIME, Aug. 21). Cackling geese are unprotected for the first time since 1930.

States have been rezoned. The season opens at noon Sept. 21, nine days earlier than last year (except in Alaska whose open season started Sept. 1) in Wisconsin, North Dakota and northern Idaho and ends Nov. 20. Other new zones with their dates for hunting duck, geese, coot and jacksnipe are as follows:

Oct. 1 to Nov. 30—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, northern Arizona. Oct. 16 to Dec. 15—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York (except Long Island), Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, Washington, Oregon, southern Idaho, northern New Mexico. Nov. 1 to Dec. 31—Long Island, N. Y., Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, California, northern Texas. Nov. 16 to Jan. 15—New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, southern Arizona, southern Texas, southern New Mexico. Nov. 20 to Jan. 15—Florida.

Deer Off a Ledge

Some 350,000 people, including 100,000 over Labor Day weekend, visited the State Park in Watkins Glen, N. Y. to gape across a deep, narrow gorge at the buck deer with horns in velvet which, presumably chased by dogs and injured on the flank, had become marooned on a rocky ledge (TIME, Sept. 4 & 11). No end of elaborate wiles and artifices, including stuffed deer, an Indian chief, a plank bridge, were brought into play to lure the animal from its prison, all to no avail. Park employes feared that, if frightened, the buck might plunge over the brink and be destroyed, as its mate had been. Last week the buck’s predicament, by now a national news story, brought Superintendent Gardiner Bump of New York’s Conservation Department to the scene. But before Mr. Bump could go into action, the buck saved itself. Gently urged by two wardens it walked unassisted to a spot where the ledge sloped least steeply to the gorge’s bottom. As some experts had predicted it would do when its injury was mended, it braced its forelegs, slid smoothly down the 35-ft. cliff, loped easily up the other side and out of the national spotlight.