552       SECOND NORTH AMERICAN WILDLIFE CONFERENCE 
pers not only ate vast acreages of cereal crops, other grasses and 
weeds, but also attacked many shrubs and trees as shown. 
Destruction of rabbit food and cover by the hordes of grasshoppers 
and chinch bugs in western and southern counties, particularly, would 
appear to make predation on rabbits in winter easier for foxes. Con- 
sequently the Conservation Commission has permitted during this 
drought period a year round open season on the rather high popula- 
tion of adult foxes. Hunters and trappers have been encouraged to 
take the animals largely in winter and to market the furs. Thus 
foxes, in surplus, have been harvested as a crop. 
The State Department of Agriculture, the State Entomologist, Dr. 
Carl J. Drake, the college extension entomologist and the county agri- 
cultural agents with the farmers have carried out intensive campaigns 
against the destructive insects to save some food and cover for the 
many desirable forms of animal life in the state. Though the savings 
which ensued during the summers of severe drought seemed small in 
quantity, those small quantities of food and cover on the many 
stricken farms were so valuable to man, domestic stock and wildlife 
that the values are incalculable. 
To gain information concerning the effects upon wildlife of poisoned 
bran, distributed to kill grasshoppers, W. E. Beed, graduate student 
in wildlife management, spent most of the summer of 1936 in the 
areas where heavy poisoning was done. No cottontails were found to 
have died of poison bran on any of 461 farms visited during the sum- 
mer. Nor was any other wildlife observed by Mr. Beed to have suc- 
cumbed to poisoned bran or poisoned grasshoppers. Instead the 
wholesale destruction of grasshoppers and chinch bugs has saved 
much cover and food and consequently benefited wildlife during the 
past several years in our state. 
The importance of cover has been studied by the author (1936) who 
reported on the use of fecal pellet counts to discover the summer feed- 
ing territories and the numbers of cottontails on an area of 15 con- 
tiguous acres in the orchard and apiary allotments of college lands, 
all of which are, in accordance with state law, wildlife preserves. 
During 1936, in preparation for other planting, the rather evenly 
distributed four short thickets, two small patches of tall weeds (not 
noxious), a brush pile and two woven wire cross fences were removed 
from the north five acres of the area. In the summer of 1935, on that 
tract four adult and four young cottontails were found. Though al- 
falfa and bluegrass were available for food and for cover as during 
the previous summer of 1936 cottontails were not in the five-acre tract 
as was shown by a lack of fecal pellets and through sight observation. 
In 1935 the several adult cottontails apparently did not feed and loaf