CO PY 
May 6, 1935 
Mr. Ed. F. Averill 
Terinal Sales Bldg* 
Portland, Oregon 
My dear Eds 
I thoroughly appreciate your letter of March 2 concerning my article 
on pheasants and your comments on it. but the thing which pleases me most
is the 
fact that it has set an old timer like you to thinking seriously along a
line of 
reasoning which a little handful of us has been -rying to sell since the
American 
Game Policy was adopted in 1930. Apparently this article has had the same
effect 
on many others, and I therefore feel more than compensated for the time I
spent in 
assembling It. 
I do not believe we will ever do away with game farms, but that we 
will gear them up to our whole wildlife restoration program in a new way.
I do feel 
that in many cases the states will do away with or curtail their large mass
produc- 
tion game farms, and spend some of that time and money in another direction
which 
in the end will pay much bigger dividends. 
The condition you mention is typical of others of which I have heard. 
I expect that the change in agricultural methods and the failure to maintain
proper 
combinations of food, cover and range was largely responsible for the very
pronounced 
drop in pheasant population which you mention. It has been my privilege to
inspect 
some of the most densely populated pheasant range in this country, and strange
to 
say, in most cases where the birds have made the best showing, stocking programs

have played a very small part after the first two or three years. 
this time you have probably read my Hungarian partridge article, 
and you will note running through that almost identically the same trend
of thought* 
For instance, in the Canadian Provinces where the Huns have made such remarkable

stridds, the extent of repeated stocking was practically negligible, but
the birds 
there found an environment which made it possible for them to increase beyond
the 
fondest hopes of those who sponsored the undertaking. 
I predict that if the agricultural methods in either the heart of 
the best pheasant country or the best Hungarian concentrations should be
changed 
radically within the next decade, you would see there they-seme kind of a
slartling 
diminution that you noticed in the case of Tbd pheasants in the Willamette
Valley. 
That brings me to the now thought in wildlife management. You and I 
both spent thousands of dollars in law enforcement work, controlling predators,
and 
restocking. Those activities had their place as part of the educational program,

but did practically nothing to assure a maximum crop of game by handling
a jiven 
area in the same intensive manner as a farmer, fruit grower or truck tardner
would. 
We also spent plenty of money stopping outlaw fishermen and stooking truckloads
of 
fish in our streams. But it is only recently that we have undertaken an intensive

management program to improve he natural environmente