Try these stalking methods. Cling as close to the ground as possible.
It saves time if the umpire makes out a scoring card beforehand, giving the name of each Scout, and a number of columns showing each act of his, also a column for minus marks for Scouts who expose themselves.
Spider and Fly
A bit of country or section of the town about a mile square with its boundaries described is selected as the web, and an hour fixed at which operations are to cease.
One Patrol (or half-Patrol) is the “spider”, which goes out and selects a place to hide itself. The other Patrol (or half-Patrol) starts a quarter of an hour later as the “fly” to look for the “spider”. They can spread themselves about as they like, but must tell their leader anything that they discover.
An umpire goes with each party.
If within the given time (say, about two hours) the fly has not discovered the spider, the spider wins. The spiders write down the names of any of the fly Patrol that they may see. Similarly, the flies write down
the names of any spiders that they may see, and their exact hiding-place.
It takes much time and patience to stalk close enough to wild animals to be able to study their habits without disturbing them.
CAMP FIRE YARN NO. 15
ANIMALS
The Calling of Wild Animals - Animals - Birds
Reptiles - Fishing – Insects
HINTS TO INSTRUCTORS
HOW TO TEACH NATURAL HISTORY
Take your Scouts to the Zoo and to a Natural History Museum. Take them to certain animals on which you are prepared to talk to them. About half a dozen animals would be quite enough for one day.
If in the country, get leave from a farmer or carter to show the boys how to put on harness, etc., and how to feed and water the horse; how he is shod, etc. How to catch hold of a runaway horse in harness. How to milk a cow.
Study habits of cows, rabbits, birds, muskrat, beavers, trout, etc., by stalking them and watching all that they do.
Take your scouts to any menagerie, and explain the animals.
Scouts in many parts of the world use the calls of wild animals and birds for communicating with each other, especially at night or in thick bush, or in fog. But it is also very useful to be able to imitate the calls if you want to watch the habits of the animals. You can begin by calling chickens or by talking to dogs in dog language, and very soon find you can givc the angry growl or the playful growl of a dog. Owls, wood-pigeons, and curlews are very easily called.
In India, I have seen a tribe of gipsies who eat jackals. Now jackals are some of the most suspicious animals that live. It is very difficult to catch them in a trap, but these gipsies catch them by calling them in this way:
In India, they hunt jackals in a peculiar way: A man i mitates the calls of a whole flock of jackals, and shakes dr y leaves.
Several men with dogs hide themselves in the grass and bushes round a small field. In the middle of this open place one gipsy imitates the call of the jackals calling to each other. He gets louder and louder till he sounds like a whole pack of jackals coming together, growling and finally tackling each other with violent snapping, snarling, and yelling. At the same time he shakes a bundle of dried leaves, which sounds like the animals dashing about among grass and reeds. Then he flings himself down on the ground, and throws dust up in the air, so that he is completely hidden in it, still growling and fighting.
If any jackal is within sound of this , it comes tearing out of the jungle, and dashes into the dust to join in the fight. When it finds a man there, it comes out again in a hurry. But meantime the dogs have been loosed from all sides, and they quickly catch the jackal and kill it.
Big Game Hunting
William Long in his very interesting book, Beasts of the Field, describes how he once called a moose. The moose is a very huge kind of stag, with an ugly, bulging kind of nose. It lives in the forests of North America and Canada, is very hard to get near, and is pretty dangerous when angry.
Long was in a canoe, fishing, when he heard a moose bull calling in the forest. So just for fun he went ashore and cut a strip of bark off a birch tree and rolled it up cone or trumpet-shaped into a kind of megaphone about fifteen inches long, five inches wide at the larger end, and about an inch or two at the mouth-piece. With this he proceeded to imitate the roaring grunt of the bull-moose. The effect was tremendous. The old moose came tearing down and even went into the water and tried to get at him—and it was only by hard paddling that he got away.
. . . then he flings himself on the ground and throws dust up in the air. The jackal rushes in to join in the fight and is quickly caught.
One of the finest sports is the hunting of big game—that is, going after elephants, lions, rhino, wild boar, deer, and those kinds of animals. A fellow has to be a pretty good Scout if he hopes to succeed at it.
You get plenty of excitement and plenty of danger too, and all that I have told you about observation and tracking and hiding yourself comes in here. In addition to these, you must know all about animals and their habits and ways.
I said that “hunting” or “going after big game” is one of the finest sports. I did not say shooting or killing the game was the finest part, for, as you get to study animals, you get to like them more and more. You will soon find that you don’t want to kill them for the mere sake of killing. Also the more you see of them the more you see the wonderful work of God in them.
Adventurous Life of Hunting
All the fun of hunting lies in the adventurous life in the jungle, the chance in many cases of the animal hunting you instead of you hunting the animal, the interest of tracking
it up, stalking it and watching all
that it does and learning its habits. The actual shooting the animal that
follows is only a very small part of the excitement.
No Scout should ever kill an animal unless there is some real reason for doing so, and in that case he should kill it quickly and effectively, to give it as little pain as possible.