From Near Extinction to Common Pest in 50 Years

It is hard to describe the destruction of American wildlife between 1850 and 1900.

By 1850 all the Elk had been shot out in the East, the Forest Bison pushed into complete extinction, the Wolf extirpated from everywhere in the East but the Maine woods.

Between 1850 and 1900 the great herds of Plains Bison were cut down to within a few hundred animals of extinction, White Tail Deer and Wild Turkey were virtually extirpated along most of the Atlantic seaboard, geese and ducks of every type were slaughtered in dizzying numbers by shrapnel fired from cannon used by market hunters, and the beaver had simply vanished from every state East of Ohio. The Carolina Parakeet and Passenger Pigeon were gone, as was the Eskimo Curlew -- birds which once numbered in the millions.

The turn around in American wildlife populations began with passage of the Lacey Act in 1907, which banned market hunting.

A critical turn around in the fortunes of wild geese and duck occurred in 1935 when live decoys -- wild birds that had been trapped and made flightless with pinned or clipped wings -- was made illegal.

It looked like the ban on live decoys had come too late for some species, however. One of those species was the Giant Canada Goose which was thought to be extinct -- or nearly extinct -- in the wild.

The good news is that while there were almost no wild Canada Geese left, captive decoy goose populations still existed. With the 1935 ban on the use of decoy geese, most of these animals were released into marshes and onto ponds. Unable to fly, many of these animals quickly fell prey to fox and dogs, but some managed to grow back their feathers or live long enough to reproduce.

During World War II and into the 1950s, the descendants of once-captive Giant Canada Geese slowly multiplied in remote marshes and isolated ponds. While a natural recovery seemed to be occurring, these descendants of once-captive geese were largely non-migratory since, after three or four generations in captivity prior to 1935, they no longer had any "lead geese" to show them the way North.

In the 1960s the Giant Canada Geese population remained so low across the U.S. that it was considered extirpated in most states and near-extinct in the wild. In order to prevent extinction, a systematic effort was made to captive-raise Giant Canada Geese and introduce small flocks back into areas where they had once existed.

The introduction of Canada Geese was a phenomenal success. Absent hunting and disease, small flocks of Canada Geese grew by 10 to 20 percent percent a year -- a population doubling time of just 3 to 7 years time.

In a relatively short period of time, states saw a phenomenal growth in their Giant Canada Goose populations. Ohio, to cite on example, began with just 20 captive-raised birds in 1956, but by 2002 had a population of over 140,000 birds. Today almost all the geese you see in the Eastern U.S,. and Midwest are Giant Canada Geese.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the current resident Giant Canada Goose population of the U.S. at 4 million birds and growing rapidly, with a small number of truly migratory Giant Canada Geese still found in the mid-Atlantic flyway.

Giant Canada Geese have also been introduced into other parts of the world, most notably Europe, where they are also thriving.

The "goose problem" today is not extinction but an over-abundance of geese in areas where heavy population densities may inconvenience golfers and cause eutrophication of farm ponds.

A boom in geese populations, however is not too bad a problem as problems go, and it has certainly been a benefit for fox which frequently raid Canada Goose nests in order to feed rapidly growing kits.

The rise of Canada Geese has also created a boom in sport hunting which now pumps hundreds of millions of dollars a year into rural economies. No one has benefited more from the demise of commercial market hunting than the sport hunter.

With the demise of market hunting, and with the assistance of capable wildlife managers, the Giant Canada Goose has returned, as has the wild turkey, the beaver, the bison, the elk, white tail deer, alligator and even the wolf. Truly, these are the good old days.



.

Clash of Opinions is Actually a Clash of Knowledge

In Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality and Wildness in America, David Peterson notes that back in 1978 Yale University behavioral scientist Stephen Kellert authored a paper entitled "Attitudes and Characteristics of Hunters and Antihunters" in which he summarized his research into the psychology and world-view of these two opposing groups of people.

Kellert breaks hunters down into three core groups:

Utilitarian-meat hunters;
Domination-sport hunters, and;
Naturalist-nature hunters.

Kellert notes that while the groups blur a little at the edges, these three psycho-demographic groups do exist, and represent striking differences of attitude within America's hunting population.

Utilitarian-meat hunters represent about 44 percent of all American hunters. This group tends to talk of "harvesting" game as a renewable resource and many have a "pioneer spirit" forged in self-sufficiency. As a group utilitarian-meat hunters tend to be older, more rural and less educated, but test pretty well when it came to knowledge about wildlife. Few Americans oppose them.

The second group, the domination-hunter, comprise about 38 percent of all hunters. Most domination-hunters are urban men, have served in the military, and see hunting as a way of expressing their manly prowess. Domination hunters know very little about wildlife, and many actually fear it, having an exaggerated "dangerous game" mindset of the kind we often see in pulp hunting magazines ("Mauled by a Grizzly," "When Sharks Attack", "Stalked by a Killer Moose"). Domination hunters showed little interest in wildlife in their youth, and as adults tend to see wild animals as uncontrolled and therefore as "bad" or nuisance animals. The domination hunter is the group non-hunters dislike, and which antihunters try to use to negatively portray ALL hunters.

The third group of hunters -- naturalist hunters -- represent less than 18 percent of all hunters. This group tends to be younger, more educated, and with higher levels of education and income than the other groups. This category also includes more women hunters. Nature hunters tend to backpack, bird watch and camp, as well as hunt. This group also spends more time actually hunting than either of the other two previous groups. Nature hunters have far and away the highest level of knowledge about wildlife and seek an intense involvement with wildlife and do not fear it.

Kellert also goes on to analyze antihunters as a group and finds, not surprisingly, that about 80 percent are women. Most are urban women living on one coast or another.

Antis had very little actual experience with wildlife and, along with domination hunters, had "among the lowest knowledge-of-animals scores of any group included in the study."
In another ironic parallel with domination hunters, "it appeared that antihunters manifested more fear and lack of interest in wildlife" than average Americans.

What was striking to me about reading Kellert's research was how it explains much of the silliness and stupidity we see in the arena of wildlife management today, where antihunters who have never walked a hedgerow clash all with macho-men domination-hunters who would never consider going into the woods without a Bowie Knife as large as medieval falchion.

Neither group seems to have very much knowledge about wildlife. One group does not hunt at all, and the other does not seem to hunt very much.

Left out of the debate -- and too often ignoring it -- are utilitarian-meat hunters and nature-naturalistic hunters which form a majority of the people who actually spend any time in forest or field.

The good news is that in America, unlike in much of Europe, wildlife management decisions tend to be left to an increasingly well-educated groups of professional wildlife managers with degrees in biology, zoology, resource management, forestry, population dynamics, law enforcement and even economics. The watchword in the U.S. is not knee-jerk emotionalism, but sustainability and habitat protection. As a consequence, we have more deer, elk, moose, bear, wolf, fox, alligator, whales, peregrine falcons, bald eagle, osprey, groundhog, raccoon, possum, coyote, bison, beaver and mountain lion today than we have ever had in the last 100 years, and the numbers for all of these species is going up, up, up.
.

Best Florida Road Sign Ever

.

Man Saves Terrier From Gator and Loses Fingers

This South Carolina gator removed a human arm at the shoulder.

As I have noted before, there's not a lot of digging on the dogs in some part of the U.S. due to the ready presence of rattlesnakes, porcupines, and the absence of den holes due to the paucity of groundhogs.

And in Florida and Louisiana, of course, there's are alligators. One Florida newspaper tells a recent tale of dog-meets-giant-lizard:

David Grounds was walking his 7-year-old dog by the pond behind his home west of West Palm Beach on Saturday morning when he saw the wake of a 7-foot alligator approaching.

He screamed for Mandy, a wheaten terrier, to get away but it was too late: the gator clamped down on Mandy's midsection and the squealing dog was helpless as the alligator started thrashing. Grounds, 65, rushed over and grabbed the gator's mouth with his hands while poking it in its eye with his thumb.

"He was powerful," Grounds said from his Palms West Hospital bed Saturday night.

The gator released its grip and Mandy was saved. But then the gator snapped at Grounds, taking part of his right index and ring fingers.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials were called and trapped the gator in the 6300 block of North San Andros after the 7:30 a.m. attack. The 7-foot, 2-inch alligator was euthanized.

Grounds, a civil engineer, said he had no regrets about the rescue, calling his wounds "no big deal," other than putting the cramp in his typing at work.

"I'd do it again," he said.

While humans are only very rarely killed by alligators, dogs and cats resemble the natural prey of alligators and are frequent fodder at canals, golf course ponds, lakes, and slow rivers.

The Florida Dept. of Wildlife removes about 7,000 nuisance alligators every year, and private contractors remove even more.

Any alligator over 7 feet is potentially lethal to humans, and alligators grow to 14 feet and 1,000 pounds.
.

The Cull of the Wild

This book set out the tenets of wildlife management still in use today.

This post is reprinted from this blog circa June, 2005

Despite a three-fold increase in U.S. population since 1900, the U.S. now has more bear, cougar, buffalo, turkey, geese, duck, fox, raccoon, possum, alligator, groundhog, bald eagle, pronghorn, wolf, coyote, bobcat, and deer than at any time in the last 100 years. Beaver, turkey and river otter have been reintroduced into areas where they were wiped out, and wolf, elk and cougar are beginning to return to the east.

Though animal rights organizations decry sport hunting, the truth is that organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Trout Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, Quail Unlimited, and the National Wild Turkey Federation are the backbone of true wildlife protection in the United States. These organizations, and their state and local affiliates, work to protect and improve habitat across the U.S., as well as fund wildlife reintroduction and research campaigns.

For their part, groups such as the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are little more than direct mail mills. Both organizations are entirely absent from all habitat protection efforts in the U.S., and neither organization runs even a single animal shelter in the U.S. despite the scores of millions of dollars they collect from the public. Instead these organizations send out millions of pieces of direct mail every year -- all of it highly emotional and designed to get suburban matrons to part with their "most generous gift of $10, $20 or even $50".

One of the perennial topics of animal rights direct mail campaigns is a push to outlaw trapping. Carefully staged photos and antique traps are used to pluck at the heartstrings, but donor beware! It should serve as a warning that blue-chip environmental organizations such as the National Audubon Society have sued the Humane Society (and won) in order to preserve the use of leghold traps as a wildlife management tool. All of the wolves now in the Yellowstone, for example, are routinely caught in leghold traps in order to inoculate them against rabies and distemper and to switch out the batteries on their radio-tracking collars. Modern leghold traps, properly set, are far more selective and less brutal than those that existed 100 or even 50 years ago -- a fact conveniently omitted from the direct mail literature of animal rights advocates.

Trapping for pelts in the U.S. is now largely independent of wildlife numbers -- when trapping numbers go down it is not because of a dip in the target species population, but because of a dip in pelt prices.

As of this writing, green (untanned) fox or raccoon pelts sell for between $8 and $12 dollars apiece -- not much considering the time and effort it takes to boil, dye and and wax a trap, set it out, check it daily, and skin and flesh the resulting catch.

That said, a surprising number of fox and raccoon are still trapped in the U.S. In the winter of 1999-2000, for example, when pelt prices were quite low, 29,739 fox were trapped in the state of Virginia (15,632 red fox and 14,107 Gray Fox), as well as 83,369 raccoon, 3,304 coyote, and 3,050 bobcat. In Pennsylvania that same year, 63,654 fox were taken (26,794 Gray fox and 36,860 red fox), as well as 107,407 raccoon, 9,508 coyote, and 58 bobcat.

For comparison purposes, the state of Virginia is 42,700 square miles in size, and Pennsylvania is 46,058 square miles in size as compared to England, which is 50,800 square miles and all of the UK which is 94,200 square miles in size.

.

Bear Population Growth

The newest wildlife species to see a starling population explosion in the U.S. is the black bear.

The black bear population of the United States is estimated to have grown by up to 35 percent between 1988 and 1995, from a population range of 253,000 to 375,000 bears in 1988, to a population of 339,000 to 465,000 bears by the mid-1990s.

Since the mid-1990s, the black bear population in the U.S. has continued to grow very rapidly, and its range is extending into areas where it had once been extirpated (such as Ohio and North Dakota).

All of this is good news, and a sign of nation-wide environmental improvement. As rough as we have been on the environment, Mother Nature really is as tough as an old boot and generally will recover if we stop beating her to death. A country with half a million black bear is country with a lof of land left for fox, possum. groundhog, coyote, wolf, deer, moose, alligator, badger, beaver, pine marten, hawk and eagle.

A sustained black bear population growth of 3 percent per year (which seems to be occurring despite legal bear hunting in 27 states) could mean that the U.S. black bear population might rise to nearly one million bears by 2025.

States with the largest black bear populations include Alaska (which has about 100,000 black bears), Maine, Idaho, California, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, and West Virginia.

As an "indicator species," the dramatic increase in the black bear population of the U.S. suggests that wildlife and habitat management is improving in much of the U.S., and that there are still quite a few large blocks of relatively unspoiled habitat left.

Depending on the type of land (wetland, dry forest, riparian area, etc.) and climate conditions, individual black bears typically have a home range of 5,000 to 30,000 acres, while bear biologists estimate that a healthy reproducing population of black bears requires a minimum of 500,000 acres of land.

In the state of Virginia (my home), we shoot about 1,500 black bear a year and the population is slowly growing.

Nutria: The Tabasco Sauce Rat

The Nutria or Coypu (Myocastor coypus) was first brought to the United States from South America by the McIlheny family, of Tabasco Sauce fame. Their idea was to start a fur farm on Avery Island, Louisiana. Unfortunately, in 1941 a hurricane blew in and wrecked the cages, releasing about 150 nutria into the local marshes.

By 1959, these 150 nutria expanded to a population estimate of 20 million!

Nutria are considered a serious pest. Wherever they have gone, there has been a steep decline in muskrat populations, with whom they directly compete. In addition, nutria are voracious eaters of vegetation and are capable of cutting huge holes in marshes, leading to increased soil loss, shell-fish deaths, lost fish spawning grounds, and lost song and game bird habitat. Not for nothing are they sometimes called "that rat that ate Louisiana".

On the up side, there is little doubt that the introduction of the nutria has had a very beneficial impact on the American alligator, whose numbers were pushed perilously close to the edge in the 1960s, but which are now in superabundance thank to better game management laws and a steady supply of nutria (as well as cats, possums, small dogs, raccoons, turtles and fish).

Efforts are underway to wipe out the nutria in Maryland, where populations have been destroying the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge. In the American South (Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia) it is probably impossible to turn the tide, no matter how many conibear traps are set out.

Nutria were introduced to England sometime prior to 1944, when a few escaped from a Sussex fur farm, but they were exterminated by 1988 thanks to a concerted trapping campaign.

The nutria is not considered much of game animal by those that have worked other terrier quarry. Despite the fact that the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America is headquartered about 45 minutes away from very large and thriving nutria colonies where a very aggressive trapping regime is now underway, the JRTCA does not list them as a species they will give a working certification for. I am told that this is because the dens they inhabit are generally so shallow and large that working them is not really earth work. The American Working Terrier Association also does not give a working certification for nutria.

In The Working Terrier, Brian Plummer notes that nutria make a great deal of noise chattering their teeth, but that this largely bluff.

“Coypu are not particularly exciting animals to hunt. Their burrows are large and not especially deep, so there is little chance of a dog getting trapped while hunting them. Furthermore, the coypu is reluctant to fight and much prefers to bolt if it encounters a terrier. Bites from coypu are never really serious, though pieces of the incisor sometimes break off and remain in wounds, causing sepsis. Wounds are rarely more than skin deep, for, in spite of its rat-like appearance, the coypu is unable to mete out the savage wounds of which the brown rat is capable. . . . the coypu can scarcely be called a sporting animal.”

Others, of course, disagree. That's what makes the world go 'round. If they ever stop setting conibear traps at Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, maybe I could find out for myself. Until then, it strictly dry land for the dogs.

.

Great Headlines in America, and a Great Blog Too

I love it when I find a new site that is simple and well done. That's certainly the case for "The Outdoor Pressroom" which describes itself as "An Outdoor Blog Before Blogs Were Called Blogs." You 'betcha, and yahoo!

Because most people are as lazy as sin, I am cutting and pasting a few links from the web site below. Full credit to J.R. Absher for putting all these great links together, and I strongly recommend his new blog-blog over at Outdoor Life magazine which has nice pictures and his well-written commentary. Go there by clicking >> HERE

Excellent stuff, eh? The good news is that you can click on this link or the one above a couple of weeks from now and get another full hat load of crazy headlines that will make you shake your head and say, "Is this a great country, or what??" Only in America!

• Trapped Washington driftboat angler cuts off fingers to free himself
• Washington angler recovering from successful reattachment surgery
• 11-foot, one-eyed gator attacks Florida golfer
• Bear crashes Ohio town's festival
• Power outage kills 110,000 salmon at Montana hatchery
• Leaping Suwanee River sturgeon breaks 6-year-old's leg
• Anglers rope and boat button buck one mile out on Chesapeake Bay
• 7-foot gator removed from Corpus Christi Wal-Mart garden center
• Florida man strangles rabid, attacking bobcat
• Man protecting sons clobbers bear with chunk of wood
• Mountain lion kills deer on Pepperdine U campus

.

Why Nutria Are Not Hunted in Fl, TX or Louisiana

Game wardens forced to shoot alligator
Published April 16, 2005

WEST COLUMBIA - Anita and Charlie Rogers could hear the bellowing in the night.

Her neighbors in Bar X Ranch had been telling them they had seen a giant alligator in the bayou that runs behind their house, but they dismissed the stories as exaggerations.

"I didn't believe it," Charles Rogers said. Friday they realized the stories were, if anything, understated. Texas Parks and Wildlife game wardens had to shoot the beast.

(Caption: Joe Goff, a game warden with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, walks past a 13-foot, 1-inch alligator that he shot and killed in the back yard of the home at the Bar X Ranch on FM 521 near West Columbia.)

.

Eastern Coyotes

Eastern coyotes are larger than their Western counterparts -- no one is quite sure why. One idea is that the Eastern coyote has cross-bred with wolves and farm dogs, but this is really unproven. What is clear, is that the so-called "Red Wolf" that once existed in the Eastern U.S. is really nothing more than a hybrid wolf-coyote cross. This has been proven with DNA tests of old "Red Wolf" skins kept at the Smithsonian, and also with DNA tests of the wild Red Wolves loose in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Carolina.

The coyote, pictured above, was shot in the Adirondack's of New York and weighed 59 pounds -- a very, very large coyote. Most adult Eastern Coyotes weigh in at around 40 pounds.