Game Management

PREFACE

PREFACE We of the industrial age boast of our control over nature. Plant or animal, star or atom, wind or river-there is no force in earth or sky which we will not shortly harness to build "the good life" for ourselves. But what is the good life? Is all this glut of power to be used for only bread-and-butter ends? Man cannot live by bread, or Fords, alone. Are we too poor in purse or spirit to apply some of it to keep the land pleasant to see, and good to live in? Every countryside proclaims the fact that we have, today, less control in the field of conservation than in any other contact with surrounding nature. We patrol the air and the ether, but we do not keep filth out of our creeks and rivers. We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of reons are stolen from under our noses. We stamp out the diseases of crops and livestock, but we do not know what ails the grouse, or the ducks, or the antelope. In a certain sense we are learning more rapidly about the fires that burn in the spiral nebulre than those that burn in our forests. We aspire to build a mechanical cow before we know how to build a fishway, or control a flood, or handle a woodlot so it will produce a covey of grouse. Control comes from the co-ordination of science and use. This book attempts to explore the possibilities of such coordination in a single, limited field-the conservation of game by management. Its detail applies to game alone, but the principles are of general import to all fields of conservation. The central thesis of game management is this: game can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have heretofore destroyed it-axe, plow, cow, fire, and gun. A favorable alignment of these forces sometimes came about in pioneer days by accident. The result was a temporary wealth of game far greater than the red man ever saw. Management is their purposeful and continuing alignment. The conservation movement has sought to restore wild life by the control of guns alone, with little visible success. Management seeks the same end, but by more versatile means. We seem to have two choices: try it, or hunt rabbits. XXXI XXXII PREFACE Game management has long been an empirical art in Europe, but the attempt to adapt that art to biological principles and to American conditions and traditions, is new. Facts about game have been accumulating for a long time, but there has been only one previous attempt to synthesize from those facts a coherent system of principles. Adams, in his Importance oj Wild Life in Forestry, presents exhaustive statistics on the economic value of wild life, and interprets them in terms of biological principles, but he does not deal with the technique of altering range for greater productivity, which is the principal subject of this volume. . Few biological arts depend as much on ingenuity and resourcefulness as this one. It is still in the stage where each practitioner must create his own skill rather than absorb that of others. This will always be true of the element of woodcraft, which can never be included in any book. Few of the techniques described in this volume have been tested sufficiently in practice to be safely followed verbatim. They represent examples of how to think, observe, deduce, and experiment , rather than specifications for what to do. Incomplete or tentative information is freely included, but with due care to differentiate those many degrees of certainty which lie between opinion and established fact. It is hoped that this emphasis on the paucity of existing knowledge of game will stimulate efforts to increase it. To encourage the reader to interpret for himself the evidence bearing on management questions, a rather full bibliography, and frequent references to it, have been included. The starred items are recommended as general reading. The subject matter of this volume has been hung upon a framework of" factors," rather than of species or land units, because the object is to portray the mechanism which produces all species on aI/lands, rather than to prescribe the procedures for producing particular species or managing particular lands. The former function belongs to the species monograph, of which we already have an outstanding example in Stoddard's Bobwhite f}(,uail. The latter is the function of the...