Wildlife Management

1
Wildlife Management
Chapter 2 Neglect and Exploitation
What is this bird????
2
Historical Attitudes

• Idealistic view of man
• Primitive tools
• Fewer killed, connection balanced nature

3
Historical Attitudes

• Reality man may have caused extinction of
  nearly all large mammal species
• -North American 10,000 years
• - Easter island extinctions
• Mammoths, mastodon
• Horse, camel, rhino
• Driving over clifts
• Seasonal mass kills

4
Historical Attitudes

• Genesis 128
• be fruitful, multiply and subdue the earth and
  have dominion over the fish of the sea, fowl of
  the air and over every living thing that moves on
  the face of the earth.
• Judeo christian heritage vs eastern philosophy

5
Impact of Domestic Animals

• Rise of domestic animals such as cattle, sheep,
  goats, chickens
• loss of predators
• Lions and wolves -Europe
• Cheetahs, tigers, cougars -elsewhere

6
Impact of Domestic Animals

• Domestic cat/dog
• England study
• 2-5 birds/mice killed per day by well fed town
  cats
• Feral dogs cats

7
Spread of Civilizaton

• Birth of civilization
• Fertile crescent
• farming
• 10,000 yrs ago

8
Spread of Civilization

• Spread of Cities
• Market Hunting for meat
• Day 1949
• 1000 ducks/day in 6 months - Virginia
• 14,000 per week Iowa
• 10 cents per duck
• (sold at market for meat

9
Spread of Civilization

• Hunting for Fashion Hats
• swans, egrets, herons
• Trumpeter swan
• Over 100,000 killed/50 yrs
• 1853 1877 20,000 killed
• 1888 1897 57 killed
• Then went out of style

Hunting in Breeding Season
10
Theodore Roosevelt

• President, Hunter, Conservationist
• Owned 2 ranches
• The Wilderness Hunter (1893)
• Friends with Pinchot
• Forest water most vital internal problems (in
  1908!!)

11
Theodore Roosevelt -Man of contrasts

• Big game hunter
• Shot specimens for the American Museum of Natural
  History
• Major league hunter
• Compared to
• 1st National Wildlife Refuge
• Pelican Island, FLA
• Saved egrets herons
• Womens hats suffered
• Bird watcher life list

12
Bison in North America

• Coexist with humans thousands of years until
  1850.
• Native american use
• Hides, shelter, clothes
• Meat for food
• Sinews for bowstrings
• Dung for fuel

13
Bison in North America

• Massive slaughter
• Starve indians
• Clear railroad
• Killed over 30 million in less than 100 years
• New record for world kill of any species of
  mammal
• Passenger pigeon still tops

14
Bison bones

• After slaughter
• Waiting to be shipped out east to fertilizer
  plants

15
The Passenger Pigeon

• Most numerous bird on earth
• 19th century
• Flocks of thousands of birds
• 1871, WI, 2200 km 2, 136 million birds
• Extinct due to
• Hunting
• Behavior needed large colonies to reproduce.

16
Extinct Species

• Carolina Parakeet
• Auk
• Stellers sea cow
• Labrador duck
• Pleistocene mammals

17
Labrador Duck

• Johnsgard (1968) on the Labrador Duck
• It disappeared so swiftly that its difficult
  to compose an obituary. We dont even know where
  it nested, what it ate or what its downy chicks
  looked like.

18
Near Extinctions

• Wood ducks
• Prairie chicken
• Wild turkeys
• California Condor
• Peregrin Falcon
• Indiana Bat

19
Problems of Excess

• Deer
• Reindeer
• Winter flocks
• Blackbirds
• Starlings
• Grackles
• cowbirds

20
Impact of Predator Control

• Coyote 1 evil
• Red fox
• Wolves
• Cougars
• bobcats
• weasels

21
Bounties, Bait Blunders

• in Michigan
• 1,209,500
• -no noticeable reduction in weasels
• 3000 coyotes killed in
• 10 years, no decline seen following years.

22
Exotics Introduced Species

• Ring neck pheasant
• Non-native
• Compete with quail
• Brown trout
• Compete with US trout
• Black Grouse
• failure