Our Vanishing Wild Life Part 31

In regard to the in-breeding of the elk herds in large open parks and preserves throughout North America, there are positively _no ill effects to fear_. Wild animals that are _closely_ confined generation after generation are bound to deteriorate physically; but with healthy wild animals living in large open ranges, feeding and breeding naturally, the in-breeding that occurs produces no deterioration.

In the twin certainties of over-population, and deterioration from excessive killing of the good sires, we have to face two new problems of very decided importance. Nothing short of very radical measures will provide a remedy. For the immediate future, I can offer a solution.

While it seems almost impossible deliberately to kill females, I think that the present is a very exceptional case, and one that compels us to apply the painful remedy that I now propose.

_Premises_:

1.--There are at present _too many_ breeding cows in the Yellowstone herds.

2.--There are far too few good breeding bulls.

_Conclusion_:--For five years, entirely prohibit the killing of adult male elk, and kill only females, and young males. This would gradually diminish the number of calves born each year, by about 2,500, and by the end of five years it would reduce the number, _and the annual birth_, of females to a figure sufficiently limited that the herds could be maintained on existing ranges.

_Corollary_.--At the end of five years, stop killing females, and kill only _young_ males. This plan would permit a large number of bull elk to mature; and then the largest and strongest animals would do the breeding,--just as Nature always intends shall be done.

SOUTH AMERICA

Of all the big-game regions of the earth, South America is the poorest.

Of hoofed game she possesses only a dozen species that are worth the attention of sportsmen; and like all other animal life in that land of little game, they are desperately hard to find. In South America you must work your heart out in order to get either game or specimens that will be worth showing.

At present, we need not worry about the marsh deer, the pampas deer, the guemal, or the venado, nor the tapir, jaguar, ocelot and bears. All these species are abundantly able to take care of themselves; and to find and kill any one of them is a man's task. In Patagonia the natives do wastefully slaughter the guanacos; and there are times also when great numbers of guanacos come down in winter to certain mountain lakes, presumably in search of food, and perish by hundreds through starvation.

(H. Hesketh Prichard.)

MEXICO

About ten years more will see the extinction of the mountain sheep of Lower California,--in the wake of the recently exterminated Mexican sheep of the Santa Maria Lakes region. In 1908, I solemnly warned the government of President Diaz, and at that time the Mexican government expressed much concern.

It is a great pity that just now political conditions are completely estopping wild-life protection in Mexico; but it is true. If the code of proposed laws that I drew up (by request) in 1908 and submitted to Minister Molina were adopted, it would have a good effect on the fauna of Mexico.

In Mexico there is little hoofed game to kill,--deer of the white-tail groups, seven or eight species; the desert mule deer; the brocket; the p.r.o.ng-horned antelope, the mountain sheep and the peccary. The deer will not so easily be exterminated, but the antelope and sheep will be utterly destroyed. They will be the first to go; and I think they can not by any possibility last longer than ten years. Is it not too bad that Mexico should permit her finest species of hoofed and horned game to be obliterated before she awakens to the desirability of conservation! The Mexicans could protect their small stock of big game if they would; but in Lower California they are leasing huge tracts of land to cattle companies, and they permit the lessees to kill all the wild game they please on their leased lands, even with the aid of dogs.

This is a vicious and fatal system, and contrary to all the laws of nations.

CHAPTER XVII

PRESENT AND FUTURE OF NORTH AMERICAN BIG GAME

(Concluded)

THE WHITE-TAILED DEER.--Five hundred years hence, when the greed and rapacity of "civilized" man has completed the loot and ruin of the continent of North America, the white-tailed deer will be the last species of our big game to be exterminated. Its mental traits, its size, its color and its habits all combine to render it the most persistent of our large animals, and the best fitted to survive. It neither bawls nor bugles to attract its enemies, it can not be called to a sportsman, like the moose, and it sticks to its timber with rare and commendable closeness. When it sees a strange living thing walking erect, it does not stop to stare and catch soft-nosed bullets, but dashes away in quest of solitude.

The worst shooting that I ever did or saw done at game was at running white-tailed deer, in the Montana river bottoms.

For the reasons given, the white-tail exists and persists in a hundred United States localities from which all other big game save the black bear have been exterminated. For example, in our Adirondacks the moose were exterminated years and years ago, but the beloved wilderness called the "North Woods" still is populated by about 20,000 deer, and about 8,000 are killed annually. The deer of Maine are sufficiently numerous that in 1909 a total of 15,879 were killed. With some a.s.sistance from the thin sprinkling of moose and caribou, the deer of Maine annually draw into that state, for permanent dedication, a huge sum of money, variously estimated at from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000. In spite of heavy slaughter, and vigorous attempts at extermination by over-shooting, the deer of northern Michigan obstinately refuse to be wiped out.

There is, however, a large group of states in which this species has been exterminated. The states comprising it are Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and adjacent portions of seven other states.

As if to shame the people of Iowa, a curious deer episode is recorded.

In 1885, W.B. Cuppy, of Avoca, Iowa, purchased five deer, and placed them in a paddock on his 600-acre farm. By 1900 they had increased to 32 head; and then one night some one kindly opened the gate of their enclosure, and gave them the freedom of the city. Mr. Cuppy made no effort to capture them, possibly because they decided to annex his farm as their habitat. When a neighbor led them with a bait of corn to their owner's door, he declined to impound them, on the ground that it was unnecessary.

By 1912, those deer had increased to 400, and the portion of this story that no one will believe is this: they spread all through the suburbs and hinterland farms of Avoca, and _the people not only failed to a.s.sa.s.sinate all of them and eat them, but they actually killed only a few, protected the rest, and made pets of many!_ Queer people, those men and boys of Avoca. Nearly everywhere else in the world that I know, that history would have been ended differently. Here in the East, 90 per cent of our people are like the Avocans, but the other 10 per cent think only of slaying and eating, sans mercy, sans decency, sans law. Now the State of Iowa has taken hold, to capture some of those deer, and set them free in other portions of the state.

Elsewhere I shall note the quick and thorough success with which the white-tailed deer has been brought back in Vermont, Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, and southern New York.

No state having waste lands covered with brush or timber need be without the ubiquitous white-tailed deer. Give them a semblance of a fair show, and they will live and breed with surprising fecundity and persistence.

If you start a park herd with ten does, soon you will have more deer than you will know how to dispose of, unless you market them under a Bayne law, duly tagged by the state. In close confinement this species fares rather poorly. In large preserves it does well, but during the rutting season the bucks are to be dreaded; and those that develop aggressive traits should be shot and marketed. This is the only way in which the deer parks of England are kept safe for unarmed people.

Dr. T.S. Palmer has taken much pains to ascertain the number of deer killed in the eastern United States. His records, as published in May, 1910, are as follows:

STATE 1908 1909 1910 Maine 15,000 15,879 15,000 New Hamps.h.i.+re (a) (a) (a) Vermont 2,700 4,736 3,649 New York 6,000 9,000 9,000 New Jersey (a) 120 Pennsylvania 500 500 800 Michigan 9,076 6,641 13,347 Wisconsin 11,000 6,000 6,000 Minnesota 6,000 6,000 3,147 West Virginia 107 51 49 Maryland 16 13 6 Virginia 207 210 224 North Carolina (a) (a) (a) South Carolina 1,000 (a) (a) Georgia (a) 367 369 Florida 2,209 2,021 1,526 Alabama 152 148 132 Mississippi 411 458 500 Louisiana 5,500 5,470 5,000 Ma.s.sachusetts 1,281 ------ ------ ------ Total 59,878 57,494 60,150

(a) No statistics available.

At this date deer hunting is not permitted at any time in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas,--where there are no wild deer; nor in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Tennessee or Kentucky. The long close seasons in Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut and southern New York have caused a great migration of deer into those once-depopulated regions,--in fact, right down to tide-water.

THE MULE DEER.--This will be the first member of the Deer Family to become extinct in North America outside of the protected portions of its haunts. Its fatal preference for open ground and its habit of pausing to stare at the hunter have been, and to the end will be, its undoing.

Possibly there are now two of these deer in the United States and British Columbia for every 98 that existed forty years ago, but no more.

It is a deer of the bad lands and foothills, and its curiosity is fatal.

The number of sportsmen who have hunted and killed this fine animal in its own wild and picturesque bad-lands is indeed quite small. It has been four-fifths exterminated by the resident hunter and ranchman, and to-day is found in the Rocky Mountain region most sparingly. Ten years ago it seemed right to hunt the so-called Rocky Mountain "black-tail" in northwestern Montana, because so many deer were there it did not seem to spell extermination. Now, conditions have changed. Since last winter's great slaughter in northwestern Montana, of 11,000 hungry deer, the species has been so reduced that it is no longer right to kill mule deer anywhere in our country, and a universal close season for five years is the duty of every state which contains that species.

THE REAL BLACK-TAILED DEER, of the Pacific coast, (_Odocoileus columbia.n.u.s_) is, to most sportsmen of the Rocky Mountains and the East actually less known than the okapi! Not one out of every hundred of them can recognize a mounted head of it at sight. It is a small, delicately-formed, delicately-antlered understudy of the big mule deer, and now painfully limited in its distribution. It is _the_ deer of California and western Oregon, and it has been so ruthlessly slaughtered that today it is going fast. As conditions stand to-day, and without a radical change on the part of the people of the Pacific coast, this very interesting species is bound to disappear. It will not be persistent, like the white-tailed deer, but in the heavy forests, it will last much longer than the mule deer.

My information regarding this deer is like the stock of specimens of it in museum collections,--meager and unsatisfactory. We need to know in detail how that species is faring to-day, and what its prospects are for the immediate future. In 1900, I saw great piles of skins from it in the fur houses of Seattle, and the sight gave me much concern.

THE CARIBOU, GENERALLY.--I think it is not very difficult to forecast the future of the Genus _Rangifer_ in North America, from the logic of the conditions of to-day. Thanks to the splendid ma.s.s of information that has been acc.u.mulated regarding this group, we are able to draw certain conclusions. I think that the caribou of the Canadian Barren Grounds and northeastern Alaska will survive in great numbers for at least another century; that the caribou herds of Newfoundland will last nearly as long, and that in fifty years or less all the caribou of the great northwestern wilderness will be swept away.

The reasons for these conclusions are by no means obscure, or farfetched.

In the first place, the barren-ground caribou are to-day enormously numerous,--undoubtedly running up into millions. It can not be possible that they are being killed faster than they are breeding; and so they must be increasing. Their food supply is unlimited. They are protected by two redoubtable champions,--Jack Frost and the Mosquito. Their country never will contain a great human population. The natives are so few in number, and so lazy, that even though they should become supplied with modern firearms, it is unlikely that they ever will make a serious impression on the caribou millions. The only thing to fear for the barren-ground caribou throngs is disease,--a factor that is beyond human prediction.

It is reasonably certain that the Barren Grounds never will be netted by railways,--unless gold is discovered over a wide area. The fierce cold and hunger, and the billions of mosquitoes of the Barren Grounds will protect the caribou from the wholesale slaughter that "civilized" man joyously would inflict--if he had the chance.

The caribou thousands of Newfoundland are fairly accessible to sportsmen and pot-hunters, but at the same time the colonial government can protect them from extermination if it will. Already much has been done to check the reckless and wicked slaughter that once prevailed. A bag limit of three bull caribou per annum has been fixed, which is enforced as to non-residents and sportsmen, but in a way that is much too "American" it is often ignored by residents in touch with the game. For instance, the guide of a New York gentleman whom I know admitted to my friend that each year he killed "about 25" caribou for himself and his family of four other persons. He explained thus: "When the inspector comes around, I show him two caribou hanging in my woodshed, but back in the woods I have a little shack where I keep the others until I want them."

The real sportsmen of the world never will make the slightest perceptible impression on the caribou of Newfoundland. For one thing, the hunting is much too tame to be interesting. If the caribou of that Island ever are exterminated, it will be strictly by the people of Newfoundland, themselves. If the government will tighten its grip on the herds, they need never be exterminated.

The caribou of New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario are few and widely scattered. Unless carefully conserved, they are not likely to last long; for their country is annually penetrated in every direction by armed men, white and red. There is no means by which it can be proven, but from the number of armed men in those regions I feel sure that the typical woodland caribou species is being shot faster than it is breeding. The sportsmen and naturalists of Canada and New Brunswick would render good service by making a close and careful investigation of that question.

The caribou of the northwestern wilderness are in a situation peculiarly their own. They inhabit a region of naked mountains and _thin_ forests, wherein they are conspicuous, easily stalked and easily killed. Nowhere do they exist in large herds of thousands, or even of many hundreds.

They live in small bands of from ten to twenty head, and even those are far apart. The region in which they live is certain to be thoroughly opened up by railways, and exploited. Fifty years from now we will find every portion of the now-wild Northwest fairly accessible by rail. The building of the railways will be to the caribou--and to other big game--the day of doom. In that wild, rough region, no power on earth,--save that which might be able to deprive _all_ the inhabitants and all visitors of firearms,--can possibly save the game outside of a few preserves that are diligently patroled.

The big game of the northwest region, in which I include the interior of Alaska, _will go_! It is only a question of time. Already the building of the city of Fairbanks, and the exploitation of the mining districts surrounding it, have led to such hara.s.sment and slaughter of the migrating caribou that the great herd which formerly traversed the Tanana country once a year has completely changed its migration route, and now keeps much farther north. The "crossing" of the Yukon near Eagle City has been abandoned. A hundred years hence, the northwestern wilderness will be dotted with towns and criss-crossed with railways; but the big game of it will be gone, except in the preserves that are yet to be made. This will particularly involve the caribou, moose, and mountain sheep of all species, which will be the first to go. The mountain goat and the forest bears will hold out longer than their more exposed neighbors of the treeless mountains.