Hunting: No End of Game

The pidgeons in such numbers we see fly That like a cloud they do make dark the sky; And in such multitudes are sometimes found, As that they cover both the trees and ground: He that advances near with one good shot, May kill enough to fill both spit and pot.

John Holme (1686) Hunters like to dream of what it must have been like in the old days, when herds of buffalo grazed the Western plains, when virgin glades were thick with elk and wild fowl. Game, they complain, is disappearing in the face of pollution, deforestation—and competition from the 17,999,999 other Nim-rods out there blazing away.

It is true enough that the passenger pigeon has been hunted to extinction (the last bird of that unfortunate species died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914), and the only buffalo most people see are on well-worn nickels. But even so, never in U.S. history has game been as bountiful—or as varied—as it is right now. As the 1967 fall season got under way last week, the U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife offered the welcome news that no fewer than 8,500,000 mallard ducks will take to the flyways this year. For those with a palate for venison, there are 16 million deer roaming the U.S. countryside. The 110 species of game that hunters can now lay their sights on include scores of creatures that their grandfathers never even heard of.

Civilized Deer. Gone are the days when brutish nature and greedy hunters combined to decimate American wildlife. In 1905, Elers Koch, a federal forest inspector, spent an entire month on a pack trip through Montana’s Sun River country and saw just one game animal in all that time—a scruffy mountain goat. “Today, if you want a deer or an antelope or a moose,” says Cliff Rumford, a Great Falls sporting-goods dealer, “you just go get one.”

The abundance is not only the result of official seasons, bag limits, stocking programs and predator controls; much of it is the animals’ own doing. Many species have learned to live all too comfortably with encroaching civilization.

“Deer are creatures that thrive in a disturbed environment,” says Ben Glading, a California game official. “It seems that the more man upsets the natural environment, the better the deer like it.” California, the nation’s most populous state, also supports the nation’s second biggest (behind Texas) deer herd—1,000,000. Pennsylvania has more deer today than when William Penn founded the colony. And in New York, where deer were extinct in 1915, the whitetail population is 400,000.

Wild fowl have been even more prolific. Although hunters bagged 3,000,000 mourning doves in California last year, the birds now number 20 million, up 50% in 50 years. Even the wild turkey, wariest of all game birds—and therefore one of the first harmed by the shrinking wilderness—is making a comeback: Pennsylvania’s turkey flock alone is estimated at 75,000.

Africa & Kashmir. Importation of foreign game has also played a big part in the burgeoning wildlife. In the Smoky Mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee, hunters can flush a European red stag or a spotted axis deer, whose native habitat is India. The descendants of 14 wild boars from Prussia, which escaped from a private preserve in 1920, roam by the thousands in the forests of North Carolina. New Mexico is not only home to the cottontail rabbit; it is the adopted residence of kudu from Africa and oryx from the Arabian desert.

The ring-necked pheasant was originally brought to the U.S. from China in 1881; it now is a permanent resident of 34 states, and its numbers are estimated at upwards of 80 million. Hungarian and chukar partridges from Europe and India thrive so well that stocking experiments are being conducted with the black francolin from Pakistan, the red jungle fowl from Kashmir, and the Himalayan snow cock.

With all that game, the only thing that stands between a hunter and the pot is his shooting. This year, according to the National Safety Council, at least 600 U.S. hunters will kill the wrong animals—themselves or other hunters.