Imagining Wildlife Abundance.

Remember this:  Always keep this in mind. We are always competing with wildlife. We are always competing with each other.

I like to compare and contrast.  I also like to read old books because no harm ever came from reading a book. This gives me a better sense of the topics and subtopics I tend to meditate on.  Various points in time especially because you can evaluate the specifically different events on a timeline and see just how much in denial or ‘the dark’ you possibly could be living.

I have recently become enamored with this mental vision of life on the North American continent before immigrants started their Exodus from Europe and other places, even if it was based on general curiosity, greed, religious persecution, or being exiled based on law-breaking.

Most of the books I have been reading are accounts from the 1700s or the 1800s. My readings are filled with articulated journalists that wrote honest non-biased (?) accounts of that particular moment in time.

In the current century, much of these honest commentaries are tossed to the wayside because certain ethnic groups complained competing ethnic group were writing a history for them that wasn’t true. What are people to do? Say we know nothing then make a story/history up for the sake of using another fabrication to uplift a group? A lie is a lie no matter who tells it or for what reason.

You are probably wondering what exactly does this have to do with hunting. If you have done any online observation of the coverage on hunter’s guilt in regards to old timers shooting buffalo or over-killing species to the point of decimation: it’s kind of along those lines.

My curiosity is the amount of game that was actually available because I can’t seem to picture this number in my head based on the reports in old documentation. Really it is mind-blowing when you compare it to recent numbers and the wordage on explaining the current population of species as ‘healthy’.

I was reading an account on the passenger pigeon from Charles Mann’s book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.  After reading the passages on the passenger pigeon you could easily visualize a snippet from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. In summary it stated how the passenger pigeon was so plentiful the people living at the time would hold hunting parties to kill them and feast.  To quote Mann’s text it is stated, “In Haudenosaunee lore, the birds represented nature’s generosity, a species literally selected by the spirit world to nourish humankind.” (Mann p. 355) Given there could have been some revolving environment or ecological disturbance that made the conditions right for the passenger pigeon to populate in large numbers it does make one think. If the passenger pigeon could grow in number with lack of human habitation encroaching on their environment, what about the other species of huntable animal? 

I read on where it was stated the number of passenger pigeons actually exploded after the immigrants came. I then thought, maybe it was because there were a wider variety of agricultural goods such as whole grains like wheat, barley, oats, and other vegetables. Hence the change in the passenger pigeon diet and the readily available seeds increased the numbers excluding breeding season trends. I looked for accounts of a passenger pigeon ‘mass extinction’. Something to the magnitude of bird littering the ground dead would make even the discerning Pilgrim carving his Thanksgiving turkey take notice. I found none unless my researching skills are lacking or the information is locked away in some weathered disintegrating journal.

The passenger pigeon’s story ends with that bird species becoming extinct. There lingers a very questionable belief that indigenous people and immigrants didn’t hunt them to extinction. The last bird died in 1941. Here you have a huntable bird that went from being bountiful to being a poster child (as is the bison) for generational hunting guilt that happened many years ago.

I was still imagining ‘wilderness abundance’ as it was called. In the ongoing drama of life, where does man stand on the stage of the natural world versus his fellow players?

That place man stands is one of subtle competition even from the employ of managers of limited aspects of Nature. Man cannot control a hurricane or a tornado but man can control X amount of acres and what lives or grows on that acreage.

In times past, indigenous people or immigrants competed for food (both plant and animal) on the natural landscape with wild game. One would have to imagine the Scales of Life. Man hunted wildlife to eat them but lowered the number of competitors for natural growing food. There was also agricultural based food.

Agriculture was in the New World. Corn was one of the main cash crops for ancient man. Indigenous farmers probably practiced the same habit of discouraging wildlife from eating the crops they hoped to store for the winter.

I see this now where farmers will kill off a herd of deer to safeguard their harvest with the mentality that there are deer elsewhere for people to hunt.

With this view of human competition with wildlife for food, because space was not an issue, it would seem how did it play in with my visualization of wildlife abundance?

As to my original obsession with herd numbers I read that the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton tossed out these estimated numbers:

·         60,000,000 Bison

·         40,000,000 Pronghorn

·         10,000,000 Elk

·         10,000,000 Mule Deer

·         2,000,000 Mountain Sheep

Can you imagine standing on a slope glassing for something respectable to shoot at and seeing that many of one species in one place? How would you feel if you didn’t have to walk around for a whole week, then go home empty handed with no luck, no money, and no meat to eat? Could you imagine what a hunter, from back then, would do or say if he were to come to the present time and have to live the way we do? He would probably have a nervous breakdown and think he was in a hell that didn’t exist yet. What would this hunter of old say if he were forced to watch a hunting show on television?  I can only laugh with the thought he would sit on a rock to cry, then kill himself from disappointment and grief but that is being dramatic.

If a hunter from today went back in time, I am sure they would have to take a diaper. If that hunter saw 40,000,000 pronghorn, he would lose all bodily function and make a mess of himself where he stood.

I watch the Sportsman Channel for one show, otherwise I am not watching. You can surf the channel there to peruse a pronghorn show. I watched one where the hunter sat in an outbuilding near a watering hole. He only saw 2-3 pronghorns but finally killed one returning to drink. How do you think that hunter would feel if he were sitting in his little outhouse with 10,000 pronghorn running around him? That would probably kill the fun of it because you would think which one do I chose. Again you could be thinking, “Oh my God. There are so many I can kill a bushel and a peck. It wouldn’t matter.”

Mann throughout his book, lobbies the fact the early North American continent was a series of manipulated landscapes by indigenous people for the management of wildlife habitat with respect to their mutual benefit. Even though agriculture was somewhat different from European farming, the management of wildlife away from farming locations seemed to be a trend by archaeological data.

Here you might have specific wild game the indigenous people would hunt locally to discourage competition with wild game that would eat their crops. They would kill off local populations and encourage those same populations further away to propagate. Given the concept of space and time, these wildlife populations would not be very far away due to the concern of meat waste, time or effort. When a person is trying to survive you take all aspects into consideration.

I then tried to wrap my mind around the concept of human populations, industry, and civilization.

Everyone knows prior to Columbus and his sailing ship of jollies, other people had indeed traveled to North America. DeSoto and his merry men documents vast amounts of indigenous people, cities, but not vast herds of animals. A different explorer documents large numbers of wild game but no people.

Both spread European diseases. I read in one account that the indigenous people held mass burnings to stop the spread by eliminating the dead body instead of performing ritual burial or rite.

If the indigenous hunter was no longer on the landscape then the prey he chased would explode in mass numbers such as the bison. The concept here is because of much earlier European contact, the spread of disease, and the effect of indigenous death on hunting herds made them increase. When the following wave of immigrants boated over viola: you have epic populations to stand in awe of because there was no one to curtail them.

Comparing the introduction of European agriculture that possibly made the passenger pigeon populations explode, killing off the indigenous culture made other huntable species increase as well. Life is always a delicate balance and you never know what is going to turn the tide or tip the scale. Truly Life does hang in a delicate balance.

Throughout reading the passages the writer reiterates the idea that because of the lack of wild game bone remnants left in indigenous homestead the actually number of specie populations were questionable. Where there really that many? If so where was the evidence?

Back to the concept of human populations, industry, and civilization, hunters look back on these events as reminders on what not to do.

In respect to governmental agencies reporting herd numbers as healthy, if you went by previous herd numbers or observations documented in history you would think current information to be anorexic if not misleading as a positive thing. Given this information is based on space and division of limited numbers across that space with regard to competition.

I also took into consideration how much of the information documented from antiquity could be a good salesmen spreading the word to inspire adventurous travel for the contemplation of making a fortune. If the antiquated adventurer who is really in the business of making money, finds a spot to start a fabulous new life for all at his behest, would he not spin that story with the most positive description he could muster? Later when people show up in droves then have to eat their friends/family on the Donner Pass that would-be instigator is long gone. I have read many accounts of non-descript historical women, who thought they were coming to a new life only to become depressed because it wasn’t what it was made out to be.

In closing, my thoughts linger in my mind on a place that is void of man-made structures, property lines, human ownership and vast landscapes with wildlife inhabiting places yet unburdened by man’s footstep, presence, or influence in number.

Can you imagine that kind of wilderness abundance?

Could North America ever return to that ideal? The lone archaic hunter standing on a slope high above a massive herd wondering where was he going to start and not worrying about his impact in the greater scheme of things.

As I reflect it would be nice to be just a regular person with that same hope.

Written by: Angelia Y Larrimore

~Courtesy of AOFH~

Sources Cited:
Mann, Charles. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York, NY: Random House LLC, (2006).pp. 355. Print.