Game Management: A New Field for Science

In this brief essay, written for Scientific American in 1932 but never published, Leopold introduces many of the ideas that would thereafter appear conspicuously in his work, particularly the idea that game was best promoted by providing good habitat and letting nature do the rest. It was an idea familiar in other countries and cultures but not yet known in the United States and nowhere practiced with the ecological rigor that Leopold would bring to bear. In this essay, Leopold was already criticizing "modern" methods of "slick and clean" agriculture, which stripped farm fields of wildlife cover and food, and calling for wide-ranging, practical experiments to determine which land treatments did and did not promote game. When he wrote this essay, Leopold apparently thought that "slight modifications" in farming practices would suffice to yield abundant farm game and that producing game could be "an economic move for the farmer." He later realized that the needed changes were far greater and the economics less appealing.

THE FLOOD of science which has inundated the affairs of everyday life has, like any other swift current, exhibited certain backwashes or eddies. For a long time one of these "slow spots" was agriculture—the art of producing crops of domesticated plants and animals. There is still another "slow spot" which has just begun to feel the impetuous onset of the scientific method. This is game management—the art of producing crops of wild animals for recreational use.

The "best" game crop is of course that which has produced itself, without human aid or interference. It is increasingly evident, however, that in settled countries the entire lack of human aid means the ultimate obliteration of wild game, and also the obliteration of the various field sports and recreations involved in its pursuit.

Some kinds of game can, of course, be confined and artificially propagated, but the costs per head are high, while the product, even after release to the fields and woods, lacks "that something" which the American sportsman demands in his quarry. Hence artificial propagation, while an invaluable source of "seed stock," is not by itself a sufficient answer to the question of game shortage.

Wild animals, under ideally favorable conditions, increase with incredible rapidity. Is there not some way in which a part of the tremendous "breeding potential" can be realized—some way in which, by increasing the wild survival, an abundant annual crop of wild game can be restored?

To search for an answer to this question, some of the industries affected by the decline in the game supply have financed a "Game Survey." A modern Solomon might say "of the making of surveys there is no end," but label it what you will, this Survey is an attempt to appraise the chances for game restoration in America. It has so far examined a block of eight states in the upper Mississippi Valley. A report of its findings has been recently published.

The fundamental reason for game scarcity in this region, the report says, is a new entity without a name. A name for it has been borrowed from the physicist and the electrical engineer. It is "environmental resistance." The meaning is this: "Slick and clean" agriculture has removed the game food and cover, and thus increased the resistance which the environment offers to natural increase. Hence a lesser fraction of the breeding potential is realized, hence game is decreasing.

A sample of the evidence on which the findings of the Game Survey are based is the analysis of quail "density" (population per unit area) in various states. A quail census was made of nearly 400 sample ranges, each about the size of an ordinary farm, and the density of each computed by dividing the quail population by the area. A map of these densities shows low abundance to prevail in the prairie farming regions, whether shot or unshot, and especially where farming custom has decreed the removal of hedge fences and fencerows which serve as quail cover. The map shows high densities to prevail in the semifarmed Ozark foothills, and along the riverbreaks of the prairie states, where brushy woodlots, draws, and fencerows are still found, but where grain is also available for winter food. Low densities, on the other hand, prevail in the high Ozarks, where there is endless cover but little grain.

The conclusion indicated is that environmental resistance to quail increase is least where agriculture methods happen to provide food and cover in close juxtaposition, but that the resistance rises where either factor gets "out of balance" with the other.

The same "law" is apparent from an historical study of food and cover changes on a single farm through a long period of time. The Report cites the Phil M. Smith farm in Missouri (see diagram) which, in 1923, supported over 200 quail. At that time it was a "backward" farm, with plenty of brushy draws, hedges, and an ungrazed woodlot. For the next five years its owner, who had just graduated from an agricultural college, subjected it to the process of "modernization." As the livestock, brush-grubbing, and fence-clearing on this farm increased, the quail decreased. In 1929 less than half the original quail population remained. The Report says:

There has undoubtedly been a large increase in the sale value of the farm, due to the enhanced working capital of livestock, fertility, and pasture area.

The question is, however, whether this enhanced value of the farm as a productive agricultural unit could not have been attained without so heavy a sacrifice of its game-producing capacity.

There can be no absolute yes or no answer to this question. The answer is a matter of degree.

The question is statewide, because thousands of farmers are doing, or will eventually do, the same thing. A powerful and extremely effective machinery is maintained in each county at governmental expense to hasten the process, and to show the farmer how. Could not this same machinery show him how to conserve at least a part of his game- producing capacity, if he cares to do so for either pleasure or profit?

To illustrate concretely what is meant by "conserving game-producing capacity" on an improved farm, the...