CBS Sunday Morning - disappointment

I was growing up in South Louisiana back in the day when alligators were on the threaten or endangered list. We use to go frogging quite often and alligators are very easily spotted at night as they have red eyes and nothing else does. We would see hundreds if not thousands of them every night back then. How could an endangered animal be observed in those numbers on a relatively small area (less then 1/4 of a section)? Really there was no where I went, fishing or just playing out in the swamp as a kid that I did not regularly observe alligators. You couldn't even get to where most of the gators would have been back in the those days without a marsh buggy or an airboat, and there just weren't many of those around in those days, and they weren't permitted by the land companies that own and control most of the marsh down there. That's before they had outboard mudmotors. We had mudboats; boats that ran on car engines with a radiator. They were pretty limited to where they could go too. All this was the mid to late 70's.

Alligators were listed as threatened, but they in all actuality, as far was we could see, were quite plentiful at least in Louisiana. What has made them even more plentiful today (and often a nuisance) isn't that hunting has been cut down, as there was no legal hunting in those days. What happened is the farming of gators so that the eggs are taken out of the wild, hatched, and then a certain percentage of the juvenile gators are returned to the wild once they reach a size where they are not likely to be predated on by anything but man, and so we're dramatically increasing the survival rate of the young ones.

How anyone back then could have thought that they could put a number on the population of alligators that would have been anywhere near reality is beyond me. Today with the animal being of such commercial importance, and with them flying over the marsh in helicopters marking as many nests and harvesting the eggs, the number is likely to be closer to reality. Based on my own personal experience, I have no doubt that back in the 70's they were way, way off.

Ed.
 
Jeff~

Seeing the video version of Sartore's comments was certainly part of the experience - especially when he mentioned hunting for the THIRD time - over a picture of a modern-day pheasant hunter - looked liked a page out of the Cabela's catalog. Using the word "poachers" instead of hunters could have clarified the message.

Also, I have my own bias. For 10 years with NYSDEC, I was the Chief of the Bureau of Habitat. I believe that the best dollar anyone can spend on fish and wildlife conservation is spent on protecting habitat - from a host of assaults. Habitat protection, if I recall correctly, was barely mentioned in the narrative.

BTW: Sorry the cold and ice truncated your season. Our season is later and colder than usual (up here in dairy country) but the rivers and creeks can offer some Mallards and Blacks.

All the best,

SJS
 
Steve:

I'm with you on habitat, habitat, habitat--and protecting intact high value habitat is a lot cheaper than restoring degraded habitat or managing marginal habitat for modest improvement in habitat value.

My duck hunting may be over, but I got out yesterday on the snowshoes and found enough deer sign in the woods near the house to make me think about chasing deer next year. I was hoping to find some areas with concentrations of snowshoe hare tracks for some winter hunts, but no such luck.
 
I agree Steve. The banding reports showed Mallards & Blacks as old as 30 with Canada's into their 30's. It not lack of breeding opportunities it's lack of habitat.
 
I do agree that hunting did have an impact, but there are a couple of nuances that I think make me more skeptical about Sartore's essay.

First, at the time in which the hunter was pictured with the whooping crane...it was probably legal. So, to use that picture is a bit disingenuous. Like showing a picture of Mom and Dad and the kids in the 1957 Chevy and saying they were bad parents because the children weren't in a car seat or wearing seat belts...

And, while we can talk about bison and passenger pigeons being "hunted", it was far more complicated than a bunch of "greedy" hunters. In the case of the buffalo, it was a triangle of railroad companies, the desire to remove a way of life from Native Americans (cut off a huge food/spiritual source, easier to control), and a market for hides. Passenger pigeons needed huge expanses of forested land to support their colonies...dynamite, poison, clearing, and hunting were all used. As a matter of fact, I don't know of another species singled out to that extent, except maybe buffalo. Both were targeted for eradication, far different than ducks, deer, cranes and other "plume" birds. Truthfully, the greatest excesses were NOT from people shooting for sustenance, or even sport, but to feed a commercial market...buffalo, the millinery trade, etc.

And, yes, honestly the "Victorian" hunters couldn't see an end to the resource. The sheer size of our country and its wealth of resources with a relatively small population blinded them. If the only limit is in your mind or what you can carry, what constitutes greed?

Even more modern hunters can remember when bluebills, widgeons, and pintails were 10-point ducks...can you imagine 10 pintails a day? I was on a hunt a few years back where four of us could have shot nothing BUT pintails...we had to try and cut the few mallards out of the flocks of pintails sailing past at 10 and 15 yards.

Yes, hunters can be greedy. Yes, there are still poachers in our society, and there will always be as long as a restaurant is willing to pay to get venison in the back door, or people pay huge sums of money for deer and elk racks, or...

But the ESA was about more than protecting from greedy hunters, and Sartore's essay didn't start with a picture of Lake Erie on fire. It started with a hunter and his presumably legally-shot game.
 
Rick, it probably was legal to shoot those two cranes, but wasn't that one of the things passage of the Endangered Species Act changed?

In any case, the defense that "what I did was legal" is fine for court, but there are lots of things that are legal and wrong. The folks who do them may not be guilty of a crime, but they should be subject to scrutiny. Shoot, we spend enough time on here debating mojos and water swatting--two completely legal acts under today's rules. In an earlier era, it was legal--and socially acceptable--to shoot species that were clearly near extinction. Here in Maine, woodland caribou went extinct around the turn of the 20th century. "Hunters" weren't trying to conserve them. They were trying to be the guy who got the last one. (To my knowledge Ted Roosevelt didn't get a caribou on his Maine hunting trip, but he chased one for a day and half before giving up.) And it wasn't just caribou (who probably succumbed as much to the loss of old growth forest as to hunting). We also pushed moose populations so low that hunting for them wasn't allowed here for most of the 20th century.

It's clear Sartore's essay rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and I'm a minority of one who wasn't offended by it. I completely agree that more emphasis on habitat and other factors would have been better. I just think it's important we don't give hunters a pass when we look at the causes of wildlife declines.
 
I'll agree with your last sentence entirely, and I guess I'll just say that they don't get a pass, they are far from the only cause, and they are some of the most vocal and physical advocates of wildlife, habitat and conservation out there.
 
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