Centennial Mini-Histories of the Forest Service

Interest in wildlife was an important part of the conservation movement of the late 19th century. Although wildlife did not have the economic importance of other resources such as timber, forage, and water, nor did it capture the public's attention as much as efforts to preserve scenic waterfalls or geysers, wildlife (especially big game) was perhaps the most endangered resource of that period. Buffalo, deer, and elk were almost eliminated from the West and predator species (wolf, bear, and cougars) were becoming rare.

Upperclass reformers such as George Bird Grinnell, founder of Field and Stream magazine, and Theodore Roosevelt, a co-founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, were alarmed by the fate of big game in the Western States. When Roosevelt sponsored Gifford Pinchot for membership in the club, Pinchot was able to expand the notion of forest conservation to embrace the cause of big game protection. Yet, when the newly created Federal forest reserves were transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture in 1905, Gifford Pinchot as head of the Forest Services apparently did not see much of a relationship between national forest administration and wildlife. His emphasis on timber resources set the future tone of the agency.

Moreover, the agency had to be cautious about regulating game animals and birds on the forest reserves (which were renamed national forests in 1907), for fear of trampling States' rights and giving its western critics reason to disband the reserves. The policy of the Forest Service was to "cooperate with the game wardens of the State or Territory in which they serve..." according to the first book of directives issued by the agency in 1905 (The Use Book). Two years later, a provision in the Agricultural Appropriations Act of 1907 made it a law that "hereafter officials of the Forest Service shall, in all ways that are practicable, aid in the enforcement of the laws of the States or Territories with regard to...the protection of fish and game."

Although wildlife management was not formally included in the 1897 Forest Management (Organic) Act as the responsibility of the Forest Service, the agency helped pioneer the field of wildlife management and stimulated many of the States to begin or improve their own programs. Hunters and anglers were the largest group of recreationists visiting the national forests, so it was natural for the Forest Service to focus its attention on fish and game animals. Federal game refuges created on national forests to conserve wildlife were helpful in increasing populations of game animals, and these animals then could be hunted on adjacent lands. The growth of deer populations led to conflicts between hunters and ranchers. Recreational hunters wanted more game animals; ranchers, concerned with forage depletion wanted fewer. In the 1920's the Forest Service effort to reduce the overextended mule deer populations on the Grand Canyon Federal Game Preserve (Kaibab National Forest) went to the Supreme Court. The agency won a limited victory in 1924 when the court found that Forest Service employees could hunt excess game to "prevent property damage," that is, to protect the forage resource from overgrazing by deer.

It was there in the southwest that Aldo Leopold, who worked for the Forest Service from 1909 to 1928, developed his concept of wildlife management that led to the first textbook on game management in 1933. That same year he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin and began the first academic program in game management. While employed by the Forest Service, Leopold favored the eradication of predators as a step in bringing back big game populations, but after killing a wolf one day he realized the importance of predators in the natural balance of deer populations. In 1916 the Biological Survey was created in the Department of Agriculture (later becoming the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Department of Interior) to enforce the Migratory Bird Act, which was passed in 1913 to provide Federal protection to game and insect-eating birds. The Fish and Wildlife Service later took the lead in government predator control efforts.

Barry Locke was hired in 1929 as the first designated wildlife manager in the Forest Service, in the Intermountain Region. He left 2 years later to serve as director of the Izaak Walton League. The economic depression of the 1930's at first halted wildlife programs for lack of budgets. Later, the public works programs developed to provide employment included work in natural resources conservation, including wildlife habitat improvement. Much of this was done by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

By 1936, the year Dr. Homer Shantz became first director of wildlife management, 61 people were assigned to wildlife work in the Forest Service. The national forests in the Southeast grew rapidly in number during the Depression through Federal purchase of severely cut-over and eroded private lands. The management challenge for these lands was to make their recovering forests suitable places for wildlife. From this goal came the slogan: "Good timber management is good wildlife management."

Around the same time, in the Pacific Northwest, the Forest Service found that public concern for elk protection superseded demand for timber production. The Forest Service became involved in a lengthy battle with the Park Service over the management of Mt. Olympus National Monument, which was established in 1909 to protect the Roosevelt elk (named after President Theodore Roosevelt). Forest Service officials in the regional office and on the Olympic National Forest argued that the best use of the monument (then managed by the Forest Service) and surrounding National Forest System lands was to open the area to road construction and timber management, which would provide employment and recreation for the local population. The controversy came to a boil during the mid-1930's when the Forest Service and the Bureau of Biological Survey recommended that the elk population in the monument be reduced by shooting to prevent the animals from overgrazing and dying of disease and starvation. Citizens from the Seattle area were outraged, especially the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose wife was the daughter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Brant 1988). When Roosevelt visited the area in 1937, he decided to include the monument and adjacent National Forest System lands in a new Olympic National Park. In a 1983 study of the conflict, Ben Twight writes that it was inevitable given the organizational values of the Forest Service. Elsewhere in the 1930's, wildlife management in the agency enjoyed success. The deer recovery program on the Pisgah National Forest made an especially noteworthy contribution to the region.

In the 1940's, agency involvement in wildlife was reduced following the improvement of State fish and game programs and the rise of timber harvesting on national forests. Wildlife managers found lack of funds to be a persistent problem, and other problems surfaced as well. Squirrel hunters in the Southern Region, upset over loss of oak trees, exclaimed in 1956: "You kill the hardwoods, we'll kill the pine." In the 1960's turkey hunters on the Monongahela National Forest (Eastern Region) complained of clearcuts in their favorite hunting areas. The result was a lawsuit and passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976. This law required the Forest Service to conduct its planning to ensure a diversity of plant and animal species and thus is responsible for the rapid increase in wildlife personnel in the late 1970's.

The Forest Service was not created to protect wildlife, but its rangers found game animals on forests and realized that if they did not manage the animals, nobody else would. Thus the agency became an early leader in the field of game management. Its efforts were limited because of conflicts with States over jurisdiction, lack of explicit congressional mandate until the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960, and subordination of wildlife first to range and then to timber management. The situation remained somewhat unchanged until the passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The Forest Service caught up with this new reality with publication of Wildlife habitats in managed forests: the Blue Mountains of Oregon and Washington (1979), edited by Jack Ward Thomas. It was the first agency book to provide "concrete direction for the management of game and non-game species alike" (Roth 1989).

References

Brant, Irving. 1988. Adventures in conservation with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing.

Roth, Dennis M. 1989. "A history of wildlife management in the Forest Service. Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service History Unit. [Unpublished manuscript.]

Thomas, Jack Ward. 1979. Wildlife habitats in managed forests: the Blue Mountains of Oregon and Washington. Agric. Handb. 553. Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service.

Twight, Ben W. 1983. Organizational values and political power: the Forest Service versus the Olympic National Park. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.