Wildlife Conservation History In Pennsylvania: Part 1

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- Hi, Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

The topic of this video is the History of Wildlife Conservation in Pennsylvania.

I'm joined by Joe Kosack, and Joe is with me today because when I think of people who know just about everything about that history the early history and the later history of wildlife conservation in Pennsylvania, it's Joe.

Joe was an employee with the Pennsylvania Game Commission as an information specialist for over 30 years.

He's got an incredible wealth of knowledge.

He's an author of several books on the history of conservation, and we'll talk about the early years of wildlife conservation history in this video.

And then in the later video, we'll talk about the 1900s up to today.

- William Penn arrives in Pennsylvania, 1682.

Native Americans had been here a long time before that, but Penn comes in and they settled in the Philadelphia area and slowly but surely, civilization starts to move out.

Now, Penn had a rule.

He wanted to have one acre of forest saved for every four acres of land cleared, but the forest disappeared pretty quickly.

Audubon Road in the 1800s already of taking a ride north up to the Jim Thorpe area and recognizing immediately how much of the forest was gone and how much that saddened him.

What did we have for wildlife?

We know there were deer, we know there were elk.

You gotta figure there were wolves because a year after Penn settled, we had a bounty on 'em.

So as people immigrate from the Philadelphia area trappers kind of lead the way, pursuing beaver.

Trappers went out using the skills that they had developed from watching Native Americans, they started trapping.

The further they went, the more important it became to have trading posts.

Through those trading posts, towns start to appear, villages start to appear, and slowly but surely, Penn's woods start to become settled.

As Penn's woods become settled, white-tailed deer, elk start to disappear.

At one point, it is believed that elk came pretty close to the city of Philadelphia.

Bears were also pursued because bears had a problem eating livestock.

Same with wolves.

They had that same issue.

And wolves and bears start to become in short supply.

And as those natural resources start to disappear, civilization moves further to get closer to where there are good supplies of white-tailed deer and some of the other animals in the forest.

- Joe, let me stop you right there and ask a question or two.

So were there any regulations at the time?

Was there any restriction of the number of pelts they could take or number of deer they could take or the time of year?

- When market hunting started because civilization was becoming too large for what was available in American livestock to feed the people that were there, hunters started to take larger numbers of wildlife.

There was a game law in the 1600s yet, and it really regulated only not taking deer when they were for lack of a better word, in spots or when they were fawns.

But other than that, you could really hunt deer from July to January and there wouldn't have been a problem.

- And no limit on the number you could kill?

- No, there was no limit.

And hunters are out there.

They're jacklighting for deer.

They're hunting over salt, they're using hounds.

There's passenger pigeons.

In fact, passenger pigeons were in such supply then, it is believed they could have equaled at least one third of the bird population in North America.

Passenger pigeons were another source of food at that point.

They used nets, they used clubs.

They used long poles to poke squabs out of their nest.

So when civilization started, it was basically bows and arrows, clubs, flintlocks, that was about all people had at their disposal, so they were always looking for ways to get closer to wildlife.

In waterfowl, we were spring hunting waterfowl.

Waterfowl were pretty much taken whenever people could get close enough to them.

And in the earlier days, it wasn't as easy to take a lot of waterfowl.

We're talking very primitive arms to do that.

But as civilization advances, so does technology.

And along the lines of that flintlock, they developed a small cannon, which was called a punt gun.

And that punt gun could shoot and take out anywhere from 20 to 100 ducks at one time because it was just like a giant shotgun blast.

Other things that started to disappear, of course, wolves were persecuted, mountain lions were also in trouble.

And you get into the latter 1800s and these big predators start to dry up.

But along with them, big game is disappearing.

Bears are becoming tougher to get, elk are gone.

So the word game itself has applied to everything from robins and on up.

Robins were being shot, flickers, woodpeckers and they'd use that meat for spaghetti meat.

Whatever people would get off of the landscape, they were taking.

There were laws on the books.

Pennsylvania actually started to protect, they called them insectivorous birds but let's just refer to 'em as songbirds.

Songbirds were persecuted for a long time in Pennsylvania.

But by the 1840s when people started to notice some of those birds that they really enjoyed hearing and seeing, as they started to disappear, the legislature started to pass laws first on a county and a township level, but ultimately to protect birds in the 1870s across Pennsylvania.

However, that was songbirds and the birds like hawks, owls, they remained persecuted.

In the 1880s, the legislature approved a law that was referred to as the Scalp Act.

It placed a 50 cent bounty on everything from weasels to foxes and hawks to owls.

And the Scalp Act started to take these predators out.

But what they learned was those predators weren't really part of the problem.

Worse, those birds and other animals that they were taking out had a very positive effect on agriculture because they took pests out.

So in the long run, it was a complete waste of money and the Scalp Act was something that should have never happened.

- Public started to realize that things were going wrong.

So tell us a little bit about that and some of the things that led up to the beginning of a game commission.

- Okay, so in the late 1800s, what we had left was small game hunting and even that was running in the trouble, so people started asking for something more than constables to enforce the game laws that did exist in Pennsylvania.

The laws were there, they just had nobody to enforce them.

And a young organization at that time was called the Pennsylvania Sportsman's Association.

They were out at a quarry area in Pennsylvania.

They started petitioning legislators to do something more for them.

They believed that the laws that were on the books weren't getting it done.

We needed something that other states were doing, a game commission.

The Game Commission comes on board in 1895 and it's a slow process.

The Game Commission is created and asked to live off of $200 a year in a legislative appropriation that could only be used for writing materials and mailing.

- Okay, so I'm gonna stop you right there.

And that's the end of this video, folks.

Thanks very much for listening.

Watch for the second part.