Wildlife Conservation History In Pennsylvania: Part 2

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- Hi, Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

This video is the second part on the history of wildlife conservation in Pennsylvania.

And again, my guest here is Joe Kosack.

Joe is an author on Pennsylvania Conservation History, wildlife history, specifically.

So, Joe, let's talk about the early days of the Game Commission.

- The Game Commission started working with legislators to get the laws that were needed to better protect wildlife.

People were pretty fond of hunting and trapping the way they did, and things like hunting deer with hounds over Salt Lakes, jack-lighting at night.

These were things that had to go.

It wasn't an easy fight, it was an uphill battle, but slowly, but surely, they start to make progress and get laws on the books.

The next thing that they were after, of course, deer, nothing is more important among Pennsylvanians than deer.

So they started to import deer from Maine and a bunch of other states.

I think in total, the deer came from 16 different states over the period that the agency stocked.

So we're putting deer in the landscape, but now we have to protect them.

So along comes the Buck Law of 1907, and it's a very important piece of legislation, because it protects antlerless deer.

Of course, the best way to build the deer population is by protecting antlerless deer.

We get that in place.

Hunters like it.

The deer population starts to grow, but the Game Commission still needs help policing sportsmen that are out there.

So it starts asking for a hunting license and their states had 'em.

Pennsylvania didn't at this point.

Again, it was a long battle.

So we get that in place, and now the Game Commission has its own form of revenue and that's a big plus for the agency.

- [Sanford] And that was a $1 license?

And so- - Correct.

- You know, in today's money, that would be a lot more, but it really helped to fund the Game Commission to employ people, especially wardens at the time, game wardens, to police the kinds of unethical, illegal activities that were going on.

But they also did a lot to set up preserves.

Not like today's Game Lands, they were actually areas that no one was allowed to go into, right?

- They had approximately a dozen preserves before we started getting into the Game Lands business.

These preserves were set up with a big hunting area in them, but also a strand of wire toward the interior where hunters could not enter.

It was a setup that we continued to use when we started to buy Game Lands.

We received that permission from the legislature in 1919, and we bought our first Game Lands in 1920.

Game Lands were critically important for hunters because at that time, finding a place to hunt that had game was pretty tough.

And the Game Commission was doing all it could to bring wildlife back, but some of the things that it did back then weren't necessarily the best direction to go.

So we would put stuff on the landscape, didn't realize, at that time, whether it would take or whether it wouldn't.

We just put it out there.

Things like Mexican quail, we brought them in here by the thousands and they didn't take, they just couldn't acclimate the Pennsylvania.

It was during the same period, 1913, we got elk from Yellowstone National Park, and we put those elk throughout the state.

They didn't last there either.

The problem was, the landscape wasn't right for elk.

So we put elk out there with the intention of hunting them, and we do through the '20s.

But by 1930, we realized there's hardly any elk out there anymore.

From the early 1900s till the late teens, we are stocking deer.

And that helped in some cases, if for nothing else, to provide some genetic viability to ensure there wasn't a lot of inbreeding in a small population.

But the thing that really pushed the deer herd was the Buck Law of 1907.

So we're not shooting antlerless deer and those deer are reproducing sometimes at a rate of doubling their size from one year to the next.

And it didn't take long.

Probably by the 1920s we're already starting to have problems with our deer herd, because it's starting to cause crop damage, problems consuming the understory of our forest.

But, deer, having this better habitat, in those young forests and being protected, soon created problems for Pennsylvania.

The first full-time executive director of the Game Commission at that time in the teens was Joseph Kalbfus.

And the last year that he served, he said, "Thank God, I won't be around in another five years doing this job, because there's going to be hell to pay." So we're having problems with deer and it gets to the point where we need to shoot antlerless deer, but hunters have been protecting them and they don't wanna do it.

They just wanna shoot bucks.

So eventually, they have to close buck hunting and just have antlerless deer hunting.

And there were a lot of problems with that.

Sportsmen, newspapers, legislators, they came after the agency.

They were unhappy with this.

And what's important to remember from that is, deer have always been the lightning rod of wildlife management.

And although we get things straightened out to some degree, as we get into the 50s, this problem occurs again.

- Joe, we've talked about a number of different things.

Bring us more up to date, at least into the 50s, 60s, and there on.

- Penn State starts to look more closely at bear.

A gentleman by the name of Professor Lindsay, started to take basic information, because we didn't have that on bears at that time.

And through his work, he raises a giant concern for the bears.

(birds chirping) And the Game Commission takes notice.

In fact, it becomes so concerned about that resource.

It closes bears season three times in the 70s.

Toward the end of the 70s, Dr. Gary all comes on board and he does even greater research in the bears.

And one of the things that Gary did was he brought telemetry to bear management.

But it's through work like that that we started to get a handle on bears.

The same thing started to occur in the 80s for elk.

We believe, in the 80s, we may have been down to maybe 80 elk on the landscape.

And Dr. John George, also from Penn State, was involved with this baseline research that started to occur in elk.

Rawley Cogan comes on board in the early 90s.

Rawley is doing more telemetry work on elk.

So all this work starts to occur with elk and we start to get a better handle on them.

- Were there other species that the Game Commission worked on that maybe people don't realize the Game Commission helped to reestablish here in Pennsylvania?

- One of the species that Pennsylvania had some real problems with were wild turkeys.

In the 40s and into the 50s, Pennsylvania's turkey population was pretty much in the south central region of the state.

But to offset the lack of turkeys elsewhere, the Game Commission created a turkey farm, and it would release turkeys, and hunters were kind of okay with shooting stock turkeys.

But the Game Commission realized that the way to have a large turkey population was to have a wild turkey population.

So it started to do work to try and figure out how to build that population.

Trap and transfer became the way that we would do that.

It was something that also occurred with black bears, but both species benefited greatly from trap and transfer in areas where these bears and turkeys weren't.

They were released and as long as the habitat was good enough for 'em, these species held.

And turkeys end up in just about every county of the state through trap and transfer.

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As the Game Commission matures, the ranks of wildlife conservation officers, also known as district game protectors, today called game wardens, their ranks increase.

And we get laws on the books that make hunting safer and definitely more cognizant of what a population could withstand in a hunting season.

And hunters are on board with this.

They're okay, they wanna see more game of field.

So compared to the early years of the Game Commission when it was just trying to get animals on the landscape and to teach hunters the right way to hunt, it's like night and day.

By the latter 60s, we start to realize that hunters need a better form of education, and hunter education comes on board.

So with hunter education, we have a chance to reach every new hunter with fair share and other fair standards in hunting.

So we end up with a better educated and better informed hunter out on the landscape.

And that in the long run, helps to make hunting the wildlife management tool that it is today. (crickets chirping)

- Joe, I wanna thank you for joining me today.

It's been fascinating.

I know we've only scratched the surface, so to speak, of this history, (birds chirping) which is well-known by those that work in the Game Commission today.

And many of them lived through that history just like you did and saw a lot of great successes.

So thank you folks for listening.

And thank you, Joe for joining me today.