Lessons in Wildlife Management
Initially , wildlife management in the United States was skewed heavily toward protection, particularly of game animals. For example, many wildlife managers and hunters believed that predators depressed deer and elk populations, and the only way to grow more deer and elk was to eliminate all large predators. As a result, at the start of the 20th century, antagonism toward most large carnivores was prevalent.
Multiple states, including Arizona, had aggressive programs that successfully removed many large predators from the ecological mix. Wolves were extirpated on the Kaibab Plateau, and all hunting of mule deer there was ceased. But rather than resulting in balanced, healthy deer herds on the Kaibab, mule deer numbers grew beyond what the habitat resources could sustain, the animals destroyed the habitat they depended on, and deer starved rather than flourished.
Hunters were able to bring the deer population into better balance with the habitat when deer hunting again opened on the Kaibab Plateau in 1929. A large, healthy herd of mule deer now inhabits the area.
The Aldo Leopold essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” is an accounting of hunting a wolf on the Kaibab plateau and the consequence of predator removal on the Kaibab deer populations.
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Video Transcript
Transcript for A Day in the Life
Speaker: The Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona can be treacherous, rugged, and remote. Still, early visionaries realized that this special place was worth protecting. Thirteen years before the Grand Canyon received National Park status, President Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon Game Preserve to conserve the unique flora and fauna that live on the plateau, especially the mule deer herd.
Over 100 years later, the wildlife in this area is still being protected—now by the Arizona Game and Fish Department and the wildlife manager assigned to the region.
Todd Buck, Arizona Game & Fish: In 1992, when I found out I was coming to the Kaibab—I had been awarded this district—a friend of mine that had gone through the academy with me told me I was going to the jewel of Arizona. And every time I go to work, I think about that statement that he made and just how accurate it was. I think the Kaibab’s an incredibly special place.
As a result, I’ve been here since I started, over 19 years now, with no plans to leave or go anywhere else.
Speaker: Game management in Arizona is a big job. And the men and women who take on that responsibility cover a lot of big territory within management units all across the state. The Kaibab Plateau is in Unit 12A and covers over 1,200 square miles north of the Grand Canyon, with elevations ranging from 5,000 to 9,200 feet. It has very few facilities, and the closest town is in southern Utah.
But being assigned here does have its perks.
Todd Buck: Yeah, I get to go to lunch on the edge of the Grand Canyon when I feel like it. The neat part is I typically have it all to myself. I’ll drive out to one of those points and have lunch for a half hour or 45 minutes and just soak in the splendor of northern Arizona.
And it’s really hard to beat.
Speaker: While this area is beautiful, it is also home to some of the largest mule deer in the country. And hunters who are lucky enough to draw a tag for this unit usually don’t go home disappointed. The job of managing this huge tract of land, with its wide variety of species and habitat, can be a challenge.
Todd Buck: Well, the Kaibab’s an interesting district for a wildlife manager in that it has a lot of notoriety associated with its deer herd. And as a result, a lot of the things that I do, other wildlife managers in the state don’t do. We do a lot of habitat work up here for the deer herd.
We’re doing constant studies. Research branch of the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s up here looking at habitat quality and forage availability. We’re catching deer every spring and looking at their health coming out of the winter.
We’ve got the check station, where every deer hunter on the Kaibab has to check out when they harvest a deer. And so there’s a lot of things going on in the Kaibab that don’t happen in the rest of the state. Well, the deer capture presents a pretty neat opportunity for somebody that’s interested in wildlife and wildlife work—and that it’s hands-on work; you’re actually handling the animals, which really is a rare thing in this day and age. I think people often assume we’re hands-on with the critters in the hills all the time, but we’re really not. We observe them constantly, but actually, hands-on work where we’re handling the animals and taking measurements and things of that nature are really a relatively rare occurrence.
Speaker: Wildlife managers are considered the face of Arizona Game and Fish because they interact with the public more than most employees have the opportunity to. On this day, Todd is patrolling during a Merriam’s turkey hunt, where he gets to know the hunters in the field—something he obviously enjoys.
Todd Buck: One of the interesting things in Arizona is that most of the hunting public and most of the public in general that we contact are really happy to see us. I think a lot of states’ game wardens aren’t really looked upon as favorably as they are in the state of Arizona. And I think that has something to do with the fact that our people have some life experience; they’ve gone to college. As a result, they’re a little bit older, and they interact with people a little bit better.
But it’s really heartwarming to see people smile when you pull up at their camp. They invite you into camp. I regularly get offered cups of coffee; I regularly get offered meals. People want to spend time with us. And I think that’s because we know a little bit about wildlife and wildlife habitat, and we can talk to and help them do what they’re doing. And as a result, the support by the Arizona public for us in the field is really, I think, probably unparalleled in North America.
Speaker: While wildlife managers in Arizona are commission law enforcement officers, they’re also required to hold a college degree in a wildlife science or a closely related field. This allows them to not only enforce the law and assist the public but to develop and create habitat improvement programs specific to their management areas.
Todd Buck: Well, in 1996, we had an incredibly large fire on the west side of the plateau, in the mule deer winter range. It burned up about 56,000 acres. And the year following that, it occurred to me that it might be an important thing to start looking at efforts to rehabilitate some of that burned range and try to get some forage species back on the ground—food for deer.
And try to restore some of the wildlife habitat that had been lost in that fire. And of course Mother Nature will do that on her own, but we as humans are a little more impatient, and we’d like things to happen a little faster. And so in ’97, I sat down, and I mapped out about 25,000 acres of various habitat treatments. Things like seeding in places that had burned pretty severely.
I also looked at some areas where things hadn’t burned, where we had really thick stands of pinyon-juniper trees that were choking out the vegetation underneath them. And going in and removing some of that overstory to release those plants and give them a chance to thrive. And also looked at some of the old habitat treatments that had been done historically, primarily for cows but had turned into really, really good winter mule deer range, and we went back into several of those and restored them to the condition they were in the ’50s.
As part of that plan, we’ve built so far eight new waters, and we have five more new ones to put in. And so we’re looking at 13 new water sources on the west side of the Kaibab for wildlife—really good water distribution. Almost ideal.
And so I think some of the things that we’ve accomplished in the last decade have really, really been productive.
Speaker: Maintaining those water sites is also part of Todd’s job, but it’s just one of a hundred things he does each year to make sure the wildlife in the Kaibab will be here for a long time to come.
Todd Buck: And I take personal pride in the fact that some of the things that we’re accomplishing on the Kaibab are going to be left. It may sound corny, but I think of them as a legacy. Something that 50 years from now, my grandkids could come back and say, you know my granddad, he did that. And it’s here for us now.
And I think that is something that not many people get to accomplish in their careers in America anymore. And I think having that legacy is an incredibly important thing to me.
Speaker: The job of a wildlife manager in Arizona is a unique one, and not for everybody. But after 20 years in the field, it is still the perfect job for Todd.
Todd Buck: I think the wildlife manager’s job in the state of Arizona is probably the best job in the world. It’s an incredibly diverse job. Many people aren’t aware that a large portion of our job is not law enforcement.
Most people immediately assume that what we do is primarily law enforcement, and really, that only constitutes about half of our duties. We get to survey wildlife populations; we develop hunt recommendations that result in the permit levels for hunt tags that people apply for. And one day, you may be sitting in the office working on paperwork, and the very next day, you’re in a helicopter flying over the Grand Canyon looking at desert bighorn sheep.
It’s really, really a dream job. I regularly tell people that no hick kid from northern Michigan should have ever expected to get to do this for a living. And I believe that.
Ironically, a similar event took place in the Eastern U.S. with white-tailed deer in Pennsylvania and other states. Deer were brought into the state and with few predators and little hunting permitted, the herd grew out of control, over-ate its habitat and thousands of white-tailed deer starved to death. Several Eastern states in recent years still continue to struggle with habitat destruction caused by too many white-tailed deer, particularly in urban areas where hunting opportunities are limited.
A blog posted on “Cool Green Science - Smarter by Nature” by Allen Pursell, Troy Weldy and Mark White in 2013 gives a great overview of several issues that eastern states are facing due to high deer numbers: https://blog.nature.org/science/2013/08/22/too-many-deer/.
Studies of the impacts of high deer numbers also reveal other unexpected effects. For example, because they often denude vegetation, deer presence can impact other wildlife, even causing pronounced differences in songbird diversity and numbers.
Through the challenges of dealing with excessive animal numbers, wildlife managers learned (and are still trying to balance and resolve) that there is more to conservation than just protecting wildlife. They discovered that nature often overproduces its game resources and this surplus can be harvested by hunters through regulated hunting.
However, wildlife conservation has grown as a discipline and is much more than a numbers game. Wildlife managers must consider not only the biology of the target species, but also the effects of regulated hunting on that species, the impacts to the greater ecological community of species and habitats, and the social tolerance for management actions.