Home
Letter
Historical
Concept
Goal
Policies
Methods
Control
Nat'l Rec. Areas
New Nat'l Parks
Summary
|
Wildlife Management in the National Parks
The goal of park management in the United States
Item 1 in the report just quoted specifies that "a prior definition
of the purposes and objectives of each park is assumed." In other words.
the goal must first be defined.
As a primary goal, we would recommend that the biotic associations
within each park be maintained, or where necessary recreated, as nearly
as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first
visited by the white man. A national park should represent a vignette of
primitive America.
The implications of this seemingly simple aspiration are stupendous.
Many of our national parks -- in fact most of them -- went through periods
of indiscriminate logging, burning, livestock grazing, hunting and
predator control. Then they entered the park system and shifted abruptly
to a regime of equally unnatural protection from lightning fires, from
insect outbreaks, absence of natural controls of ungulates, and in some
areas elimination of normal fluctuations in water levels. Exotic
vertebrates, insects, plants, and plant diseases have inadvertently been
introduced. And of course lastly there is the factor of human use -- of
roads and trampling and camp grounds and pack stock. The resultant
biotic associations in many of our parks are artifacts, pure and simple.
They represent a complex ecologic history but they do not necessarily
represent primitive America.
Restoring the primitive scene is not done easily nor can it be done
completely. Some species are extinct. Given time, an eastern hardwood
forest can be regrown to maturity but the chestnut will be missing and
so will the roar of pigeon wings. The colorful drapanid finches are not
to be heard again in the lowland forests of Hawaii, nor will the
jack-hammer of the ivory-bill ring in southern swamps. The wolf and
grizzly bear cannot readily be reintroduced into ranching communities,
and the factor of human use of the parks is subject only to regulation,
not elimination. Exotic plants, animals, and diseases are here to stay.
All these limitations we fully realize. Yet, if the goal cannot be fully
achieved it can be approached. A reasonable illusion of primitive
America could be recreated, using the utmost in skill, judgment, and
ecologic sensitivity. This in our opinion should be the objective of
every national park and monument.
To illustrate the goal more specifically, let us cite some cases. A
visitor entering Grand Teton National Park from the south drives across
Antelope Flats. But there are no antelope. No one seems to be asking the
question -- why aren't (they) there? If the mountain men who gathered here
in rendezvous fed their squaws on antelope, a 20th century tourist at
least should be able to see a band of these animals. Finding out what
aspect of the range needs rectifying, and doing so, would appear to be a
primary function of park management.
When the forty-niners poured over the Sierra Nevada into California,
those that kept diaries spoke almost to a man of the wide-spaced columns
of mature trees that grew on the lower western slope in gigantic
magnificence. The ground was a grass parkland, in springtime carpeted
with wildflowers. Deer and bears were abundant. Today much of the west
slope is a dog-hair thicket of young pines, white fir, incense cedar,
and mature brush -- a direct function of overprotection from natural
ground fires. Within the four national parks -- Lassen, Yosemite, Sequoia,
and Kings Canyon -- the thickets are even more impenetrable than
elsewhere. Not only is this accumulation of fuel dangerous to the giant
sequoias and other mature trees but the animal life is meager,
wildflowers are sparse, and to some at least the vegetative tangle is
depressing, not uplifting. Is it possible that the primitive open forest
could be restored, at least on a local scale? And if so, how? We cannot
offer an answer. But we are posing a question to which there should be
an answer of immense concern to the National Park Service.
The scarcity of bighorn sheep in the Sierra Nevada represents
another type of management problem. Though they have been effectively
protected for nearly half a century, there are fewer than 400 bighorns
in the Sierra. Two-thirds of them are found in summer along the crest
which lies within the eastern border of Sequoia and Kings Canyon
National Parks. Obviously, there is some shortcoming of habitat that
precludes further increase in the population. The high country is still
recovering slowly from the devastation of early domestic sheep grazing
so graphically described by John Muir. But the present limitation may
not be in the high summer range at all but rather along the eastern
slope of the Sierra where the bighorns winter on lands in the
jurisdiction of the Forest Service. These areas are grazed in summer by
domestic livestock and large numbers of mule deer, and it is possible
that such competitive use is adversely affecting the bighorns. It would
seem to us that the National Park Service might well take the lead in
studying this problem and in formulating cooperative management plans
with other agencies even though the management problem lies outside the
park boundary. The goal, after all, is to restore the Sierra bighorn. If
restoration is achieved in the Sequoia-Kings Canyon region, there might
follow a program of reintroduction and restoration of bighorns in
Yosemite and Lassen National Parks, and Lava Beds National Monument,
within which areas this magnificent native animal is presently extinct.
We hope that these examples clarify what we mean by the goal of park
management.
|