What Fowls for Fowlers?

[Birdwatcher]

This leads me to wonder if the decline was not due in part to the cyclic nature of animal populations.

With respect to buffalo, there was apparently an expansion of the buffalo range towards the east subsequent to the massive 16th century epidemics among the Natives in the Southeast. This based upon 17 th Century Euro reports of buffalo clear to the Atlantic Coast despite a general absence of buffalo remains in Eastern pre-Columbian Indian middens and archeological sites in the East.

The evidence seems to suggest a subsequent decline of buffalo populations ever since that time, including on the Plains.

In other words there maybe never was any sort of equilibrium between mounted Plains Indians and buffalo, the Horse Indians merely decimating the herds at a far slower rate than the Euros did but decimating them nontheless.

In truth we'll never know, the Horse Indian period wasn't long enough, all that is reasonably certain was that the buffalo's range was contracting all through that period.

I dunno Sam Fadala's study, and its prob'ly well thought out, but I wonder if it takes into account the movement of the Eastern Tribes out onto the Plains too, even well prior to Removal, a thing commonly forgotten in popular history.

As for cattle diseases, almost a certainty, and likely six million feral longhorns in Texas had displaced SOMETHING, but even so the Southern Plains, including much of Texas, still enjoyed an abundance of Buffalo in the Early Nineteeth Century, more'n a hundred years after the introduction of cattle around he San Antonio Missions.

I got no problem with the concept of buffalo just getting shot out over the years.

Birdwatcher

 

[Grandpa Ron]

I suppose the story never ends. I was watching TV and concerns about the growing Hog Menace down south.
I remember a few years back the blackbirds were migrating leaving untold amounts of bird dropping in some town parks. The folks were worried about disease.

Much of where I grew up was drained in the late 1800’s, for land and to curtail the “ague”, some form of swamp fever.

I suppose most of the readers of this board enjoy the out of doors. I just returned from a week of canoeing the Boudary Waters in MN. So, it is good the think about these things; lest we become complacent.

Still, I am looking forward to this fall when I want to try my Trade gun on quail. That should be humbling. :wink: