More than protection: what game managers have learned

An idea older than science

Deuteronomy (22:6–7) tells whoever finds a nest not to take the mother together with the young. The young may be taken, but the mother must be let go, so that it may go well with him. The text gives no ecological reason. Maimonides explained the commandment by the distress animals feel for their young. Nachmanides, in the 13th century, read it as a lesson against cruelty and added that Scripture does not permit a species to be destroyed.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says of William the Conqueror, who died in 1087, that “he made many deer-parks” and decreed that whoever slew a hart or a hind should be blinded. The Charter of the Forest, separated from Magna Carta in 1217, says in its 1225 form that no man shall lose life or limb for killing the king’s deer. The punishment becomes a heavy fine or, for a man with nothing to pay, a year and a day in prison. These rules kept game for the king, not for the species.

The American bowhunter education course says that the first official hunting season may have been established by Kublai Khan in the 13th century. The story comes from Marco Polo. Throughout the empire, he writes, nobody dared to hunt hare, stag or roe from March to October, so the game multiplied and the emperor had as much as he could desire. It resembles a season, but it is a single account of a ruler’s order about his own game.

A renewable resource, used or set aside

Romania’s hunting act, Law 407/2006, calls game wildlife “a renewable natural resource, a public good of national and international interest” (art. 2). A mineral deposit does not renew itself. An animal population does, as long as it has the conditions to breed.

The US Forest Service links managed conservation, including industrial use, to Gifford Pinchot, and to John Muir the preservation of nature with little or no industrial profit, the line the national parks came from. The strictest form of the second is the strict nature reserve, IUCN category Ia, where human visitation and use are strictly controlled and limited.

Kaibab: the textbook story and what is left of it

In 1906, an act of Congress and a proclamation by Theodore Roosevelt made the Kaibab Plateau, north of the Grand Canyon, a preserve where hunting game animals was unlawful except under regulations of the Secretary of Agriculture. It was not an outright ban.

According to a 2005 master thesis on the Kaibab, government hunters killed cougars, coyotes, bobcats and wolves over the following years to protect the mule deer, and the Forest Service did not open hunting seasons until the mid-1920s, against the opposition of the state of Arizona. In the same period, Burk shows, the number of sheep on the plateau fell sharply.

The deer increased, but nobody knows by how much. Burk gives about 4,000 for 1906, and estimates for 1924 between 30,000 and 100,000; the graph that reached the textbooks used the highest figure. What is certain is that the browse was destroyed. In 1928 the US Supreme Court accepted as fact that thousands of deer had died for lack of forage, and upheld the federal government’s right to kill deer to protect the land.

The classic story has been challenged. Drawing on Graeme Caughley, Burk wrote in 1973 that the figures are unreliable and that the removal of livestock may explain much of the increase. In 2006, Dan Binkley and colleagues dated the aspens on the plateau. They found extremely few trees established in the 1920s, a sign of very heavy browsing, and a second irruption of the herd in the 1950s. How much the missing predators mattered, and how much the missing livestock, remains uncertain.

For 2019, the Arizona Game and Fish Department put the Kaibab herd at about 10,200 animals, the densest mule deer population in the state. The Mule Deer Foundation writes, in an undated piece, that the herd has been affected by years of extreme drought and declining habitat.

Pennsylvania

By 1900 the white-tailed deer had almost disappeared from Pennsylvania, after subsistence and market hunting and the habitat changes of the 19th century. According to the Game Commission deer plan, about 1,200 deer were released between 1906 and 1925, antlerless deer were protected from 1907, and the habitat left by logging provided outstanding conditions. The plan cites an estimate of about 1,000 deer in 1905 and about a million in 1928.

The large predators were not removed at that time: according to Redding, they had been absent since 1890. Redding also writes of massive starvation of deer in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which Royo and Stout link to the severe winters that began in 1938–1939.

The “surplus” has limits

One argument for hunting goes like this: nature produces more young every year than the habitat can feed, and what hunters do not take, starvation and disease will. Research supports it only in part. In an experiment on willow ptarmigan in Norway, Sandercock and colleagues found that a 15% harvest was partly offset by lower natural mortality, and a 30% harvest was not; the late-season harvest was mostly added to natural deaths. A 2013 synthesis by Péron shows that long-lived species compensate less than short-lived ones, and populations below carrying capacity less than those above it. How much of the harvest would have died anyway depends on species, density and season.

Habitat

On land and in fresh water, says the 2019 IPBES global assessment, land-use change has done the most damage to nature since 1970; second comes direct exploitation, which includes logging, hunting and fishing. In the European Union, agriculture is the pressure most often reported for habitats and species, but for migratory birds the European Environment Agency puts illegal killing and hunting first.

American bowhunter courses teach five elements of habitat: food, water, cover, space and their arrangement on the ground. It is a teaching framework, not a scientific law.

The edge: less simple than in the textbooks

In 1933, Aldo Leopold observed that game which moves little and needs two or more habitat types is more abundant where those types mix. That is where the “edge effect” comes from. Masters, Ditchkoff and Farley point out, however, that many benefits ascribed to Leopold were never claimed by him, and that “more edge means more game” is not his formula. They also write that generalist species, such as the white-tailed deer, often benefit from edges, while specialists often lose.

In 1978, Gates and Gysel found songbird nests clustered along the forest edge, but lost there more often to predators and to birds that lay their eggs in other species’ nests: the edge acted as an “ecological trap”. The meta-analysis by Batáry and Báldi (2004) confirmed higher nest predation at edges in deciduous forests and marshes, but not in coniferous forests or fields. Ries and colleagues describe the mechanisms by which species respond to edges and show that, where responses occur, they are largely predictable.

There are some data for European game. In Norway, female roe deer followed by Tufto and colleagues spent more time near habitat edges. According to GWCT, pheasants prefer the woodland fringe, up to about 50 metres from the edge. For partridges, Rands found that the length of permanent field boundaries correlated with breeding density within a farm, but not between farms. River corridors hold, according to Naiman, an unusually diverse array of species and processes; Sabo shows that they do not necessarily hold more species, but different ones from the land around them.

Romania

Law 407/2006 divides the country into hunting grounds of at least 5,000 ha in the plains, 7,000 ha in the hills and 10,000 ha in the mountains (art. 5); national parks and the Danube Delta are not part of them (art. 1 n). The state, through the central authority responsible for hunting, entrusts the game to managers on 16-year contracts (art. 9). Managers can be hunters’ organisations, the administrators of state, private or municipal forests, research institutes and educational institutions (art. 7).

Every year the manager carries out population assessments, and it works to a 16-year management plan (art. 17). The administrator approves harvest quotas annually, with the opinion of the environmental authority, and the quotas are mandatory (art. 6 f). At least 10% of each hunting ground must be a quiet zone (art. 20). Disturbing game in the breeding season is forbidden, and since November 2025 so is feeding free-ranging bears (art. 23). Damage caused by game is paid by the manager if it has not met its prevention duties, and otherwise by the state (art. 13).

Annex 1 of the act lists the species that may be hunted, among them roe deer, red deer, chamois, wild boar, hare, pheasant and capercaillie. Annex 2 lists the species that may not be hunted, including brown bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, beaver and European bison; for them there are only derogations under Emergency Ordinance 57/2007 (art. 19). For the bear, a 2024 law introduced a “prevention level” and an “intervention level” (art. 1 ș¹ and ș²).

The bow is not a hunting means in Romania: the act lists it among poaching offences. The details are on the Romania page.

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