Page 195 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF BIG GAME 173
southern New York have caused a great migration of deer into those once- depopulated regions,—in fact, right down to tide-water.
The Mule DEER.^This will be the first member of the Deer Family to become extinct in North America outside of the protected portions of itshaunts. Itsfatalpreferenceforopengroundanditshabitofpausing to stare at the hunter have been, and to the end will be, its undoing. Possibly there are now two of these deer in the United States and British Columbiaforevery98thatexistedfortyyearsago,butnomore. Itis a deer of the bad lands and foothills, and its curiosity is fatal.
The number of sportsmen who have hunted and killed this fine animal in its own wild and picturesque bad-lands is indeed quite small. It has been four-fifths exterminated by the resident hunter and ranchman, and to-day is found in the Rocky Mountain region most sparingly. Ten years ago it seemed right to hunt the so-called Rocky Mountain "black- tail" in northwestern Montana, because so many deer were there it did notseemtospellextermination. Now,conditionshavechanged. Since last winter's great slaughter in northwestern Montana, of 11,000 hungry deer, the species has been so reduced that it is no longer right to kill mule deer anywhere in our country, and a universal close season for five years is the duty of every state which contains that species.
The Real Black-Tailed Deer, of the Pacific coast, {Odocoileus columbianus) is, to most sportsmen of the Rocky Mountains and the East actually less known than the okapi ! Not one out of every hundred of them can recognize a mounted head of it at sight. It is a small, deli- cately-formed, delicately-antlered understudy of the big mule deer, and now painfully limited in its distribution. It is the deer of California and western Oregon, and it has been so ruthlessly slaughtered that to- day it is going fast. As conditions stand to-day, and without a radical change on the part of the people of the Pacific coast, this very inter- esting species is bound to disappear. It will not be persistent, like the white-tailed deer, but in the heavy forests, it will last much longer than the mule deer.
My information regarding this deer is like the stock of specimens of itinmuseumcollections,—meagerandunsatisfactory. Weneedtoknow in detail how that species is faring to-day, and what its prospects are for the immediate future. In 1900, I saw great piles of skins from it in the fur houses of Seattle, and the sight gave me much concern.
The Caribou, Generally.—I think it is not very difficult to forecast the future of the Genus Rangifer in North America, from the logic of the conditions of to-day. Thanks to the splendid mass of in- formation that has been accumulated regarding this group, we are able todrawcertainconclusions. IthinkthatthecaribouoftheCanadian Barren Grounds and northeastern Alaska will survive in great numbers for at least another century; that the caribou herds of Newfoundland will last nearly as long, and that in fifty years or less all the caribou of the great northwestern wilderness will be swept away.