Page 10 - Black Range Naturalist Oct 2020
P. 10

  Perhaps the clearest early application of the idea of habitat to wildlife management was by Wallace Byron Grange who, in 1949, published The Way to Game Abundance. On page 10, Grange says, "There is no reason to believe, simply because an animal species is now present on earth, that it will continue to survive, or to maintain abundance. It can survive only if its habitat survives; that particular pattern of plants in a certain climate to which all of the internal and external patterns of the animal have become specialized."
Grange was certainly aware of the concepts of Darwin, although he didn't divulge his own belief in the matter. Nonetheless, he clearly understood that species were adapted to particular habitats and that they could be preserved and even increased through protection or improvement of habitat. Predecessors of Leopold and Grange used habitat or understood the concept. In 1927, J. Stokely Ligon used the term in Wild Life of New Mexico — a book he originally planned to coauthor with Leopold. Their lives diverged and each wrote separately. Leopold moved to Wisconsin and became a theorist, professor, and philosopher. His portion of the book morphed into Game Management. Ligon remained in New Mexico, working on the ground, coldly observational and descriptive in his writing. But Ligon saw the importance of habitat to wild species.
Photo of Ligon - New Mexico Department of Game and Fish (For more on Ligon see “Twelve Hundred Miles By Horse and Burro” by Harley Shaw
    9































































































   8   9   10   11   12