Science Blasts

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from Fall 2016 issue of Fair Chase My column in the Summer 2016 issue of Fair Chase talked about the importance of the Boone and Crockett Quantitative Wildlife Center directed by Professor Bill Porter at Michigan State University...

A complete collection of articles about conservation, hunting, and wildlife research by John Organ, Director Emeritus of the USGS Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units, and current B&C professional member.

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from Summer 2017 issue of Fair Chase Those of us in the hunting community take great pride in the fact the dollars we spend on hunting licenses, firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment are the financial backbone of state-...

Much debate has occurred through the years over the value and purpose of maintaining records of “trophy” big game animals killed by hunters. This has become magnified in recent years with a focus on trophy hunting in general, spawned in part by the Cecil the Lion episode, and in conflicting reports on the genetic impacts of trophy hunting to big game populations in particular.

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Drs. Dave Wattles and Steve DeStefano of the Massachusetts Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit attach a GPS collar to a bull moose in west-central Massachusetts. Excerpt from Spring 2016 issue of Fair Chase The distribution of the...

By John Organ — Nearly 100 years ago Aldo Leopold, the father of game management, coined the term “harvestable surplus.” The intended meaning of the term is that some wildlife species and populations may produce more young in a given year than can survive to the following year. Those individuals doomed to die over the winter, for example, represent the “surplus” in the population. Leopold observed that those surplus animals could be killed by hunters during the fall, instead of succumbing to winter mortality, and there would be little impact on the population. So, in theory, hunting would be sustainable because the population would not change.

By John Organ — The issue of lead versus non-lead ammunition has been a divisive factor within the hunting and wildlife conservation community for decades. Consider this statement: “The accounts of the destruction of ducks, geese, and swans by lead-poisoning which are printed on another page bring to public attention a new element of danger to our wildfowl, and one for which a remedy will be hard to find.” This was written by George Bird Grinnell, co-founder of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1894.

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from Fall 2017 issue of Fair Chase It’s pretty common knowledge these days that black and grizzly bears are very efficient predators of ungulate fawns and calves. Some of the earliest published accounts of black bear predation on...

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member © Mark Mesenko Excerpt from Fall 2018 issue of Fair Chase In the Spring 2015 issue of Fair Chase ( “A Little Help From Our Friends” ), I wrote about the Western Elk Research Collaborative and the promise it held for a greater...

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from Spring 2015 issue of Fair Chase My good friend Curtis Taylor, West Virginia’s State Fish and Wildlife Director, tells it this way: his cousin Ditto, so named by his parents becausehewasthespitting image of his older brother...

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from Fall 2015 issue of Fair Chase Aldo Leopold wrote “One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community,...

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from Summer 2016 issue of Fair Chase Occasionally I go to my bookcase and pick an issue from the first volume of the Journal of Wildlife Management , published in 1937, and peruse it. The wildlife conservation movement in North...

SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Gordon Batcheller still hunting for moose in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Excerpt from Fall 2019 issue of Fair Chase In the last issue of Fair Chase , I wrote about how we may transform the way we communicate the results of hunting...