v

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY

MOV 3 1915

Reprint from Transactions of the Illinois Academy of Science, Fifth Annual Meet-
ing, Bloomington, 111., Feb. 23 and 24, 1912.

THE NATIVE ANIMAL RESOURCES OF THE STATE.

Stephen A. Forbes.

The native animals of this State were once its most important
economic asset, furnishing perhaps the larger and certainly the
more highly valued part of the food, and all the clothing, of its
inhabitants, and almost the total mass, also, of its merchantable
products. Now, however, they are reduced to such economic
insignificance that few would be found to object seriously, on
merely economic grounds, to a fiat of extermination to be issued
against our whole native fauna, if the injurious might go with
the beneficial species. We would cheerfully sacrifice what is left
to us of our native fish and game if we might pile upon the same
altar the vast destructive host of what we cgmmonly call our
insect enemies, together with the, gophers, mice and moles of the
fields and the owls and the hawks of the air. *

Permit me to try to sketch rapidly the nature, the process and
the causes of this transformation, in the hope that we may see to
what extent it has been, and perhaps still is, normal and helpful
to us, and to what -extent, if at all, it has gone, or is likely to go,
too far in any part of its movement — at what points, if at all, it
may be improved upon for our purposes, or may perhaps be
profitably arrested or reversed.

The chief pressing and universal Requirements of our aborig-
ines were food, clothing, shelter, instruments of transportation,
and articles of barter, the last especially important after white
traders began to come among them. Our native Illinoisans were
mixed feeders, like the North American Indians generally, but
with a marked preference for animal food. We have no data
sufficiently detailed for an intelligent judgment of the relative
importance to be assigned to the corn, beans and squashes, on the
one hand, raised by their women on their bottom-land fields, and
to the products of their hunting, on the other; but our Indians
were clearly hunting tribes — governed in their movements to r
and fro by the migrations of their game — rather than truly seden-
tary agricultural people like those farther to the south. Hunting

and fishing were their principal economic pursuits, and their men-
tal and physical development was most strongly influenced by
their contact with the animals of their environment, which they
must outwit or master or outrun in order to gain a living for
themselves and their families. Their fuel was, of course, mainly
wood, with buffalo chips, perhaps, as an occasional convenience.
Their clothing was almost wholly made from the skins of animals,
with buckskin as the chief material. Their boats and their per-
manent shelters were mainly of forest products, the frames of
their huts of wood and the covering of mats woven from strips
of bark; but the objects of their barter, particularly with the
whites, were almost wholly furs and skins obtained by hunting
and trapping.

Notwithstanding this steady draft upon the native animal
resources of the country, the original number of our Indian
inhabitants — estimated at something like 200,000 for all North
America east of the Mississippi River — was too small to affect
in any overwhelming way the general system of animal life,
which would apparently have gone on but little changed if they
had been suddenly exterminated. In Illinois they probably influ-
enced the fauna of the State more powerfully by their prairie
fires than in any other way.

The first appearance of the white man made little or no altera-
tion in these relations, for the discoverers and explorers of our
territory necessarily lived much as the Indians did ; and the
hunters and traders and earliest squatters, who were in part the
successors of the explorers, were similarly dependent on the
untamed products of the country — especially so upon its animals,
which gave them not only the major part of their food but also
the greater part of the materials of their trade. Barter for furs,
as we all know, was almost the sole business of the first business
men of the State, and their food was probably even more largely
animal than that of the Indians among whom they lived, since
they killed their own game, but rarely planted any crop. An
employee of the American Fur Company, stationed, in 1819, at
an Illinois River post near the present site of Hennepin, says, in
his recently published autobiography :

“Our roasted meat . . . was placed in the large wooden

bowl on the table, and each one helped himself by cutting off
with his knife and fingers as much as he desired. Usually we
had nothing else on the table except honey. The wild turkey
was used as a substitute for bread, and when eaten with fat

^ ^ I OV'C * ^JUUlUbtU

y

5^\.Q
F 74 n

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS UBRAW

u

NOV

3 1916

venison, coon or bear, is more delicious than any roast can be.
One of our luxuries, which was reserved for special occasions,
was corn soup, and this was always acceptable. . . . From

the ponds we gathered the seeds of the lotus, which we used for
coffee, our ever-filled honey-trough furnishing the sweetening.
Our supply of salt and pepper was rather limited, and these were
used only on special occasions.”*

It was not, in fact, until the farm-maker and the town-builder
appeared on the scene, bringing in a much denser population
than could live on the mere surplus product of our native plants
and animals — the bare interest on our capital in plant and animal
resources — that this primitive system of maintenance broke
down. When too heavily drawn upon, the animals of the State
began to yield a smaller instead of a larger product, because
an excessive demand had the effect to reduce the number of
producers; and a substitution of more productive resources
became a necessity. IlThe white man being substituted in rapidly
increasing numbers Tor the scanty and stationary Indian popula-
tion, wheat, oats and corn and the tame meadow grasses were
substituted for the wild plants of the prairie turf, and to some
extent for the growths of the forest ; beef cattle, pigs and sheep
were substituted for buffalo, bear and deer; and to these were
added milch cows, oxen, horses and mules, not represented func-
tionally by anything in the native fauna. Chickens, geese and
ducks were substituted for the prairie-hens, pigeons and wild
waterfowl ; and for the preservation of all these valuable but
defenseless animals, wolves and bears and all the other large
carnivora were virtually exterminated.

The result has been, of course, an immensely greater product
of far more valuable and more readily available resources, suffi-
cient for a population many thousand times greater and more
exacting than any which formerly existed here. The whole
process has evidently been a perfectly natural and inevitable
one — as much so as the flow of the tide in the wake of the
revolving moon — and immensely advantageous, also, from every
point of view except that of the inadequate, incompetent and ill-
adapted population which it has reduced or suppressed. These
native populations were not, however, all unfit for survival under
the dominant influence of civilized man, and such as were unfit
were not equally so. Some were promptly and completely extin-

*“The Autobiography of Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard.” The Lakeside Press, Chi-
cago, 1911, p. 57.

guished, others slowly and partially so; some remained undis-
turbed by our interference, and some continue more numerous
and more prosperous to-day than ever before, because the new
conditions established are more favorable to them than were the
old. Wolves and wildcats, for example, were soon virtually sup-
pressed as unmitigated nuisances, and buffalo, deer and the
prairie hen went as early, or even earlier, because they could not
be profitably domesticated, and could not breed, unprotected in
the wild, fast enough to make good their losses. The fishes in
our larger streams diminished slowly in numbers — if, indeed,
taken as a whole, they diminished at all, until recent reclamation
projects began to drain and cultivate their spawning places and
feeding grounds — and the smaller plants and animals of our
waters, upon which the fishes depend for food, were, until quite
lately, at least as abundant as they ever were. No native insect
species has disappeared from our borders, and several of the
most abundant and voracious of them — the most injurious, conse-
quently, to our interests — find a far better food in our cultivated
crops, and, in our agriculture and horticulture, a system of
management far better adapted to their needs, than was the
original system which we have displaced. Our resident game
birds would all have been gone long ago if it had not been for
the restraints of law put upon the activities of the hunter, and
the migrant game species are sadly reduced in numbers; but the
smaller seed eaters, fruit eaters and insect eaters among birds are,
I believe, more numerous now, on the whole, than they were in
the days of the prairie, the Indian and the buffalo.

All the various processes of destruction, maintenance, protec-
tion, substitution and new introduction to which this state of
our fauna is due are still in active operation; and they are in
great measure as automatic and unreflecting, in respect to the
motives behind them, as they ever were. Most men still act
towards the wild life of the State precisely as if they were wild
animals themselves, and seem to think no more of its future than
does the hawk or the hungry wolf ; but the State , as such, has
recognized, of late, its responsibility to future generations, and
is beginning to shape the course of events with forethought and
intelligence in the permanent interests of its people. It is for
this Academy to assist this movement, both by helping to popu-
larize it and by contributing to its direction.

To give you an outline sketch of present conditions and tend-
encies over the whole field of zoology would take more time than

I have been allotted, and I can only summarize the facts and
make brief suggestions of policy concerning our fishes, game
animals and insectivorous birds.

The waters of the State have been much longer unaffected,
and remain much less affected still, by human activities than any
other parts of our area. Each of our rivers or lakes is yet,
indeed, a piece of the primitive wilderness, which no one pretends
to cultivate or to hold as such with a view to cultivation. It may
have bSen greatly affected indirectly, in respect to its fitness as
a home for plants and animals, by our various operations on its
banks or in its neighborhood ; but the picture of life presented
by its waters, its bottom and its shores is still in its main fea-
tures that of the days before the white man in America. In
respect to the natural resources offered us by its plants and
animals, we are lingering in the pioneer or squatter stage of
progress, and we may still see belated illustrations of methods of
appropriation in operation there, much too crude to be tolerated
in any other field.

Almost nothing aquatic has been wholly exterminated, even
the larger mammals and birds — the beaver, the otter, the swan,
wild geese, pelicans and cranes — still remaining in small num-
bers in sufficiently favorable situations. Fishes, turtles, minks,
muskrats, frogs and river mussels or clams remain as almost the
only immediately valuable animal products of the waters of the
State, and these are, on the whole, quite as valuable as they ever
were.

No native fish has completely disappeared from our territory,
although several useful species have been greatly reduced in
numbers within recent years. The only comprehensive statistical
reports upon the interior fisheries of the country have been made
by the United States Fish Commission and the United States
Census Bureau for 1894, 1899 and 1908. The second of these
census years came just before the opening of the Chicago Drain-
age Canal in 1900, and the last one eight years after that revolu-

tionary event, and nine years after the introduction of the Euro-
pean carp into the public waters of this State. The two occur-
rences of critical importance within the period covered by these
reports are thus the opening of the drainage canal and an enor-
mous increase in the numbers of carp.

The drainage canal, by increasing the average depth of the Illi-
nois River between two and a half and three feet, and greatly
enlarging the area and lengthening the period of overflow, has

greatly extended the lateral range of the fishes of the river, espe-
cially in its middle course, enlarging at the same time their breed-
ing grounds and feeding grounds, and bringing into the stream
a tremendous load of sewage from Chicago and its suburbs. The
first effect of such an enlargement of the aquatic area must be to
scatter the normal fish population more widely and make it less
accessible to the fisherman. On the other hand, the enlargement
of their breeding and feeding grounds doubtless tends to an in-
crease in the numbers of fishes by the better provision made for
the survival of the young; while the final effect of sewage con-
tamination upon the inhabitants of the stream will turn upon the
manner in which these organic contributions are gradually
worked up, through the ascending series of the plants and animals
of the water, the margin, and the bottom, to bring them within
the reach of fishes in some form of life available for their food.

The most interesting result I have obtained from an analysis
and comparison of the three census reports referred to is an indi-
cation that the numbers of our native bottom-feeding fishes are
being gradually diminished as an indirect consequence of the rapid
and enormous multiplication of the introduced carp. This fish
has now become so abundant, and commercially so important, that
it is the main object of our commercial fisheries. The yield of the
Illinois River, for example, was $412,000 worth of carp in 1908,
while the value of all the other fishes taken from the stream that
year was only $309,000. In 1894 the carp yielded, in Illinois, 860,-
000 pounds ; five years later, nearly 10 million pounds ; and nine
years later still, ^1,642,000 pounds — the value of this Illinois yield
increasing in this period 27^ times, or from $21,000 to $574,000.
The native coarse fish, on the other hand, which, like the carp,
search the bottom of the stream for their food, yielded approxi-
mately gy2 million pounds in 1894, nearly 6^4 million pounds in
1899, and about 6% million pounds in 1908, — a loss of 29 per cent
between 1894 and 1899, and of 7 per cent between 1899 and 1908.

The number of men employed during this period increased from
1,653 to 4>359> about 2% times as many being engaged in fishing
in 1908 as in 1894; and the investment in fishing equipment in-
creased in the same period more than three and one-half times —
from $156,000 to $553,000. That is, while fishing operations in-
creased from two and one-half times to three and one-half
times, and the product of European carp was multiplied over
twenty-five times, the product of the bottom- feeding food fishes
native in these waters fell off 29 per cent during the period before

the drainage canal was opened — a period coincident with that of
the most rapid multiplication of the carp. This can only mean,
it seems to me, that under the stimulus of fishing operations due
to the rapidly growing importance of this exotic fish, the number
of native fishes of similar habit is being rapidly reduced. The
yield of buffalo was, in 1908, 52 per cent of that for 1894; that
of the fresh-water drum, or sheepshead, was 60 per cent; of
eels, 74 per cent; of suckers, 67 per cent. The catfish yield
diminished 19 per cent for the first five years, and then increased
30 per cent for the next nine, — a net gain of 4 per cent, comparing
1908 with 1894.

Furthermore, the principal game fishes have also fallen off
materially in yield, with the exception of the black bass, whose
product increased about 6 per cent for each year of the first period
and 36 per cent each year of the last. The sunfishes and the
croppies, on the other hand, increased their product an average
of 28 per cent for each of the first five years and of 26 per cent
for each year of the last nine. Their rate of reproduction seems
sufficient, under the new conditions, to hold them up under the
new drain of excessive fishing for carp. These species all breed
in shallow water and feed mainly on crustaceans, insect larvae,
and other minor forms of animal life, and their breeding grounds
and feeding grounds have been enormously extended by the rise
in river levels and the greater expansion and longer continuance «
of the overflow consequent upon the opening of the canal. More-
over, most of them select nesting places, makes nests, and care
for their eggs and young, and hence bring to maturity a compara -
tively large percentage of each new generation.

Another important fact obtained from a comparison of our
census data is the enormous and destructive increase of mussel-
fishing in this State. The Illinois product of mussel-shells in 1894
was 24 tons, in 1899 F was 2,500 tons, and in 1908 it was 20,000
tons, with a value during the latter year of $184,000 for shells
and $170,000 for pearls and slugs. This must, of course, result
in the prompt destruction of the mussel population of our streams.

To summarize these statements in a sentence, it is plain that
the clam fisheries of the State are being rapidly exhausted, and
that the European carp is, with the aid of the fishermen, rapidly
swamping and smothering out several of our native food fishes,
both coarse and fine, excepting, however, the sunfishes and the
black bass. This seems due not to direct competition between the
native and the imported species, but to human interference under

the economic motive. We have here a substitution process at
work, like that of our pioneer agriculture, but differing from
that in the fact that it has been unintentional and hitherto un-
noticed. If these present tendencies continue we shall apparently
have, in time, our larger and more important fishing streams pro-
ducing little but carp, sunfishes, black bass, gizzard-shad, dog-
fish, and gars, with even the catfishes engaged in a somewhat
doubtful struggle for existence.

Several additional dangers now threaten the Illinois River,
much the most important of our productive waters. It may be-
come overloaded with sewage from Chicago and from the cities
on its banks ; the establishment of manufactories along its course
or on its contributing waters may befoul it with chemical wastes
poisonous to fish or injurious to their food supply, a process
which has completely depopulated many streams in the eastern
states, and which some of these states are now seeking to correct,
at great expense and trouble, by legal restrictions and adminis-
trative control. Our recent work shows that the productivity of
a stream is dependent upon the extent and condition of its back-
waters and the period of its overflow, a fact which makes drain-
age district operations on the river bottoms a menace to its pro-
ductiveness. The same is true of measures for straightening
the stream and confining it to its channel, such as are likely to be
necessitated if the Illinois is to become at any time a great artery
of commerce.

These conditions require prompt, vigorous and intelligent recti-
fication and control if we are to preserve and improve the natural
resources represented in our lakes and streams — measures quite
beyond the reach of any power except that of the State. If time
permitted, I should be pleased to enter upon a discussion of
various future policies necessary to this end, but I must pass it
now with the general remark that the most important measures
which should be taken at the present time are, in my judgment,
the protection of our waters against injurious contaminations,
especially from gas works and certain kinds of manufactories;
and the preservation, intelligent care, and complete control of
selected breeding grounds and feeding grounds of our most im-
portant fishes, to be acquired, held, and developed as permanent
reservations by the State. The State Fish Commission has, in
fact, made a beginning in this direction, and has lately secured
a long-time lease of Matanzas Lake, in the Illinois bottoms, which
it is preparing to use as a breeding station. It also seeks to main-

tain the supply of our more desirable fishes by hatchery opera-
tions, and by collecting young fishes from isolated overflow ponds
and returning them to waters in which they can survive.

Whether the insectivorous birds of the State are of sufficient
importance to be taken into serious account in cataloging our
economic resources, is a question which can not be answered with
the definiteness and precision which we are accustomed to expect
as the outcome of anything worthy to be called strictly scientific
investigation. The value of the services of birds depends upon
the kinds of their food and the ratios of its various elements;
upon the variations in their food and feeding habits as coordinated
with differences of season, geographical situation, and ecological
circumstance; upon the amounts of food eaten by birds of various
species at various ages and under the various conditions of their
activities ; and upon the numbers of the various kinds of birds
engaged in the economic services with which they are to be cred-
ited. The problem of the food of any bird is thus highly complex,
and its primary data are so variable that even final conclusions,
however broadly based, must be put in the form of approximate
estimates and contingent probabilities, amounting to scarcely more
than expressions of an enlightened personal judgment.

The quantities of food taken by birds, young and old, can not
well be stated in terms of definite values, or masses, or numbers
of individual objects eaten. Nevertheless, accumulated observa-
tions, continuous for days at a time, on the activities of parent
birds of various species in feeding their young, furnish conclusive
evidence of the fact that a family of nestlings may devour and
assimilate a truly surprising amount of insect food ; and the rapid-
ity of growth and the high rate of physiological activity of birds
as a class give theoretical support to statements which might
otherwise seem incredibly exaggerated. The insects eaten by an
insectivorous bird are evidently to be numbered in hundreds per
day ; and the weed-seeds eaten by a seed eater, in thousands.

With respect to the number of birds inhabiting any extensive
area, the only systematic work attempted is that done in recent
years by the Natural History Survey of this State. Thanks to
this work, we now know something of the numbers of birds of
various species in our area in different situations and at different
seasons of the year. Time will not permit more than a brief ref-
erence to this matter, especially as our data have not yet been
completely studied. I have generalized them, however, to the
effect that, taking the State as a whole and the year as a unit, our

bird population averages something over a bird per acre for the
open area of the State — excluding, that is, forests and other simi-
lar tracts on which accurate counting of birds is impracticable.
This population varies greatly, of course, in density, according
to the character and vegetable covering of the surface. Pastures
contain, on the whole, more birds than any other open surface,
and corn fields the fewest of all. The tendency of birds to con-
centrate where their food is especially abundant, and even to
change their habits temporarily, in order to take advantage of an
unusual profusion of certain elements of their food, greatly
increases their economic value, since it makes them most efficient
where their efficiency is most important. Nevertheless, the very
fact that insectivorous birds thrive best when insects are most
numerous must lead us to doubt that nature has really committed
the blunder of producing birds in such numbers, and endowing
them with appetites so vigorous, as to keep the natural sources of
their own food supply much below the line of the highest possible
productivity.

That birds are economically useful, scarcely admits of serious
question, but the ultimate value of their services can scarcely be
guessed at intelligently until much more work has been done on
the problem. In the meantime, there are abundant reasons, both
economic and esthetic, for their protection, and to this end the
most important pending measure is the passage of national laws
forbidding the destruction of migrant species — an interest which
I would like to have this Academy promote by a resolution favor-
ing the passage of the Anthony bill, now under consideration in
the national House of Representatives.

The fur-bearing mammals of the State are by no means so
nearly extinct as most of us would be likely to suppose. The
mink and the muskrat remain in numbers still to figure in the
United States census reports, the Illinois yield of mink furs being
valued by the last census at $6,000 per annum, and the muskrat
at $14,000. Even the otter has been reported to me by the deputy
game wardens of Illinois1 as still present in twenty-three counties,
mainly in the southern half of the State, although a few reports
come from the more northern counties bordering upon the Illinois
and the Mississippi. The beaver is reported from four Ohio

1 The data here given concerning the larger fur-bearing animals of the State I owe
in great measure to the courtesy of Hon. John A. Wheeler, State Game Commis-
sioner, who was kind enough to obtain for my use, and at my request, information
from his deputy . wardens throughout the State as to the present animal life of their
respective counties. Reports have thus come to me, since this paper was begun,
from eighty-five of the hundred and two counties of the State.

River counties; but the marten and the fisher have long been
extinc.t in this State.

Among the larger mammals we have lost the elk, the buffalo,
the panther or puma, and the black bear. The Virginia deer is
still sometimes seen in southern Illinois, but hunters there believe
that it crosses the river from Missouri, and does not breed within
our limits. Its occasional occurrence in several of the more
northern counties is to be attributed to its escape from parks.
Both the prairie-wolf and the timber-wolf are widely distributed
in very small numbers, one or both of these having been lately
seen, according to the deputy wardens, in at least forty-three
Illinois counties. Lynxes and wildcats have been lately reported
from fourteen counties, seven of which are in extreme southern
Illinois. Red and gray foxes are found by the game wardens in
forty counties; and the raccoon and the opossum are common
enough to be hunted occasionally. The woodchuck holds its own
fairly well in the northern part of the State, and the swamp-hare
may yet be found in our southern cypress swamps. The common
rabbit is, of course, everywhere abundant. The fox-squirrel and
the gray squirrel still live in our woods in scanty numbers, and
the red squirrel or chickaree occurs at present in Iroquois County,
where, however, it was specially introduced. The badger is un-
doubtedly to be found in northern Illinois; and skunks and
weasels are, of course, still with us, although in smaller numbers
than formerly.

The really significant game of the State is virtually reduced,
however, to wild ducks, shore-birds, prairie-hens, quail, and the
plebeian rabbit. Quail are found, in fact, in every county; and
prairie-hens — thanks to our protective laws — are now to be seen
in at least seventy-four counties, so abundantly in some that farm-
ers are beginning to protest against their further increase because
of the amount of grain which they devour. Wild turkeys occa-
sionally occur in the more broken, wooded country, but too rarely
to offer any considerable inducement to the hunter. In short,
with the exception of the elk, buffalo, and bear, we have the
larger forms of the wild mammalian animals of the State, and
most of the game birds also, still present to an extent such that
we need only to protect them strictly to have them back again in
any numbers which can find food, shelter, and safety in their
present environment. That this must at best fall far short of
their original abundance is shown by the results of the recent

protection of the prairie-hen. The very country in which it was
formerly most numerous — that is, the open prairie — is now, least
favorable to it because of the agricultural operations, which
disturb and destroy it during its breeding season.

Time has failed me, in the preparation of this brief paper, to
enter into particulars concerning the work of the state commis-
sions now engaged in maintaining and protecting the valuable
wild animals of the State and in improving the composition of
our fauna by the introduction of exotic species. These are the
State Fish Commission and the State Game Commission, to which
reference has already been made. The biennial reports of the
former, some fifteen in number, give a sufficient account of their
work. The State Game Commissioner has not yet published
regular reports of his operations, but they are described in a brief
but comprehensive illustrated article printed in the Arbor and
Bird Day Circular issued by the State Superintendent of Public
Instruction in 1909.