Feature Stories Fall 2010 Issue

How Wild is Your Game?

By Dan Johnson | Photo By Bill Lubing 0

In my arms, I held the symbol of our nation. As a recent wildlife biology graduate from Colorado State University in the early 1990s, it was my job with the Colorado Division of Wildlife to climb old cottonwoods and ponderosa pines to the base of an eagle’s aerie and figure a way into the overhanging nest. After what typically amounted to a trapeze act and a climb up a makeshift ladder made of nylon webbing, I would pull myself into the nest and the company of rotting fish, furry animal parts, ants—and one to three baby bald eagles. Moving slowly and then snatching quickly, I would catch each eaglet and individually transport them in a duffle bag down to waiting biologists who would place a numbered band on one of their legs, measure and weigh them, take a blood sample and then send them back up to the nest. All of this was being done to monitor the success of our national symbol as its population rebounded from near extinction in the lower 48 states, due in part to the pesticide DDT.

In the 1940s and 50s, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was hailed as a panacea for controlling insect borne diseases and helping farmers combat pests in their fields. It was, in fact, such an efficient insect poison that its discoverer, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948. Not known at that time were the future effects DDT would have upon the reproductive success of raptors, such as the bald eagle and peregrine falcon.

Sprayed either directly on wetlands to control mosquitoes or washed into rivers and streams from agricultural fields, DDT became more concentrated as it moved up the food chain from insects to small fish and mammals, to larger fish and mammals, and eventually to the bald eagle at the top. In bald eagles, DDT and its metabolite DDE affected calcium metabolism, which caused eggshell thinning, the accidental crushing of eggs by adult birds and, consequently, reproductive failure.

With the banning of DDT in the U.S. in 1972, along with the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and earlier laws that protected the eagle and its habitat, our national symbol went from “endangered” to a success story of species recovery with their de-listing from the ESA in 2007.

A few years after my work as a tree climber, I hid at dusk at the scrubby edge of a southern Iowa soybean field. In the fading autumn light, I watched as a small herd of white-tailed deer left the security of the woods to browse in the beans. I set my sights on a small buck, took aim and fired. The deer dropped in the field, and I quickly moved to its side to begin field dressing it for transport back home for hanging and eventual butchering. During this process I reflected upon the reality of meat eating, life and death, venison chili, smoked meat, the combine that would be coming any day to harvest the beans, and how the flavor of deer meat can be influenced by what it consumes: wild native plants leading to a “gamey” taste or agricultural crops that can mellow the flavor and add a little more fat.