THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 55, March 17, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
LACKING FARMS, CALIFORNIA AMERINDIANS
ATE UP WILD BIRD SPECIES
By Dennis T. Avery
AMERINDIANS AS CONSERVATIONISTS THROUGHOUT THEIR 2,000 YEARS OF HISTORY ON THE NORTH AMERICAN
CONTINENT, LIVING IN SUPPORTIVE HARMONY WITH WILDLIFE & HARVESTING ONLY WHAT THEIR SMALL COMMUNITIES
NEEDED TO SUBSIST: A MYTH PERPETUATED IN OUR TIME BY THE POLITICAL IDEOLOGUES OF THE ENVIRONMENTALIST &
ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT -- EXPLOSION OF THE MYTH BY RECENT ARCHEOLOGICAL RESEARCH FINDINGS
FULL STORY:
Lacking farms to grow food, California’s Amerindians -- i.e., American Indians, or pre-Columbian native inhabitants -- hunted
the region's wild bird species nearly to extinction.
When the first white pioneers settled California in the early 1800s, they found the San Francisco Bay area teeming with geese,
ducks, shore birds, deer, and elk. One early settler said: “The wild geese and every species of water fowl darkened the surface
of every bay…in flocks of millions.”
This wildlife abundance seemed to endorse the legend that native Amerindians lived in supportive harmony with the wild birds
and animals, harvesting only what their small communities needed to subsist. That legend has spread guilt among modern
Americans whose food comes from crop fields that were once wildlife habitat.
A painstaking California archeologist has now blown the Amerindian conservation legend into tiny fragments. Over seven years, he
analyzed 5,700 bird bones from a huge Amerindian shell/waste mound on the shores of San Francisco Bay. The bones laid out
a 1900-year history of the Amerindians’ bird hunting. They’d hunted dozens of wild bird species to local extinction, starting
with the biggest geese and working their way clear down to tiny sandpipers.
Archeologist Jack Broughton, a native Californian, says he found the bones of 64 different bird species, mostly waterbirds, but
also quail and even eagles. The Bay Amerindians raided the island breeding colonies of cormorants, and caught the sea ducks
floating far from shore.
The early European settlers found birds in abundance, says Broughton, only because Spanish explorers had inadvertently
brought such epidemic diseases as smallpox and measles, starting about 1500 AD. The shell mound shows that the
Amerindian population crashed by 90 percent, and the Bay area bird populations then recovered.
The Emeryville shell mound, 30 feet high and 900 feet long, was eventually cleared to build a paint factory. Before that,
however, scientists in the early 1900s had excavated thousands of bones from the mound, recording the layer in which each
was found — and thus when it was hunted. These bones and records have been stored in the Hearst Museum at the
University of California at Berkeley.
Broughton painstakingly identified the species of each bone, thus creating a 1900-year pattern of San Francisco Amerindian
bird hunting. He has also researched the impact of the Amerindian communities on other species, including such fish as
sturgeon and such mammals as elk and deer. He concluded that “anything big and juicy” suffered major population losses
at the hands of the Stone Age hunters.
Broughton’s paper on bird bones was recently published in Ornithological Monographs.
Worldwide, populations of primitive humans expanded to use up all of the available food supply. The American Indians
certainly wanted to preserve their wildlife, and they talked, sang, and danced about doing it. But, if clan A didn’t kill the
geese, clan B would. Then clan B would get bigger, and push out clan A completely.
Only in the modern era of high-tech farming, has the world seen the current pattern: increasing food production per capita
and per acre, while the increasing food security leads to lower birth rates.
Today, California can once again afford large bird populations, not because of smallpox deaths but because of high-yield
farming. Instead of depending primarily on hunting, the European settlers grew grain. Over the years, their grain yields
have increased tenfold, due to better plant breeding, use of fertilizers, and integrated pest management.
The biggest U.S. land use change since 1900 has been from poor cropland back to forest and wildlife preserves — because
we were getting higher yields on the better lands
In addition to praising the Amerindians’ conservation ethic, we should also be proud of our own. We should also be
praising the farmers, researchers, and agribusinessmen who have finally enabled humanity to achieve wildlands
conservation through high-yield food production.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and the Director for Global Food Issues
(www.cgfi.org). Formerly he was a senior analyst for the United States Department of
State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421. Email: cgfi@rica.net
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