LEOPOLD: THE CONSERVATION OF WILDLIFE 801 



of producing game by the simple expedient of creating a suitable home for it 

 was adopted slowly in this country. 



In the Old World, the purposeful preparation of the habitat for game had 

 long since become standard practice. As early as the thirteenth century, Marco 

 Polo noted that Kublai Khan maintained special preserves for partridges and 

 pheasants, ''. . . for whose food the Great Khan caused millet, and other grains 

 suitable to such birds, to be sown . . . every season, and gives strict command 

 that no person shall dare to reap the seed; in order that the birds may not 

 be in want of nourishment." The Khan likewise prepared special winter shelters 

 and maintained a staff of gamekeepers to protect both the birds and their habi- 

 tat. Marco Polo concludes: "In consequence of these attentions, he [the Khan] 

 always finds abundant sport when he visits this country" [near Changanoor, 

 Cathay] . 



At a somewhat later date in Europe, the planting of special coverts for 

 pheasants and gray partridges became customary on country estates and on 

 crown forests, and in Scotland the rotational burning of heather was found to 

 be the least expensive and most effective way to increase numbers of red grouse. 



But these ideas were not carried to the New World. Much was said and 

 written about preserving existing wildlife habitat, as for example on the na- 

 tional forests, but cultural operations to create new or better habitat were not 

 attempted until Herbert Stoddard, then with the United States Biological Sur- 

 vey, undertook to study means of improving bobwhite shooting in Florida and 

 Georgia. Stoddard's work on quail management in the Southeast was a mile- 

 stone in American conservation. His book on The Bobwhite Quail (1931) sum- 

 marized five years of intensive, scientific study of the bird in its natural environ- 

 ment and pointed up the fact that the management of the land and its vege- 

 tation had more to do with quail abundance than hunting, predators, or any 

 other single factor. He showed how simple cultural operations could be used 

 to create food and cover in proper interspersion, yielding a high density of 

 quail and a high annual bag for hunters. Though the book is over twenty years 

 old it is still the bible of game managers on Southern plantations. More im- 

 portantly, it demonstrated the scientific approach to game production through 

 good land management. 



At about the same time, another pioneer in the new era of wildlife manage- 

 ment, Aldo Leopold, came forth with two volumes that reiterated Stoddard's 

 findings and applied the basic tenets to game populations generally. The first 

 of these, entitled Report on a Game Survey of the North Central States (1931) 

 dealt with game conditions in one specific region. The second Game Management 

 (1933), laid down the principles of scientific game production and harvest. 

 From that time on, the study and the administration of wildlife resources was 

 led gradually from the fields of politics and law into the fields of science and 

 land management. 



The New Deal of the 1930's was a fruitful period in which scientific game 

 management could grow. The federal government heavily subsidized conserva- 

 tion projects of many kinds, and developing wildlife habitat became a recog- 

 nized activity of such bureaus as the Soil Conservation Service, Forest Service, 

 Tennessee Valley Authority, and Bureau of Land Management, as well as the 

 Fish and Wildlife Service. State fish and game departments likewise began 



