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EXAMPLES OF RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

The Division of Predator and Rodent Control was replaced by the Division of Wildlife Services on June 7, 1965, and new responsibilities assigned to this Division to achieve long-range goals.

A new program of wildlife enhancement has been initiated to provide assistance to Federal, State, local, and private agencies and organizations, urban and rural groups and private individuals for the purpose of realizing the full potential of wildlife resources with intial emphasis on assistance on public lands, primarily military and Indian lands, with particular attention to migratory species.

The 52-year-old Government/cooperative animal control program is being modernized. When the program first began, over 50 years ago, the ratio of man and animals necessitated an approach of practically all-out control. The tremendous increase in population-particularly during the last two decades-has brought about a drastic need to change objectives of this Bureau function. The majority of the peolpe are now showing an increasing and very encouraging interest in the nonconsumptive use of all wildlife species; included are the photographers, the bird watchers, the backyard enthusiasts, the protectionistsall served by a host of private organizations, but with no tie to the Federal Government. Neither this Bureau nor any bureau in the Federal Government has heretofore served this increasing segment of the public. The new Division of Wildlife Services was organized to meet this need.

Conferences of supervisory personnel of this Division were held in late 1965 to acquaint these employees with their new responsibilities. All memorandums of understanding with other agencies and organizations are being reviewed to assure that they are in compliance with new policy and Bureau goals. Further steps are being undertaken as rapidly as possible to expedite the implementation of the Bureau's goals to provide wildlife services to a waiting public.

The Wildlife Services activities now include portions of the Bureau's responsibilities for the national pesticides monitoring program and began sampling duck wings being collected for other purposes. Samples will be taken from each flyway and submitted for laboratory analysis to determine pesticide residue levels. Later on, starlings will be used as one of the monitoring species.

The Bureau has, in the past, worked closely with local, State, and Federal health officials. The control work done this year near Gallup, N. Mex., in the plague suppression program was a model of cooperation and will be extended in the future, working closely at the request of and with the approval of the Public Health Service to coordinate rodent and flea control work.

Plague situations are unpredictable and money is not specifically budgeted to cover this activity. It is, however, costly, and when plague occurs, we must spend whatever is necessary, obviously reducing other control activities.

Following Assistant Secretary Cain's policy statement of June 22, 1965, providing for the protection of the black-footed ferret and the control of prairie dogs in South Dakota, the Bureau took immediate action to implement the policy. Procedures for surveying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in advance of prairie dog control work were developed and resulted in the checking of 13,105 acres of reservation lands to determine the presence of black-footed ferrets. The tribal council control crew, working under the technical direction of this Bureau, treated 12,350 acres for prairie dog control following assurance that ferrets were not present.

The Bureau has assisted in field testing a number of candidate pesticides for use in wildlife control programs. Notable are the large-scale field tests of DRC 1339 for bird control in livestock feedlots and DRC 714 for pocket gopher control. Both compounds have desirable characteristics and appear to be useful tools in wildlife management programs. Through Bureau effort it appears that DRC 714 will soon be regnstered for pocket gopher control, eliminating the need for use of more hazardous products.

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Mr. DENTON. The budget estimate includes $100,000 and 10 permanent positions for your new program of wildlife enhancement. Describe for the committee the necessity for this project, and indicate just what the objectives of the program will be.

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. There are three major categories of new work: The first one I alluded to in my opening remarks in which we have a wonderful opportunity with various facets of society. It would be supported by this $100,000. I use the Indians and the Indian reservations as a specific example because we have had good success in our fishery services, and the wildlife services would be a comparable program on Indian reservations. We have a standing request, almost an irate demand from the Navajos in Arizona, to help them out with their deer management problems, and we just haven't had anybody that we could put down there to give them any help. The thing I have to make clear is that on Indian reservations, there is usually no requirement for a State hunting license, and consequently most State fish and game departments do not contribute to the management of fish or game on an Indian reservation. So this leaves the Indians right up in the air and they call on us for this help.

Now, aside from the surveys we have been called on many times to give to the public, the hunting clubs, Indian reservations, and so forth,

we are giving this organization two additional responsibilities. One, which we are calling pesticide surveillance, an activity which involves assigning men to major pesticide application programs that are proposed by an agency of the Federal Government, usually in the Department of Agriculture, and on occasion that are carried out by private industry to measure the effects of an individual project on the ground, so that we can have somebody there to identify the losses that may occur, if any.

This third part then is what we call our pesticide monitoring program. This is the program in which we will, in cooperation with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, participate in the collection of samples of wildlife which we will then assay to determine the amount of pesticide residues in these samples. We will acquire this material from various sources, and various places-fixed places, and determine in the same way that we now determine the amount of radioactivity fallout material or the amount of these chemicals in streams-geological survey is doing this sort of thing-whether the levels of pesticide residues in wildlife are going up or going down. We are not doing this for wildlife specifically, but as a measure of the character of the environment in general, it being recognized that wildlife does constitute a way to secure samples of what may be happening in places that they can't get otherwise. In other words we take a duck wing, and this is one of the things we will be assaying, he may have picked up his pesticide way up in the north country and we get them up there at that time and can tell a little bit more about what is actually happening to our environment.

Mr. DENTON. List by grade and title and insert in the record the 10 permanent positions you propose for this activity.

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. All right.

(The information follows:)

STATEMENT CONCERNING 10 NEW WILDLIFE ENHANCEMENT POSITIONS

The 10 new wildlife enhancement positions proposed to be added to the staff of the Division of Wildlife Services during fiscal 1967 are:

Central office (Washington, D.C.): one GS-13 wildlife administrator: one GS-5 secretary.

Region 1 (Portland, Oreg.): one GS-12 wildlife biologist (management); one GS-5 secretary.

Region 2 (Albuquerque, N. Mex.): one GS-12 wildlife biologist (management); one GS-5 secretary.

Region 3 (Minneapolis, Minn.): one GS-12 wildlife biologist (management) one GS-5 secretary.

Region 4 (Atlanta, Ga.): one GS-12 wildlife biologist.

Region 5 (Boston, Mass.): one GS-12 wildlife biologist.

TRANSFER OF PREDATOR AND RODENT CONTROL PROGRAM

Mr. DENTON. For animal control you are requesting $2,441,000. First, I would like to have you inform the committee the reason for the transfer of this activity.

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. Actually this activity has not been transferred into another area of responsibility. What we have done is to change the name of the Predator and Rodent Control Division. One of our reasons for doing this was the report of the Secretaries Wildlife Management Advisory Board, a group composed of a number of distinguished students of wildlife management, which made an intensive

study of the predator and rodent control operations 3 years ago, reported to the Secretary and came up with a series of recommendations, one of which was that they felt that the operation could be carried out more smoothly with a change in name. So we changed the name of the Division of Predator and Rodent Control to the Division of Wildlife Services.

At the same time we have proposed through the request for $100,000, that the overall responsibility of this group of men be enlarged so that rather than calling it a transfer, I would say that you would call it an enhancement of the operation.

Psychologically it is very important to the men themselves, in my estination, because it puts them in the position of being true wildlife managers in a broad sense rather than narrowly specialized control experts. This group will be called upon, I hope, to answer questions on how to increase the stock of wildlife, particularly migratory birds in the future, rather than just having their activities limited to giving advice on how to reduce the numbers of wildlife.

STATUS OF CONTROL PROGRAM

Mr. DENTON. Describe for the committee the current status of your control program as far as effectiveness is concerned.

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. I believe that our control program is still being carried out with a high degree of responsibility, but it is being carried out with a sense of responsibility not only to the men or the people who profit directly from it, but also to the citizens of the rest of the country. We have made a deliberate effort to recast the responsibility of this organization in a much broader sense. At the same time we are intensifying our efforts to focus needed animal control on the areas where there are severe problems. We have as you know, been operating so far this year under a reduced appropriation, and we have been hard pressed to

Mr. DENTON. We appropriated exactly what you requested.

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. Yes sir. But the point I am making is that we have been working very assiduously to try to make the shift in emphasis functional in this short time. Now I think I said last year that we didn't expect we would be able to do all of the things that we wanted to do to get our efficiency to its peak level all at once or in 1 year. It is going to take us some time to accomplish this but we have made some progress.

The thing I want to make clear is that our field personnel have been given rather explicit directions from all of us in the top level of the Bureau as well as their immediate supervisors, that we expect them to concentrate their efforts on the places where in their own judgment the greatest demand for wildlife control exists and not to spread their work just generally across the country. The result is, I hope, and I think we have some evidence of this already, that we are getting a degree of refinement in the program that we haven't had before.

We have got a long way to go, but I believe we are making progress. We are responsive to the needs of the livestock industry. I would not want for a moment there to be any suggestion that we are at all contemplating a reduction in the program that would place further stress on the woolgrowing and the cattle-raising segments of our economy,

but I will say that it has been a challenge this past year. The program has had the benefit, if you want to call it that, of a complete change in top direction. We have a new Assistant Secretary who is very much interested in this kind of a program. We have a new Director in the past year and a half, myself, who is taking a different look at things. We have brought in a new man to head up this operation, a trained wildlife management and extension specialist, Mr. Jack Berryman, who is here in the room with us today, and with all of these things being put into the overall operation it has been a very busy and, I think, fruitful year in the sense we are laying the foundation for the activities that are going to come in future years.

CONTROL PROBLEM AREAS

Mr. DENTON. Do you have a serious problem in any particular section of this country?

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. Well, I would say that we do have a serious problem in the sense that there seems to have been a general increase in the coyote population throughout the West. I base this on the reports of our field personnel who say that as far as they can tell there has been a general increase in the coyote population.

We ascribe this, however, not necessarily to the reduction in the control efforts so much as we do in the capability of the coyote to adjust to the kind of control that we try to carry out. In other words, the coyotes are getting smarter and there is probably one of the toughest things we have got to contend with. This is a general problem. I would say that the most difficult problem overall, however, is the fact that we have a program that is a controversial program-Mr. McBroom, do you happen to have some of these publications from the wildlife groups, just to give an example? I won't leave these for the record, but we receive scores of letters from people upbraiding the Secretary for destroying wildlife. Here is a magazine put out by a group known as Defenders of Wildlife, now these are well-intentioned people, nobody can dispute their motives, but the whole emphasis of this organization is to get the Federal Government out of the coyotekilling business.

Mr. DENTON. When I was in California, your man told me about an epidemic of rabies they had there. They found about 70 skunks with rabies. Two of them had bitten horses and killed them. Public Health and the local people cooperated in controlling the outbreak. They used strychnine at that particular time because of the seriousness of the situation. Of course they were concerned about poisoning doos and other animals. They finally got it under control.

RABID BATS IN BALTIMORE

Bats can also be rabid. I talked to one Government official there whose boy was bitten by a bat. He later found the bat had rabies and his boy had to take the Pasteur treatment.

The Public Health Service claims bats can transfer rabies by means other than biting. Are you aware of this problem?

Mr. GOTTSCHALK. Mr. Chairman, your knowledge of it may transcend my own but I can tell you in the city where I know that there has heon a high population of both bats and people, namely Baltimore,

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