Federal wildlife bureaucracy served game species rather than most wild species until 1974

Evidence

The administrative obstacles were formidable. The principal concern of the federal fish and wildlife bureaucracy was the management of public refuges, not the use of private property. The agency’s mandate also neglected the vast majority of the nation’s wild species. From 1957 to 1974, the Fish and Wildlife Service was called the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, and the name made clear the limits of the agency’s responsibilities: The bureau had to be far more concerned about trout and quail than opossums, bluebirds, or salamanders. Throughout the 1950s, indeed, the agency’s director of research could not secure funding for work on urban wildlife. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 840

Categorization

• QUESTION: Charting when ‘nongame’ wildlife gained federal mandate mirrors the pattern of gradual expansion of conservation scope to private property seen across this book.
• XREF: connects to: Growing wildlife bureaucracy coincided with grizzly retreat from the lower states — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 706