211. The early explorers and settlers told of abundant deer in the early 1800s and yet almost in the same breath bemoaned (complain) the lack of this succulent (delicious) game animal.
212. Lewis and Clark and had experienced great difficulty finding game west of the Rockies and not until the second of December did they kill their first elk.
213. And when game moved out of the lowlands in early spring, the expedition decided to return east rather than face possible starvation.
214. David Douglas, Scottish botanical explorer of the 1830s, found a disturbing change in the animal life around the fort during the period between his first visit in 1825 and his final contact with the fort in 1832.
215. A recent Douglas biographer states:" The deer which once picturesquely (graphically) dotted the meadows around the fort were gone [in 1832], hunted to extermination in order to protect the crops."
216. Reduction in numbers of game should have boded ill for their survival in later times.
217. A worsening of the plight of deer was to be expected as settlers encroached on the land, logging, burning, and clearing, eventually replacing a wilderness landscape with roads, cities, towns, and factories.
218. Wild life zoologist Hulmut Buechner(1953), in reviewing the nature of biotic changes in Washington through recorded time, Says that "since the early 1940s, the state has had more deer than at any other time in its history, the winter population fluctuating around approximately 320,000 deer (mule and black-tailed deer), which will yield about 65,000 of either sex and any age annually for an indefinite period."
219. Great tracts of lowland country deforested by logging, fire, or both have become ideal feeding grounds of deer.
220. In addition to finding an increase of suitable browse, like huckleberry and vine maple, Arthur Einarsen, longtime game biologist in the Pacific Northwest, found quality of browse in the open areas to be substantially more nutritive.
