Wildlife Transplants & Population Management

Manipulations of native wildlife and their habitats are the most common form of intentional human interference in wilderness. The Wilderness Act recognized the value in keeping certain areas free from overt human influence, and this untrammeled quality extends to native wildlife as one of the key elements of Wilderness character. Allowing natural processes to operate freely is one of the defining characteristics of wilderness that make it different from any other undeveloped landscape.

The manipulation of wildlife through habitat modifications, population and predator control measures, transplants, and intrusive scientific research methods should only occur if the action is demonstrated to be the minimum necessary for the administration of the Wilderness and protection of one or more components of Wilderness character. Commonly proposed projects that are unrelated to protecting Wilderness include transplanting additional animals to augment populations of a game species already present in the area, transplanting non-indigenous species into an area, capturing and radio collaring wildlife for scientific research that is unrelated to protecting the area’s Wilderness character, and constructing water developments in an attempt to artificially augment populations of game species such as deer, bighorn sheep, or game birds in arid areas.

Activities that are incompatible with Wilderness values and not related to wilderness protection but that may be interesting or desirable from a scientific or game management perspective should be conducted outside the Wilderness when possible, or not at all if wilderness is the only available location. The Wilderness Act did not intend that Wilderness values should take a back seat whenever other desired projects come along that are incompatible with Wilderness. Helicopters, water developments, and intrusive research methods such as radio collars should not be used to manage non-endangered wildlife in wilderness.

Natural processes should prevail in determining the relative abundance and diversity of wildlife species. The reintroduction of extirpated species may be appropriate where human actions have eliminated an indigenous species, where habitat conditions are suitable, and where the population will be self-sustaining. In addition, natural recolonization should always be supported and have priority over overt reintroduction.

Projects aimed at intentionally manipulating wildlife are degrading to an area’s Wilderness character. In Wilderness, the earth and community of life are to remain untrammeled by intentional human interference. This is part of the educational value of wilderness — the opportunity to observe how nature unfolds when humans resist interfering with natural processes, and, perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to observe how it affects us when we restrain ourselves from interfering. Many Wildernesses are too small to portray the functions of an entire ecosystem, but no wilderness is too small to learn how it affects our humanity when we exercise humility and restraint and experience ourselves as part of nature, not in domination of it. The Wilderness Act defines Wilderness in part as “an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence…which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions…”