Mother Nature provides all living creatures with the necessary things for their survival. Those necessary items are food, water, habitat, and the urge to reproduce themselves. Nature has it all, in her diverse ecology. But man in his arrogance and interference can change all of that.

Mother Nature is not the soft, furry, beautiful thing that the uninformed would lead you to believe. Nature can show it's wondrous and beautiful side with it's mountains, plains, and diverse waterways. But Nature can also be a cruel, unforgiving, taskmaster.

Animals in nature live by instinct alone. Weather and habitat conditions are all that stand between life, and death for any animal, bird, or insect. Mans incursion into and destruction of that habitat starts a chain of events that without further intervention of a positive nature by mankind will nearly always start a downward spiral that is twice as hard to stop, before irreversible damage is done. Denizens of forest, field, and sky must have enough room for feeding, procreation, and to escape its natural predators.

If not, then there will be a loss of life and a dwindling of overall numbers of that species. That demise is seldom quick, painless, nor humane. I don't know about you but I have seen the results of that loss of habitat and over population. Picture Mother Nature this way. Dozens or maybe hundreds of deer, with their skeletons nearly outside their skins, stumbling around suffering the effects of starvation and disease caused by loss of habitat and overpopulation, just waiting for the end of a slow painful death to occur. The Bible says that man shall have dominion over the beasts of the field and the fowls of the skies. Man can do good or he can do bad with this stewardship.

Bad would be removing thousands of acres of habitat from the animal's realm. Good would be the humane management of any species through adding lands back into its environment and the scientific cropping by hunting of a necessary number of animals or birds from any given species. This hunting while serving a scientific necessity, also gives modern man or woman a recreational break from the everyday pace of modern society, as well as pouring millions of dollars into the economy.

One way or another Mother Nature will always, eventually balance the books of nature and not always, in fact seldom, in the clean, clinical, painless way that many would like to believe. You cannot stockpile animals or birds or any other species, because Mother Nature just will not allow it.

Written by Steve Mahurin on August 19, 2000.