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Wildlife Also Struggles for Its Proper Nutrition
Part 9 of a series of 12 articles. Series title: “It’s the Soil that Feeds Us.”
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Because our wildlife cares for itself, we do not appreciate how it, too, struggles with its problems of nourishing itself completely. Only as wild animals accomplish this do they live and multiply. Otherwise, they become extinct. They live, then, in the areas which are nourishing them properly.
In our domestic animal pattern we might at first imagine that animals are merely scattered according to our accidental distribution of them. Quite to the contrary, we have pork as a fat-producing animal in Eastern United States where carbohydrates crops, like starchy corn, are its major feed. This is on soil that was originally forested. In its virgin condition that soil was producing mainly wood, or fuel, as its crop. Today it is producing mainly fuel foods and fuel crops. These are high in calorie values. They are low in protein. Even as feed for hogs, corn must be accompanied by some protein supplements.
On those soils, the original wildlife had its problems of nutrition. Wildlife in the forests tells us of its struggles for calcium and phosphorus. The porcupine in the woods of Minnesota was observed by some artists, and so sketched, as it was eating the antlers of deer dropped there. Antlers disappear quickly in the forests on limepoor soils because the other rodents, like mice and squirrels as well as the porcupine, supplement their calcium-deficient diets by calcium concentrates in the form of bones of preceding life forms. This is their struggle in order to guarantee complete nutrition.
In the same area today, cleared of most of its forests, the gray and red squirrels in our city residential areas are commonly noticed to be eating bones. Seen on the window ledge, they have been carefully observed eating old dry bones, so aged and so dry that obviously it was the bone itself that appealed to the squirrel. This suggests that the feeds produced in the neighborhood for these animals are an incomplete diet in terms of the lime and phosphate which we expect the soil to supply.
Animals Eat to Satisfy Hunger
In the northern woods on humid soils the antlers are taken for the calcium and phosphorus demanded as feed requisites in satisfying the hunger of the porcupine.
Cattle Are Capable Connoisseurs of Feed Quality
Young cattle grazed out first the corners of this barley field where the drilling out of those rounded areas doubled the application of the fertilizers. Photo by E. M. Poirot, Golden City, Missouri.
It is suggestive to note that it is during the season of pregnancy that most of these reported observations have been made. Perhaps during part of the season the struggle is not so marked, hence the animal needs only supplement by such perverted behaviors of eating the remnants of its predecessors’ bodies during a limited period of the year. Crops too low in lime and phosphate and with only fattening power as feed for hogs call for bones as supplements in case of their feeding wildlife, just as legume crops on those same soils call for lime and phosphates if they are to produce the protein-rich feed values and successful growth.
In the Western United States where high-protein wheat has been a common crop and where grasses were once the virgin vegetation, antlers of deer accumulate. It was in that area where the buffalo roamed. With the summer he moved northward, and with the winter he moved southward. He did not move much to the east of his chosen area, not even into the eastern limit of the big bluestem except possibly for Kentucky. In that state he was in limited numbers and limited area originally where the race horses have made themselves famous and established the annual derby. He was also in some of the more productive valleys of Pennsylvania to suggest that he too was struggling to find his complete nutrition. This was according to the pattern of the soil.
It has been reported that deer quickly take to burned-over forest areas on the first signs of growth recovery there. Can they recognize the ash as soluble fertilizers making the grasses and other growth more rich in the inorganic elements and thereby more proteinacious? Can this burning get rid of the excessive woodiness in the decaying organic matter that keeps the inorganic essentials tied-up in microbial life in competition with plant life? Does not the deer get out into the burned-over clearing and risk its life in the struggle for complete nutrition? Deer as marauders in our fertilized fields and well-kept gardens are risking their life in their struggle to find what they need to survive–all their fear of the human enemy notwithstanding.
The wildlife in its struggle for complete nutrition has set up its population pattern as the result of–and thereby in agreement with–the soil fertility pattern. All this tells us that our wildlife is just another crop of the soil and only as we manage the fertility of the soil to feed the wildlife will we have this animal crop in abundance.