500 years of American wildlife.

In 1492, a wildlife menagerie of the first order roamed across America. Bird flocks darkened the sun, rambling herds spread to the horizon, streams teemed with fish, and large predators culled the weak and young. It was, quite simply, one of the greatest collections of wild animals ever seen on earth, a bestial assemblage rivaled only on Africa's Serengeti. As Christopher Columbus' ships lay at anchor 500 years ago this autumn, the wild nations of the newly discovered America reigned supreme.

America, of course, had been "discovered" long before by the ancestors of the people Columbus took to calling "Indians." But Native Americans--with their primitive hunting instruments, low numbers, and simple lifestyle--had little effect on wildlife. The arriving strangers would.

To the often impoverished colonists, wildlife meant table fare and clothing. A man could feed his family for a long time on a whitetail deer, and the hide made a tough leather coat. Naive turkeys strolling through the barnyard proved to be easy, tasty targets. Animal furs kept many a pioneer baby warm.

But even in the beginning, some Europeans looked at America's wildlife bounty and saw profit. They guessed-- correctly--that the wealth of this continent lay in the living products of the land, not in hidden gold or spices. Almost immediately, fishermen began working the offshore waters, trappers plied the stream banks, and market hunters prowled the woods.

Unaccustomed to humans, some species were doomed from the beginning. In 1534, explorer Jacques Cartier encountered' numerous large, flightless fowl on the rocky islands in the north Atlantic. Totally unwary, the great auks dumbly stood their ground and let Cartier's crew club them to death.

Soon great auks became a favorite food of New World sailors, who sometimes stretched a spare sail from ship to shore and simply herded the birds into an on-board butcher shop. The great auk became the first North American species driven to extinction by humans.

Settlers shipped deer hides to Europe by the boatload. Thousands of egrets, swans, and other elegant birds died so their plumes might adorn ladies' hats. Beaver skins literally became interchangeable with money. Every public eatery put wild game on the menu. And no one could see an end to it all. Always, more lay over the next hill--more wilderness, more forest, more game, more fur, more land, more everything.

Market hunting grew to a large, legitimate industry. People treated professional deer slayers the way they might a meat packing plant today. The trapper was like a farmer harvesting a crop. Shooting 100 ibises a day for their plumes was the same as cutting trees for homes. No one knew the word "conservation." The notion of limits and restraint was not part of the prevailing ethic.

And it's easy to see why. The land was indeed immense and the wildlife incredibly bountiful. Passenger pigeons, for example, traveled in huge flocks that blackened the skies and created their own wind. One Wisconsin pigeon roost covered 750 square miles and contained an estimated 136 million birds. Nationally, passenger-pigeon numbers may have topped five billion, possibly the largest single-species avian assemblage the world has ever seen.

On the prairie, up to 60 million bison formed the biggest collection of large animals ever to tread the globe. Colonel Richard Dodge, a prominent frontiersman, told of a running herd of bison 25 miles wide that took five days to pass his observation post. Many pioneers reported traveling 100 miles or more through a single mass of grazing bison.

Other species also prospered. Forty million pronghorn antelope graced the plains. Ten million turkeys inhabited the woods. Sixty million beaver plied the streams. A single prairie-dog town in Texas housed an estimated 400 million residents. Elk numbered 10 million. And on and on.

But even the most plentiful species could not withstand the juggernaut of white settlement. Homesteaders, market hunters, the Army, and recreational shooters hacked away at the teeming bison masses, and by 1890 the bison millions had been reduced to a few hundred. (They might have disappeared entirely had it not been for the existence of private herds.)

Farmers shot the ravenous passenger pigeons on sight, and men collecting meat for restaurants clubbed the birds to death in their roosts, blasted them with shrapnel-filled cannons, and plucked the flightless young from their nests. The clearing of hardwood forests destroyed their habitat, and in just a few decades, the passenger pigeon's billions had been reduced to zero. The last living member of the species died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914.

Predators also suffered greatly in early America, With trap, gun, and poison, fearful pioneers methodically drove wolves, cougars, and grizzlies from most of their habitat into whatever inaccessible wilderness remained. Even smaller predators--coyotes, bobcats, hawks, and the like--were treated as vermin, and many states put bounties on their heads. Livestock and game animals were good; predators were bad. It was that simple.

As the country lurched its way through the 19th century, America gradually began to question the precept of unlimited wildlife. Pronghorn populations dipped to 25,000, turkeys to 20,000, whitetails to 300,000, elk to 50,000, and beaver to 100,000. Slowly it sunk into the American psyche that protection must replace exploitation, and a U.S. conservation ethic was born.

At the urging of sport hunters, states began passing laws to prohibit spring waterfowl shooting, boat-mounted battery guns, plume collecting, and eventually all market hunting. Next came closed seasons for hunters and the revolutionary notion of daily bag limits, concepts embraced by the emerging conservationist/hunter wildlife constituency. State agencies emerged to implement these laws, and/ederal statutes and agencies looked after migratory species. Finally, wildlife had legal standing.

Another boon for wildlife was the growing cadre of conservationist leaders coming to prominence--Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, William Hornaday, George Grinnell, John Muir, and others. Like a huge ocean liner that takes a long time to stop, the national philosophy of wildlife exploitation had finally ground to a halt--and even started to reverse course.

Still, something was missing: science. Though many governments and individuals sought to preserve wildlife, they didn't really know how to do it. In 1906, for example, authorities set out to protect the declining mule-deer population on the Kaibab Plateau in Arizona by banning hunting and launching a war on predators. The Kaibab deer population skyrocketed from 3,000 to 100,000, but in 1924 nearly two-thirds of those animals died of starvation caused by their overpopulation. (See "The Great Kaibab Deer Die-Off," American Forests, May/June 1991.)

The solution to ill-advised, knee-jerk wildlife regulation came from a quiet Wisconsin biologist, Aldo Leopold. In the 1920s and '30s, Leopold pioneered the creation of a technique called wildlife management. This new science, which for the first time looked at wild animals not only as individual species but as components of a larger environment, rapidly became the tool of wildlife authorities everywhere. Wildlife habitat gradually grew in importance, as resource managers realized that preservation of forests, wetlands and prairies meant the preservation of wildlife as well.

in 1937, sport hunters added financial teeth to this concept by asking the federal government to tax their equipment and use the funds to manage the nation's wildlife. To date, the resulting Pittman-Robertson Act has raised $2 billion for America's wildlife. Other legislation-the Duck Stamp Act, the Lacey Act (prohibiting the sale or interstate shipment of illegally taken game), and the Endangered Species Act, to name a few--also championed wildlife's cause.

Private groups have taken up the wildlife banner, too. Names like the National Wildlife Federation, Izaac Walton League, Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation have become well known in and out of conservation circles.

The recent environmental movement also has been good for wildlife, portraying all species as natural parts of the whole. Predators, for example, are rarely despised these days. Rather, we now accept them as key elements of and aesthetic equals in the natural order.

Still, challenges remain. Farmland habitat mosaics turn to black desert monocultures. Forests disappear. Prairie grass becomes a parking lot. The wild residents try to cope, but not always successfully. Black-looted ferrets, California condors, and others teeter on the edge of oblivion. Salmon are disappearing from Northwest streams.

But at the nation's half-millennium mark, the status of America's wildlife is mostly upbeat. No nation treasures its wild members more. Bison have lumbered back from near extinction. Pronghorns are again plentiful on the plains. Elk have returned in large numbers. Whitetails are ubiquitous. Conservationists have relocated wild turkeys to every region. Cougar numbers in the West are way up. And on and on. Perhaps the biggest success, though, has been the hard-earned realization that wild creatures need habitat, that they truly are fruits of the land.

Wildfire today enjoys a newfound prominence. Hunting, fishing, birdwatching, and wildlife photography provide big boosts to many state economies. And the latest bestial buzzword is "watchable wildlife"--just looking at wild animals. Imagine that! Wild creatures that serve humanity just by existing. Wildlife with inherent value. Wildlife that doesn't need to be exploited. We've come a long way in 500 years.

Gary Turbak is a Montana-based writer specializing in wildlife topics.