Welcome to Clovis Kids Cook-off as part of our America’s Conservation & Hunting Heritage Series.
As you’ll discover in this video, our hunting heritage offers you pathways to learning about how humankind historically and presently harvests wild game, and the rewards of sustainably preparing and consuming our renewable wild resources with your clan.
Okay, so there's several great ways to enjoy and share the "truly wild", wildlife and conservation education in this show.
First, you can kick back with family or friends to watch this entire half-hour television episode to get the full content in one sitting. Kinda like enjoying a full course meal. Yum-yum.
Then there's the shorter, custom segments on the noted links below. These are the custom "classroom" or learning videos with some bonus content designed to share with your entire classroom. On these links below you'll also find lots of other educational content, including custom lesson activities for your teacher to take your entire classroom on a three to four day journey of peer-driven learning blended with fun and hands-on pathways to try outdoor pursuits yourself.
Whichever way you decide to enjoy the fun and educational content, it's a win-win way for you to get engaged with pathways to discovering more about yourself and the great outdoors.
Until then, enjoy the journey of discovery in all of the content in our America’s Conservation & Hunting Heritage Series.
Official Hunter Safety Courses for Today’s Hunter
Approved by IHEA-USA and your state hunting agency
Welcome to the Shooting Sports Challenge television show that's part of our America’s Conservation & Hunting Heritage Series airing nationally on 5 digital networks 24/7, and syndicated television in 7 states on 33 stations via ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX... plus PBS in a number of markets.
As you’ll discover in watching this program, shooting sports and our hunting heritage offers you pathways to learning about America's Model of modern wildlife management and how to discover new levels of self-confidence and focus.
Okay, so there's several great ways to enjoy and share the shooting sports and conservation education in this show.
First, you can kick back with family or friends to watch this entire half-hour television episode to get the full content in one sitting. Kinda like enjoying a full course meal. Yum-yum.
Then there's the shorter, custom segments on the noted links below. These are the custom "classroom" or learning videos with some bonus content designed to share with your entire classroom. On these links below you'll also find lots of other educational content, including custom lesson activities for your teacher to take your entire classroom on a three to four day journey of peer-driven learning blended with fun and hands-on pathways to try outdoor pursuits yourself.
Whichever way you decide to enjoy the fun and educational content, it's a win-win way for you to get engaged with pathways to discovering more about yourself and the great outdoors.
So enjoy the journey of discovery in all of the content in our America’s Conservation & Hunting Heritage Series funded by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in partnership with Safari Club International Foundation, a nonprofit org dedicated to promoting wildlife conservation across the country.
Official Hunter Safety Courses for Today’s Hunter
Approved by IHEA-USA and your state hunting agency
Many people don't realize that... even using flint-tipped spears and arrows over the past 15,000 years, early Paleo hunters over-harvested many North American big game species to the point of extinction. If you were to see these giants still roaming our landscape you would be in awe. Imagine for a moment all of these giant species that were hunted to extinction by the first primitive hunters to reach North America. Most were hunted to extinction about 3000 years after the arrival of Paleo hunters in North America (11,000 to 12,000 years ago). Research has revealed a similar pattern on continents and islands around the world of many mega-fauna hunted to extinction within 2000 to 3000 years after the of the arrival of humans.
Of course when European settlers arrived in America, there had no idea that so many species, that must have seemed endless to Paleo hunters, had been hunted to extinction. So they didn't have either the history or foresight to imagine that shooting America's wildlife could devastate their populations. For instance the passenger pigeon once numbered 3 to 5 billion at their population peak and darkened the sky. It seems impossible that unregulated market hunting combined with human changes to the landscape could impact a wildlife population that size. Yet someone shot the last wild bird in 1901 and the sole survivor died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. From billions to extinction in less than 100 years.
The American bison once blacken the American plains. When Lewis and Clack explored the west, an estimated 60 million bison roamed the plains and foothills. But the combination of market hunting and slaughter by the Army reduced the bison almost to the point of extinction by the late 1800’s.
Fortunately, the movement to preserve and protect America's wildlife, wild lands, and other natural resources occurred between 1890-1920. The conservation movement affected government policy that lead to landmark legislation that established Yellowstone National Park in 1872, Yosemite National Park in 1890, and the creation of the National Park Service in 1916. In 1901, conservationist, outdoorsman and sportsman Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States. With other conservation voices such as John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, parks and wildlife refuges began being established across the nation. Today there are now over 560 National Wildlife refuges in the U.S. And perhaps more importantly, states across the nation began regulating hunting season and harvest numbers based on wildlife conservation science.
To discover how this conservation movement helped restore wildlife populations in America over the past 100 years, watch the video here and click on the "Learn More" button below. But if you really want to wade into the past and have your entire class share in the fun of learning to manage really "wild" wildlife species, have your teacher download the free lesson below on Managing Pleistocene Megafauna. It's a serious interesting peer-driven education and a highly interactive ice-age blast to the past.
Once you've learned about the birth of conservation, you can expand your wildlife knowledge more by exploring Managing Black Bears and Managing White-tailed Deer.
This wildlife education program is made possible with support of the follow educational partners. Teachers can link to their websites for additional information and educational opportunities, such as their American Wilderness Leadership School Youth Program.
At SCI Foundation’s American Wilderness Leadership School location in Jackson, Wyoming, educators and students learn about conservation, wildlife management, and outdoor recreation through outdoor, hands-on activities. Their Hands on Wildlife (HOW) program provides educators with conservation education instructional tools they can use in hands-on instruction.
If you could have flown over North American in 1492 (when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America) you would have seen a vast wilderness, unbroken by the sweeping hand of civilization. And if you could have somehow counted all the white-tailed deer within the forests then, their numbers would have totaled about 45 million.
Now if you jumped ahead in time some 400 years to 1903 when the first plane did actually fly over Kitty Hawk, North Carolina by Wilbur and Orville Wright, you’d see that the landscape had changed dramatically. Settlers with their axes and plows had transformed many of the lush forests into farms. Settlers’ guns combined with uncontrolled market hunting had also dramatically impacted those 45 million white-tailed deer. In fact, they had been decimated to the point of only an estimated 300,000 deer in the United States by 1903. With such a downward spiral, they seemed doomed to near extinction, right?
But thanks to the birth and evolution of modern wildlife management, things changed dramatically for the white-tailed deer. Now there are about 100 times more deer, some 30 MILLION that now inhabit North America. Think about that for a moment… 100 times more deer than 100 years ago. And today, the “whitetail”, as many people call them, represent the nation’s most abundant wild game resource and one of America’s great conservation success stories… all rolled into one.
All that sounds pretty wonderful on the surface. But with that many deer sharing a limited or shrinking wild landscape with some 300 million humans creates a whole set of serious challenges for wildlife managers, public safety officials and the other species that share those limited wild places. Two reasons that whitetails have been so successful in rebounding their numbers are: 1) they are extremely adaptable to almost any wild or human-made environment, 2) they are a “keystone” species - which means they can dominate and eat so much plant matter in an ecosystem that they can adversely impact all the other species that try to share that ecosystem.
Watch the video on this page plus click on the Learn More button below to "learn lots more" about managing white-tailed deer and how wildlife managers use regulated hunting as a key tool in ecosystem management. To truly become junior wildlife managers, have your teacher download the free lessons on Managing White-tailed Deer below so the entire class can share in the science and discovery of managing your own deer herds. The links below will also help you learn how different places developed their deer management plans. And once you've learned about managing deer, expand your wildlife knowledge by exploring Managing Black Bears.
This wildlife education program is made possible with support of the follow educational partners. Teachers can link to their websites for additional information and educational opportunities, such as their American Wilderness Leadership School Youth Program.
At SCI Foundation’s American Wilderness Leadership School location in Jackson, Wyoming, educators and students learn about conservation, wildlife management, and outdoor recreation through outdoor, hands-on activities. Their Hands on Wildlife (HOW) program provides educators with conservation education instructional tools they can use in hands-on instruction.
Long before humans began inhabiting North America, bears ranged across the entire continent. Though bears co-existed with native populations of humans inhabiting North America for some 15,000 years, the arrival of European settlers rapidly reshaped the distribution of black bears. Like other wildlife resources that the settlers found in abundance, they took bears freely with traps and guns. Unfortunately, black bears represented more than just food and furs to settlers. They posed real and perceived threats to families, livestock, and crops, so they shot bears at will.
Besides killing individual bears, the settlers’ plows and axes took a lasting and wider toll. Woodcutting, burning, and clearing changed the wild habitat that the bears needed to survive. Within a 150-year period, much of America’s forests had been cut down. As the wave of human expansion changed the wooded lands into farm fields and pastures, black bears lost much of their native habitat.
Black bear populations remained in some of the more mountainous, swampy, and rugged regions. The few black bears that inhabited these regions came under the pressures of unregulated market hunting for their hides, meat, and fat. Due to their low reproductive rate, bears recover more slowly from population losses than other North American mammals. By 1900, the black bear population shrank in many areas of the country almost to the point of extinction.
Eventually, much of North America began to realize the importance of wildlife management, including the future of the black bear. By the mid 1900s, hunting seasons became heavily controlled or closed altogether, and bear restoration programs began in some states. While all this was happening, the forests that had been cut and burned decades before began to recapture the landscape. Once the wild habitat started to return, black bears began reclaiming their historic range.
Compared to some species, such as the grizzly bear, black bears proved adaptable to human development and under the protection of modern, professional wildlife management, their populations soon recovered in many areas. Beginning in the late 1980s through the start of the twenty-first century, black bear numbers increased at a rate of two percent a year continent-wide, with some states such as New Jersey and Maryland reporting five-fold increases. Though black bears have not yet reclaimed their original range across America, they have rebounded to populations of an estimated 800,000 bears spread across 37 states and all Canadian provinces... the highest population in the past 100 years.
Watch the video on this page plus click on the Learn More button below to "learn lots more" about managing black bears and how wildlife managers use regulated hunting as a key in controlling cultural carrying capacity. Have your teacher download the free lessons on Managing Black Bears below so the entire class can share in the science and discovery of managing these mysterious omnivores. The links below also provide more background on understanding black bears. And once you've learned about managing bears, expand your wildlife knowledge by exploring Managing White-Tailed Deer.
This wildlife education program is made possible with support of the follow educational partners. Teachers can link to their websites for additional information and educational opportunities, such as their American Wilderness Leadership School Youth Program.
At SCI Foundation’s American Wilderness Leadership School location in Jackson, Wyoming, educators and students learn about conservation, wildlife management, and outdoor recreation through outdoor, hands-on activities. Their Hands on Wildlife (HOW) program provides educators with conservation education instructional tools they can use in hands-on instruction.
Approved by IHEA-USA and your state hunting agency
Did you ever wonder why we sleep only one night at a time yet bears sleep for five months? How do bumblebees survive winter underground when their body temperature is just above freezing? Discover the answers by watching this Serious Science video!