Pennsylvania Game News - February 2020 - 15

tic heavy goshawk migrations
inspired goshawk bounties,
Todd believed a "growing scarcity of ruffed grouse," also had
influenced the goshawk bounty.
What bothered Todd more than
the goshawk bounty was the
number of protected hawks
that were shot in mistake of
goshawks.
"The results of this act were
precisely those that its sponsors
had hoped for: it cost the state
very little, since comparatively
few goshawks were actually
killed; but large numbers of
other species were sent in by
those who knew no better,"
Todd wrote in Birds of Western
Pennsylvania.
But at $5 per goshawk, with
bounties paid on more than
2,000 goshawks over this fouryear period, it's clear the bounties cost plenty. With inflation,
that 1934 five-spot had the value
of $90 today.
Newspaper accounts substantiated Todd's concerns: many
hunters clearly hadn't a clue
how to differentiate raptors. A
1929 article from the Lebanon Daily
News covered how more than 100 raptors were submitted to the Game Commission for goshawk bounty; only seven
were goshawks, or goshawk fledglings.
So, countless other birds of prey died as
mistake kills.
But it seems unlikely the Game
Commission paid bounties on birds that
weren't goshawks.
That something so wrong occurred at
a time when America watched Rosalie
Edge rescue migrating hawks from the
annual fall gunneries assembled to shoot
FEBRUARY 2020

raptors as they passed Hawk Mountain
seemed incredulous. But it truly still was
business as usual.
And with the support of organized
hunting clubs and associations committed to bringing game back, bounties
were going nowhere.
Pressured by Gov. Gifford Pinchot
and Pittsburgh naturalist Bayard H.
Christy in the early 1930s to repeal the
goshawk bounty, the Board of Game
Commissioners responded that the
statute providing bounties on goshawks
"...was not introduced, nor sponsored,
at the instigation of the Game Commission." The agency's involvement was
limited to paying bounties on qualifying
goshawks.
In 1937, the Game Commission
through a recodification of the Game
Laws, received authority to establish
its own regulations. With that new
privilege, at its July meeting, the Board
of Game Commissioners repealed the
bobcat bounty and dropped the goshawk
bounty from $5 to $2. Then, it created
a great-horned owl bounty: $2 for each
adult, $1 for fledglings.
Bounties were still needed, as far
as the Pennsylvania Federation of
Sportsmen's Clubs was concerned. The
organization at its annual convention
on Feb. 12, 1940 supported a continued
bounty on goshawks, as well as removing protection on all hawks - excepting
"sparrow hawks."
Todd didn't.
"Birds of prey have just as much right
to exist as have game birds, and no sound
and scientific conservation policy would
conceivably discriminate one in favor
of the other," he wrote in his Birds of
Western Pennsylvania.
The goshawk bounty remained on
the books until the 1950-51 license year,
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Pennsylvania Game News - February 2020

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