Old rules offer glimpse of past, hope for future
Regulations from ’62 reveal progress in wildlife management, public policy
Maybe someone in 2068 will dig through a drawer in a forgotten desk or some other long ignored nook and find an old and, by then, very quaint paper booklet — a copy of the 2015-16 Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Outdoors Annual.
If that person reads even some of the 112-page digest holding the rules and regulations that governed recreational hunting and fishing in the state 53 years earlier, especially if that person is old enough to have been alive in 2015 and spent time afield with rod or gun, the experience is likely to prove sobering and maybe depressing but, ultimately, enlightening and, if they are lucky, encouraging.
At least that’s what I came away with after discovering and poring over a copy of the 53-year-old equivalent of today’s Texas Outdoors Annual. Reading the 35-page “Digest Supplement, Game and Fish Regulations, State of Texas, September, 1962,” produced by the Game and Fish Commission of Texas, precursor to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, was like opening a time capsule. Looking back at a Texas very different from today offers a perspective of how far wildlife and fisheries management and public policy related to wildlife resources have progressed over the past half-century. It also illuminated how the state’s fisheries and wildlife populations have changed (some for the better, some for the worse) and how the attitudes of anglers and hunters have similarly evolved. Time of change
Texas in 1962 was convulsing with change, the post-war years’ explosive growth having transformed the state from a majority-rural population of 6.4 million in 1940 to 10 million residents, 75 percent of them living in urban areas. But while much of Texas was rocketing into the Space Age, the approach to hunting and fishing regulations and management of fish and wildlife resources struggled to shake the state’s frontier mentality. The 1962 hunting and fishing regulations reflect that duality.
Take the state’s list of bird species considered “unprotected” and legal to be killed in any number and at any time. It included “buzzards, ricebirds, blackbirds, white pelicans, roadrunners, golden eagles, great horned owls, woodpeckers, shrikes, jays and some hawks.” Today, all of those birds are, rightly, wholly protected by state and federal law. But 53 years ago, long-held ignorance and unfounded belief that those birds were somehow detrimental to other wildlife or otherwise without value held sway.
The 1962 fishing regulations were shockingly liberal and showed that the relatively new field of science-based fisheries management had made only slight impacts on how recreational fisheries were viewed.
All anglers between 17 and 65 years of age were required to purchase an annual fishing license, a rule that had been expanded in 1957 to include saltwater as well as freshwater anglers. The license fee was $2.15, and in 1962 almost 850,000 Texans bought one.
That license allowed anglers in most of the eight “regulatory regions” into which the state was divided to take as many as 15 largemouth bass per day. In most of the regions, there was no minimum length requirement for largemouths. In a couple, the minimum was a whole 7 inches. Saltwater free-for-all
At least there were bag limits on some freshwater fish. There were no limits or minimum lengths on any saltwater species. Anglers fishing Texas bays could catch and keep as many speckled trout, redfish, flounder and any other marine fish as they could land.
And fishers weren’t limited to catching those saltwater fish on rod-and-reel. Although using seine nets was prohibited in many of the state’s bay systems, they were perfectly legal to use along the beach front. The only restriction was the net could not be more than 2,000 feet — more than six football fields — in length. And those nets could take hundreds of trout and reds in a single set; I know because I watched seines used along the Bolivar beachfront in the 1960s and ’70s, before steep declines in many coastal fish species, documented by the state’s growing staff of coastal fisheries biologists, triggered the Texas Legislature in 1979 to ban the use of entangling nets in all marine waters.
Hunting regulations were a near incomprehensible mess. With the exception of migratory game bird rules, set by federal law and applied statewide, hunting regulations in the state’s 254 counties were a patchwork often decided by whims of county officials.
While the Game and Fish Commission set basic statewide hunting regulations for resident game such as deer, quail and turkeys, those rules wholly applied to barely half of the state’s counties. In 125 counties, county commissioners decided which game animals it would allow to be hunted and set season lengths and other rules. That didn’t change until 1983, when the Legislature passed the Texas Wildlife Conservation Act, placing all counties under TPWD’s regulatory authority.
One amusing, if ultimately senseless, effect of this system of having hunting regulations set by political whim instead of science-based reasoning was that some of the “nonregulatory” counties had hunting seasons for game animals that didn’t exist in those counties. In 1962, there were bear seasons in dozens of Texas counties where black bears had been extirpated decades before.
More deleterious, county commissioners in some of these “non-regulatory” counties set white-tailed deer hunting seasons to run only a week or so while adjacent counties under Game and Fish Commission rules saw a much longer season. And different counties had different definitions of a “legal” buck. In some counties, a buck had to have a forked antler to be legal; shooting “spikes” was prohibited.
The deer season in most of the state opened Nov. 16 and closed Dec. 31. The annual bag limit in most counties was two bucks.
And the idea of taking antlerless deer — does — being pushed and expanded by state wildlife biologists was a new and very controversial issue. Deer hunters wanting to take does had to get a stateissued antlerless deer tag from the landowner, who had to apply to the state for the permit. Many landowners opposed taking antlerless deer and refused to apply for the tags. Fewer deer
While deer hunting was very popular in Texas in 1962, it was not nearly as huge a draw as it is 53 years later. A big reason was that Texas held a lot fewer deer. Texas’ deer herd, which had been whittled down to maybe 200,000 or fewer in the early 1900s, was slowly being rebuilt through stockings by Game and Fish Commission staff.
A half-century later, Texas holds an estimated 4 million whitetails. Something worked.
The 450,00 hunters who spent $3.15 for a resident hunting license in 1962 saw quail seasons that ran Nov. 1-Dec. 31 in South Texas and Dec. 1- Jan. 16 in much of the rest of the state. The quail bag limit was 12 birds, three fewer than allowed today.
Turkey hunting was allowed only during a fall season that generally ran concurrent with deer season, with a one- or two-bird season limit. There was no spring turkey season.
There was barely a duck season in 1962. North America’s duck population had crashed as a severe drought withered the birds’ northern nesting grounds. Duck season, statewide, ran just 25 days, Dec. 6-30. The daily bag limit was two ducks, and redheads and canvasbacks were protected. It was the shortest duck season and lowest daily bag limit Texas waterfowlers had ever seen or have seen since. A new appreciation
When I was a kid in elementary school in 1962, all of these hunting and fishing rules, what they meant and how the world was changing went right over my burr-haircut head. What I do remember is following father and grandfather and great-uncles through a cathedral-like East Texas forest as they taught me things about the woods and squirrels and deer and life. And days spent on lakes and ponds, learning how not to get my knuckles busted by a direct-drive baitcasting reel and how great it feels to fool a bass into slamming a topwater plug.
Reading that old digest and looking back at how things have changed over those 53 years makes me appreciate that, even in a Texas holding 30 million people, there’s still the opportunity for a young person to have those same life-defining experiences. We haven’t completely screwed it up yet.
I hope someone finding a 2015 Texas Outdoors Annual 53 years from now will be able to say the same.