America’s “Global Goose-Chaser”: Nelson Gardiner Bump, the Foreign Game Introduction Program, and the Quarter-Century Quest to Renovate American Fauna

The contemporary hegemony of the discourse of “invasive species” makes willful introductions of non-native species seem to belong to the distant past. Indeed, historians have generally viewed the organized, intentional introduction of non-native species – what contemporaries called “acclimatization” – as a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Moreover, according to this narrative, acclimatization abruptly lost scientific credibility and popular support with the proliferation of unwanted species, like house sparrows and European starlings in North America, in the 1880s and 1890s. The introduction of new foreign game species – particularly birds – became a core component of America’s wildlife management regime in the twentieth century. Indeed, the American federal government, and many of its state governments, spent millions of dollars attempting new animal introductions until the late 1970s, when the now-familiar doctrine of “invasive species” rose to prominence.

I assess the persistence of animal acclimatization in America by examining the career of the biologist Nelson Gardiner Bump. Styled by the media as America’s “global goose-chaser,” Bump traversed the world for 25 years as the head of the federal Foreign Game Introduction Program (founded 1948). Ranging from South America to Northern Europe, India and Southeast Asia to Turkey, Bump investigated over 100 birds for possible introduction to America. He and his colleagues in state government wildlife departments ultimately facilitated the introduction of hundreds of thousands of individual creatures drawn from dozens of distinct species, all to generate “shootable surplus” for America’s profligate hunters. These ranged from European birds like the capercaillie to large mammals like Africa’s Barbary sheep. Throughout, Bump argued that FGIP was “slow, careful, and scientific,” thus differentiating it from the rash acclimatization attempts of the past. But Bump’s acclimatization attempts rarely succeeded, making FGIP’s legacy less one of “reason and order” – as Bump claimed – than power and hubris.