Fittingly, the Act's chief sponsors were a Senator from Nevada, Key Pittman, and a Representative from Virginia, A. Willis Robertson. The Pittman-Robertson Act, as it came to be called, sped through Congress and was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on September 2, 1937. From a modest beginning, the Pittman-Robertson program has grown with the economy and the human population of our country. By now it has channeled nearly $1.7 billion in Federal excise tax receipts, augmented by some $600 million from the States, into activities to restore wildlife. The projects include State acquisition of acreage needed to bring wildlife back, research into wildlife requirements and problems, active management of habitats, and development of scientific ways to enable wildlife and people to share our land in harmony. The program has strengthened State governments and built wildlife management into a respected profession.

"This revised edition is not an expanded version of the original, summarizing, for example, the dozens of studies that hve been made of the productivity of various subpopulations of the "Giant Canada Goose" since its rediscovery. Rather, the main objectives of this revised, slightly enlarged edition are to redefine the range of this race as it was originally understood and to correct earlier assumptions based on the literature as to racial identity of peripheral populations."--Page xvii.