These predators must find other prey species or starve, and during some years they may be few squirrels, mice, and other small animals to feed upon. The entire ecostructure is adversely altered and there is not the biological diversity of animal life that would exist in an unhunted natural or restored ecosystem. A few species exist to the detriment of many. In some areas where the exotic pheasant has become well established, it utilizes food, cover and space that could be used by rare threatened or endangered birds and mammals native to the habitat. This creates stress on all the animals of the forest.
Many states have spring turkey hunts.
These are often the result in the nests and eggs when incubating hens are flushed. Other species of birds and mammals are also stressed at this critical time of the year when the young of most species are being born or are about to be born. Deer management, which maintains deer population at artificially high levels for hunting, is particularly destructive because deer are large animals which consume a lot of food, and they are ecologically top-heavy. The management of deer was explained by C. W. Severringhaus and Robert W. Darrow in an article in the September-October 1976 issue of The Conservationist, the magazine of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. As a result a maximum fawn crop will be produced each summer.