The Secretary of the Interior was given the responsibility for implementing and enforcing the treaty's provisions. Primary Management Authority over all migratory game birds, control of all depredations by protected migratory birds, and research related to life histories and management needs was vested first in the Bureau of Biological Survey and then in it's successor the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS.) From the 1920's until the 1970's migratory birds were the primary purpose of FWS refuges, land acquisition, law enforcement, research, and the second priority (after western stock protection from predators on public lands) for FWS damage control employees.

In the late 1960's FWS employees worked with UN and IUCN employees to adopt the IUCN Red Book as the predecessor to the Endangered Species Act that they drafted and lobbied through Congress in the early 1970's along with the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The early interactions between these Federal bureaucrats and their UN counterparts focused on the "lack" of Federal protection (even though they were doing just fine under State government authorities) for cormorants, hawks, owls, and pelicans. They contrived to show a "need" for new bird treaties with Japan and the Soviet Union since we also "shared" birds with them in the North Pacific. The treaties sailed through (it was the sunrise of environmental awareness and concern) with the hawks and owls and cormorants and pelicans listed even though only a few of those species were "shared" with the Japanese or the Russians. The other two treaties (Mexico and Canada) were subsequently adjusted to cover all the same species.

In the 1970's FWS began to sense a new role with great power and funding potential. As public evidence of it's new role "saving" "Endangered Species" and "Marine Mammals" FWS began shedding it's reputation as a manager of birds "for the gun." An early move in this direction was "restoring the Giant Canada Goose in the upper Midwest. This was not for "the gun" but for the environment and urban and semi-urban nature lovers that were known to be supportive of the new FWS role. Permits for towns like Rochester, Minnesota were issued to breed and release Canada Geese (a protected migratory bird.) Other cities and golf courses and parks soon wanted the "beautiful birds" for their area. Permits were issued and what were mostly medium to large (Canada geese, like humans, have a wide variety of sizes) Canada geese began popping up all over the Midwest and the East. FWS no more knew what they were getting into than they do about wolf introductions or waterfowl contamination of heavily used marshes. Studies about wild Canada geese like studies of wild wolves are no more a gauge to their behavior or food habits in urban areas than observations of killer whales in the Aleutians are to a killer whale from Seattle living in a tank in Florida. So the rest is, as they say, history. Overpopulating and non-migratory (resident) Canada geese for the first decade were trucked from Dulles airport or Connecticut golf courses to Georgia and West Virginia. Sometimes they beat the FWS employees back to their home and sometimes they stayed on a reservoir or an industrial park pond or on a local creek or even in swimming pools. By the 1980's FWS had to abandon moving all of the overpopulating Canada geese (wolf-lovers and rural residents and suburban dog owners take note) because of costs and the sheer magnitude of the problem. Permits were no longer even considered. Concurrent with this debacle, uncontrolled cormorant populations ballooned in the Mississippi watershed and on the Great Lakes. Catfish farmers, hatchery operators, sport fishermen, and commercial fishermen all began to howl. Like the similarly unmanaged North Atlantic seals the cormorants obvious impact on sport fish, commercial fish, hatcheries, and human health around colonies was denied and urban residents came to believe that any reduction in their record numbers was tantamount to endangering the birds with "extinction."