By Doug Leier
I feel like I'm in between. It's July and I hate to break the news, but we're well into summer and a little beyond midway through the year. If you’re like me, you’ll feel a little bit caught between prepping for fall and enjoying the heart of summer.
I also feel like we're in the middle of some interesting fish and wildlife topics and issues. A while back, speaking at a Lion's Club meeting, I started to realize that my generation of biologists and natural resource managers is in the middle of a unique fish and wildlife era.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we're in the middle of a transition in grassland habitat with the ever growing loss of Conservation Reserve Program acres. Over the next few years we’ll likely see a shift of hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland habitat into more of a grain and row crop landscape. Maybe that part is not so unique. The previous generation of biologists worked through another cropland retirement program called Soil Bank, which existed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Most Soil Bank grassland acres went back to cropland by the end of 1964, and in the 22 years following that before CRP first appeared, North Dakota’s pheasant harvest averaged about 75,000 birds a year.
Since CRP started influencing North Dakota’s landscape in 1987, the pheasant harvest has averaged about 368,000.
This time around we’re not expecting all the CRP to go back to cropland in just a few years, but hunters will soon start noticing reduced game populations.
The unique situations deal more with wildlife populations that are at historically high levels. Back in my college and high school studies on wildlife, much time and attention was given to restoration of wildlife populations. Think of Canada geese, turkeys and snow geese. Each of these now has their own success story, and in some cases the numbers are beyond where managers would prefer.
Even in big game circles, our white-tailed deer, elk, and pronghorn numbers are not only maintaining but growing. Many hunting seasons are set not to encourage growth, but to actually reduce populations.
Instead of research and management actions designed to recover populations, today’s wildlife managers are dealing with the growing phenomenon of having to reduce some wildlife populations to levels that limit negative impacts such as crop depredation.
So what does this mean? For many hunters it equates to more hunting opportunities. For snow geese, we’ve had a decade of spring conservation hunts. Canada goose hunters are now provided an early season which this year will open in August. Turkey hunting licenses have increased in many units, and a few years ago the entire state was included in turkey zones, providing more hunting areas than ever before.
What we don’t know is where the next few years will take us. Will we still be in the middle of this unique run, or will circumstances change enough so we move out toward the end?
As summer moves from middle to end, we’ll begin to find out.
Leier is a biologist with the Game and Fish Department. He can be reached by email: dleier@nd.gov
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