Golden Spreads
Dale Rollins
Texas A & M University

Last week found me cold in Amarillo.  The blue norther had hit during the night, and as I left Paducah headed northwest in the pre-dawn, I knew I was poorly dressed for the occasion.  My luncheon date was to address a group of lenders, lawyers, land entrepreneurs, and landowners about the impacts of wildlife on land values in the Golden Spread.

I had a tie in my clothes bag, but no sports coat or blazer.  After all, I’d been out of the office for over a week, and my thoughts when I’d left San Angelo were more on quail and deer hunting, than on “work.”  The only warm outerwear I had in the truck was a camouflage sweatshirt and a fluorescent orange insulated hunting jacket.  As I wound through the hills around the headwaters of the Red River, an idea hit me that might serve double duty: to stave off the arctic wind, and to introduce my topic.  

I left the tie in my bag, grabbed my hunting coats, and attacked the situation of the moment.  When I was introduced as a leading quail expert, I whispered to myself  what I always do following such declarations “there’s a lot about quail that I don’t understand.”  I walked to the corner of the room, and in a deliberate manner, donned the camouflage sweatshirt and then the orange coat.  

Talk about a fashion clash; one reeked of visibility, the other hinted of a sense to stay hidden.

As I sported the hunter orange coat, I referred to how visible the hunting opportunities were becoming in the Texas Panhandle.  “Thar’s gold in them thar hills” I proclaimed, “and in those brushy canyons and cottonwood draws.”  It comes in six-ounce ingots called quail, and in 10-point settings atop a deer’s head.

The brushlands and canyons east of the Caprock are home to some incredible white-tailed and mule deer, as are the breaks of the Canadian that bisect the High Plains from west to east.  Game birds, including bobwhite and blue quail, wild turkey, and pheasants range throughout the tailwater pits of the plains to the cottonwood draws and sandy soils.  The playa lakes that dot the plains, to borrow a phrase from cajun Justin Wilson, are often “black black black with duck.”

The chambers of commerce for struggling communities are beginning to open their eyes to the colors of camo, orange caps, and greenbacks.  And the realtors have honed in on the lure of wildlife as a motive for land transactions like turkeys flocking to a corn feeder.   The brushiest pasture is worth more on today’s rural real estate market than the best dryland cropland.  “We don’t sell ranchers to ranchers anymore” one realtor has told me, begrudgingly acknowledging the changing of the guard relative to land values from ranching to hunting.

In these respects, the future for hunting and for landowners to capitalize on hunting in this area is indeed “bright.”

Then I removed the orange coat to reveal the camo sweatshirt.  There’s another perspective on the issue that would just as soon keep the wildlife variable more cryptic.  If you’ve had hunting access to a property for many years, for free, the writing on the wall isn’t favorable.  When you have to watch as some rich folks from the big city are hunting what was formerly “yours”, there is a sense of despair.  You don’t blame the landowner, but your situation certainly doesn’t allow you to match their antes for hunting rights.

Another group that is beginning to disdain hunter orange, and the accompanying green they sport, are stockmen who operate on leased land.   “New” landowners, who likely tow dog trailers more than goosenecks, are less likely to be compelled to turn a buck from grazing revenues, and may value the grass more for nesting cover than fodder.  The grazing lessee sometimes gets pinched.  And the inflated land values by demand for hunting has driven land prices well beyond the inflection point for anything approaching cost-effectiveness, at least using traditional economics.  But the new landowners view the venture as recreation, and just like gardening, recreation isn’t usually bound by the chains of cash flow or cost-effectiveness.

And finally, there’s the landowners themselves.  Modest by nature, they typically shun the publicity of bright orange, and would just as soon blend in to the local surroundings.  Back in 1988 I was a meeting in Throckmorton to visit with a small group (a total of eight; funny how I remember such numbers) of ranchers.  The mood was one piqued mostly by apathy, as the blossoming of deer and quail hunting for this region was just about to hit the exponential phase of its growth curve (which it has in the last several years).  One rancher asked the question “why do we want to encourage more people [by promoting the hunting] to come to Throckmorton County?   Seems to me there are plenty here already.”

Where you stand on an issue surely depends upon where you sit.  And the clothes definitely make the man, and how he views land management in today’s economy.  Our task is to tailor our existing wardrobe to best fit today’s fashion.

My message to the group from that point on was that the historical paradigm for the area’s rangelands (i.e., cattle grazing) was compatible with the new kids on the block, provided “you know when to say when.”  One can’t maximize grazing potential and nesting cover at the same time.  Similarly, it likely doesn’t make sense (cents?) to wage a vendetta against brush when there may be more bucks in a quail than a calf.

I left them with the metaphor of the camouflaged cowboy hat.  Blending the traditional paradigm (ranching cows) with the notion of ranching people, quail, and whitetails, is not a one-size-fits-all situation.  Craft your Stetson with the amount of mottling that is appropriate for your ranch goals, not only for today’s fashion, but tomorrow’s as well.  Then hold on to your hat, as the winds of change are always gusting.