Wildlife manager, or miner?

“America’s good fortune can’t possibly last longer than her natural resources.”  - Will Rogers

Natural resources come in two basic flavors: renewable and non-renewable.   An additional dichotomy is the two basic approaches to handling such resources: to mine, or to manage.   Herein is a plea toward the latter as it relates to wildlife management.

Most of our energy sources fall into the non-renewable category.  It is unrealistic to think of replenishing the state’s wealth of oil and natural gas, at least not in our lifetimes or multiples thereof.   We speak of mining these assets.  We may mete out the rate at which the reserves are tapped, but we don’t speak of replenishing them.  Our management of such resources is to seek their wise use, and to minimize their waste.  Alternatively we seek to replace petrochemicals with solar and wind-powered technologies.  These are the fields to which the pure sciences of chemistry, geology, and physics are well tailored.

But most of our talk of conservation is geared to the renewable natural resources.   Our water, soil, forests, rangelands, and wildlife.  These are the fields to which ecology, the study of interrelationships among organisms and their environment, are prerequisite.  

Some renewable resources, like soils, are replenished at minuscule rates, so again our management hinges more on wise use (i.e., minimize erosion) than regeneration per se.  The Mollisols (prairie soils) were created over thousands of years, and the organic matter therein has sustained cornfield and cowman for the last two hundred years.   Those who used the first John Deere steel plows to cut the prairie sod speak of the prairie’s reluctance to yield its rich organic matter.  The bluestem roots reportedly popped like piano wires.  

“The outstanding discovery of the twentieth century is not radio, or television, but the complexity of the land organism.”  - Aldo Leopold

Just as we learn the significance of mulch to our garden, so we’ve learned the importance of leaving sufficient litter on our grazing lands to slow water, cool the soil surface, and provide a source of organic matter back to the soil.  Hence the trends in recent years to minimum tillage farming.  But in many respects we have been poor students of the ecology of the soil.  The rhizosphere could indeed be our most important cog in our endeavor to be good land stewards.

“There is as yet no social stigma attached with a wrecked forest, a gullied farm, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the kids to college.  Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.”  - Aldo Leopold

But I am sidetracked; my assignment was to address one of our most renewable resources, that of our wildlife.   And what a tradition it is in Texas.  Thanks to a long legacy of good land stewardship, law enforcement, and an economic incentive to entice landowners (e.g., hunting leases), these are indeed the “good ol’ days” for many species of wildlife.  There are likely more wild turkeys and white-tailed deer at this time than ever before.  But there are also many examples of abuse and greed, with threeawns offering moot testimony to “what might have been.”

I encourage my students to gorge themselves on the readings of Aldo Leopold.  A contemporary of Will Rogers (although I don’t know the two ever met), Leopold blended ecology, natural history, stewardship, and agriculture into very readable messages.  His chastisements of the slow rate at which conservation was being applied to the back forty are perhaps as timely today as they were in the 1930s.  His two classics “A Sand County Almanac” and “Game Management” are available in many bookstores, or on the Internet. This doctor prescribes these writings ad libitum for all who make their living off the land.  

The preface of Leopold’s 1933 textbook Game Management summarized the tools of wildlife management not as rocket science, but as everyday icons.  “Game can be restored by creative use of the same tools which heretofore destroyed it - axe, plow, cow, fire, and gun.”  

He further defined management as the “purposeful and continuing alignment” of these forces.  Hence our lesson for the day.  How do we apply the “axe, plow, cow, fire, and gun” as building tools in a purposeful way to enhance wildlife habitat on our property?

Leopold used the “axe” as a metaphor for forestry practices, but it’s more appropriate to regard it as brush control for Texas ranchers (except for those in Pineywoods).  Brush control, like the rest of these tools, can be either one of the best, or the worst, things that happen to wildlife habitat.  The dose makes the poison.  Changing economics over the last fifteen years have elevated the importance of wildlife-based recreation (i.e., hunting leases) for many Texas ranchers.  Accordingly, the prevailing paradigm of “brush eradication” yielded to “brush control”, then to “brush management”, and increasingly to today’s philosophy of “brush sculpting.”  AS you contemplate brush management, adhere to the carpenter’s lament and “measure twice and saw once.” 

The “plow” broadly connotes farming, and inherently the various Farm Bill programs (e.g., Conservation Reserve Program [CRP]).   The plow can be used at the micro-scale to promote soil disturbance that fosters forbs, which are a staple in the diets of many species of wildlife.  At broader scales, the extent of CRP changed millions of acres of cropland to permanent grasslands.  As with brush control, the extent to whether the plow is an asset or liability hinges on the degree to which wildlife habitat needs were addressed when the practice was implemented.  Recent Farm Bills have become progressively more wildlife-friendly.  A visit with your local Natural Resources Conservation Service may reveal attractive cost share incentives to implement various conservation practices.

The “cow” implies livestock grazing in the broadest context.  Here we seek to understand the utility of various plant communities, and how we can use livestock to achieve the desired level of grass, forbs, and brush.   The grazing toolbox may include the season of grazing, the distribution of livestock across the landscape (i.e., spot grazing), and the kind and class of grazing animal (e.g., stockers versus cows).   But the locking pliers therein revolve around stocking rates.  An understanding of these tools allows to graze in a prescription manner to accomplish specific objectives.  But, we must appreciate that tradeoffs occur between livestock and wildlife, and that we cannot maximize production of both simultaneously.  I encourage ranchers to examine such tradeoffs under the brim of a camouflaged cowboy hat.  

Leopold’s “fire” was acknowledging in the 1930s what most of us didn’t appreciate until the 1980s (if then!), i.e., Smokey the Bear’s message that painted fire as a universally destructive force, was suspect at best.   Led by Dr. Henry Wright at Texas Tech, we’ve learned that fire can be a positive, inexpensive tool for managing rangeland vegetation, if you know when to say when.  The timing and intensity of a prescribed fire can be manipulated through a knowledge of fire behavior, weather conditions, and fuel loads.   For rangelands east of the 100th meridian (roughly a 20 inch annual rainfall line), there are few tools that can match the results of a timely fire for enhancing rangelands for livestock and wildlife.

The “gun” is aimed more at habitat management viz-a-vis the control of deer and their kin that have the ability to exceed the grazing capacity of the range.  Here the manager’s responsibility should be to understand the concept of carrying capacity, and how to recognize the mostly theoretical concept as if affects hackberry and skunkbush on the back forty (i.e., “browse lines”).  At the other end of the “gun” spectrum, is the ability (and willingness) to limit the harvest.  Hence season and bag limits.  

“The best fertilizer is the footprint of the farmer.”  - Anonymous

If I could condense the difference between a wildlife manager and a wildlife miner to its essence, it would be their relative interest, hence involvement, in the wildlife happenings on their property. The manager should be aggressive in his endeavor to study his production system, i.e., the plants and animals that inhabit the ranch.   He should be interested in inventory procedures, monitoring techniques, and to seek continuing education as we learn more about the ecology of our rangelands, and its products.   

The TEXNAT website (http://texnat.tamu.edu) offers a good starting point for assimilating information.  Various symposia proceedings are available there that summarize brush and grazing management regimes and their applications as habitat management tools.