Make sure to have your voice heard on wildlife management
Through a
Decoy’s
E
ye
Our season has finally ended, or has it? The truth is, the counties that have an extended archery season hunt can archery hunt for deer until January 31. So can hunters that are hunting a few metro units. It probably isn’t a surprise to anyone that there isn’t a metro unit in our area.
For our area, the deer, turkey, grouse, and pheasant closed last Sunday at the end of shooting hours. It can be difficult to keep track of all the different seasons, season dates, and what season applies to what zone. That, however, is wildlife management at current. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is what it is and depending upon how you are looking at it, this can be any and all of those at the same time. Getting all of us to agree on anything about wildlife management has less of a chance then the Vikings winning a Super Bowl. I just couldn’t resist that.
Our North American system of wildlife management far and away exceeds any other system anywhere in the world at any time. It’s designed to do several things that allow wildlife to flourish, and allow us common folk a fair chance of hunting, fishing, trapping, viewing, and otherwise enjoying and utilizing the resource for sustainability. It also gives us a say.
The consensus of the say, or the scientific proof may not be what we like, but we have a say. Where our ancestors immigrated from, having a say just didn’t exist.
There are some from time to time that go beyond the rules and laws, that’s where game wardens come in. But when things are up for discussion, before they become rules and laws, we have a say. And if enough people agree and ask for a re-evaluation of rules and laws, we get a say in that too.
Kind of like the proposed update to the Wolf Management Plan. I might have poked a little fun at the joy of reading the whole plan. It’s had a bumpy road. I pointed out that since some groups of us common folks exercised their say, some changes to the process were made.
There are some things I like in the plan. Like the part advocating for management of maintaining a proper balance of early successional forest. This is important for many species including several species of Neotropical songbirds that nest in regenerating forest.
But sportsmen’s groups have a lot of things they don’t like about this proposed plan. There has been plenty published about this already. A simple Google search should steer anyone to those articles. Maybe you agree with them, maybe you don’t. One of the things that a sportsmen’s group that was on the committee pointed out was that they felt that there were certain things put in the plan that only wolf advocate groups from the sunbelt part of the state supported. Wolves don’t live there. They live here. Wolf advocate groups do not support the hunting of wolves – they probably don’t support hunting at all; but their voices have led to several proposed changes. Another bone of contention is the lack of a public hearing on this.
The point is we get a say in this plan right now. All we have to do is jump on the internet for a few minutes and scream from our mountain top. You know who doesn’t like that we get a say in all of this? Anti-hunters, that’s who. They don’t want you to be able to hunt or trap wolves. They don’t care if your livestock are predated upon. They don’t want you to be able to hunt deer, turkey, grouse, or defend your castle from red squirrels. They don’t want you to be able to trap any animal. They most definitely don’t want you to have a say and most especially they don’t want you to voice it. That’s food for thought.
This is a good time of the year to take a little time to say your piece.
As for this recently ended hunting season, I rate it a pretty good one from my perspective. We had plenty of opportunities for great hunting. We hunted the weather and the situation we were given. That it included one of the best days of grouse hunting in many years on a bad weather snowy and wet day. It included an epic late season duck hunt. The deer hunt was above average. It was what it was. Nothing more and nothing less.
