With millions of acres of wildlife habitat erased each year conservation groups seek balance

One of those “memories” popped up on my Facebook page recently with a hunting photo I’d proudly posted in 2016. It featured my 9-month-old Brittany pup standing over the first wild pheasant we’d bagged as a team.

That was a great day in the field. A bird dog’s first perfect point and retrieve on a rooster is as momentous as a kid’s first home run.

But as I pondered the photo, I wanted to weep. Ranger and I had been hunting through tall grass, forbs and cattails that buffered 25 feet or so on each side of a small creek trickling through a farmer’s wheat field.

This ideal habitat mix had provided water, cover and food for all sorts of critters. Pheasants thrived there. My friend, John Roland, and I counted our blessings at having the landowner’s permission to hunt the property.

Five years later, the grass and cattails have been chiseled away so wheat can be planted right up to the edges of the creek, which has been ditched in places. The wildlife habitat is gone, and so is the wildlife.

It’s a consequence of efficient agriculture.

I don’t blame farmers. Their land is their livelihood. They must deal with weeds, pests, weather, a gantlet of regulations and staggering costs for equipment and chemicals – all while gambling on crops and markets.

When I talk to my farmer friends, I shudder at the high-stakes decisions they make every year to feed their families and the world.

But as a hunter, angler, wildlife lover, grandfather and husband of a farmer’s daughter, I wonder about what can be done for wildlife that continues to lose their home on the range. Less than 40% of the 550 million acres of historical grasslands that stretched from Alberta to Mexico remain today, according to an Audubon report.

Columbian sharp-tailed grouse, an important native food source for early settlers, once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Fewer than 1,000 inhabit Washington now, clinging to existence on about 5% of their original range.

The world got a reality check in 2019 from a study reported in the journal Science indicating that nearly one-third of the wild birds in the United States and Canada have vanished since 1970.

The staggering loss of about 2.9 billion breeding adult birds suggests the fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling, the study’s authors said in a New York Times op-ed column.

“The magnitude of losses among 300 bird species was much larger than we had expected and alarmingly widespread across the continent,” the authors wrote.

Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds. Grassland bird populations collectively have declined by 53%, or another 720 million birds.

Much of the loss is among common species. For example, the red-winged blackbird population has declined by 92 million. Western meadowlarks are down 60 million.

The declines of these birds point to a global environmental health crisis. A study in Germany, for instance, reported a decline of 82% in the midsummer biomass of flying insects over the past quarter century.

A United Nations report warns that about a million animal and plant species are in danger of extinction including 40% of the world’s amphibians.

Wetlands vital

Despite being vital to a broad spectrum of wildlife, wetlands are virtually always in the crosshairs of development. Eastern Washington has lost about 30% of its wetlands, Puget Sound 80%, and some states up to 90%.

Disheartening as it is to watch egomaniac billionaires commit megabucks to launching in their tourist spaceships, Americans of more modest means tend to be the ones attending local fundraisers for conserving marshes, forests and grasslands that make life sustainable on Earth.

Conservationist groups – many of them founded by hunters and anglers – are stepping up and making positive impacts on everything from monarch butterflies to elk.

Big money is needed to respond to habitat loss. Lobbyists for conservation legislation must take their game to state capitals and Washington, D.C.

Ducks Unlimited, for example, has conserved nearly 15 million acres of important habitats with that concept. Founded in 1937 initially to preserve breeding areas for waterfowl, the wetlands conservation group has completed more than 20,000 projects in North America.

DU is known for harnessing bulldozers to move earth for countering destruction done to wetlands habitat. “Construction conservation, that’s what we call work we do on the ground,” said Greg Green, DU’s Pacific Northwest conservation programs director.

A key to success is for many conservation groups is leveraging the money they raise locally – as much as 20-to-1– with volunteer hours, grants and partnerships with other groups and local, state and federal agencies.

Slavin Conservation Area and Saltese Flats Wetlands are two local projects where DU joined with Spokane County to restore marshes using state and federal funds. In the case of Saltese Flats, DU provided its expertise in hydrology engineering and even bought 60 important acres to complement the county’s 600 acres. Both areas are loaded with waterfowl and shorebirds in season.

Conserving wetlands is an unselfish goal for DU, which was founded by people who enjoy shooting ducks. While the two recreation sites are popular with hikers, bikers and bird watchers, hunting is not allowed.

Getting the money

The deep pockets of federal programs are important in getting major projects done.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund was established by Congress in 1964 to safeguard natural areas and water resources and to provide recreation access to places like Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge and Fishtrap Lake Recreation Area.

But years of grassroots effort was needed to coax a bipartisan majority in Congress to finally pass in 2020 the Great American Outdoors Act, which authorizes stable funding of $900 million a year from oil and gas leasing for the LWCF.

The North American Wetlands Conservation Act funnels billions of dollars toward increasing bird populations and wetland habitat and providing recreation along with improving water quality, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says. Voluntary incentives supported by the act have helped to fund nearly 3,000 wetlands improvement projects across 30 million acres in all 50 states.

“Sportsmen have paid for a ton of wildlife benefits through their license fees, Duck Stamps, excise taxes on gear and other support,” DU’s Green said. “But the number of hunters is declining. Other dependable funding sources are needed.”

What the NAWCA has done for waterfowl, the North American Grasslands Conservation Act has the potential to do for pronghorns, sage grouse, mule deer and many other species. At least 11 conservation groups are currently promoting passage of the grasslands legislation.

Private partnerships

Public-private partnerships are essential in dealing with habitat loss. In Washington, for example, 40 percent of the land is public or tribal while 60 percent is privately controlled, said Trina Bayard, director of bird conservation for Audubon Washington.

“It’s really important to work across boundaries and jurisdictions,” she said. “But working with farmers and other private landowners is challenging because they are independent and really busy.”

Game birds such as pheasant and Hungarian partridge have prospered on the shirttails of farming. But around the 1970s, the connection began to change noticeably. The more productive farming got, the less it left for birds.

Washington’s pheasant harvest peaked at around 650,000 birds a year in the early 1960s. Nowadays it’s about 60,000. Pheasants took a big hit, for example, as Columbia Basin farmers began “cleaning up” the weeds and vegetation at the corners of circle-irrigated fields. Meanwhile, dryland farmers were upgrading to more efficient equipment that enabled them to farm eyebrows and erase brush in draws through Palouse crop fields.

“Clean farming – it’s how agriculture has evolved, and it’s completely within their rights to do it that way,” said Jim Inglis, government affairs director for Pheasants Forever.

Federal assistance that has the most potential to tap modern agriculture for improving wildlife habitat is the Farm Bill, a package of legislation enacted every five years or so covering a broad array of titles that boost farming and associated programs ranging from food stamps to conservation.

The 2018 Farm Bill involves $428 billion over five years. Conservation programs get only about 7% of that pie, but $30 billion still amounts to a windfall for habitat.

Banking on CRP

Whitetail deer hunters and groups such as Pheasants Forever are especially interested in the Farm Bill-funded Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to take land out of production and sow vegetation that checks erosion while providing year-round wildlife habitat. Advancements have been made over the years to improve the plant mix to be more effective for feeding and sheltering wildlife.

“If we expect farmers and ranchers to adopt voluntary conservation programs, we absolutely must compensate them fairly,” Inglis said.

CRP sign-ups nationwide totaled 22.27 million acres at end of October, and state wildlife agencies and conservation groups are trying to rally interest in bringing that up to the current authorized maximum of 25 million acres. In Washington, 1.05 million acres were signed up as of this fall, down from a high of 1.6 million acres in 2007.

“When the CRP peaked nationally at 36.7 million acres in 2007, hunting was pretty darned good, with record-high pheasant populations in some states,” Inglis said.

Indeed, in 2007, South Dakota reported pheasant populations soaring to numbers that hadn’t been seen since the Soil Bank years of the 1950s and ’60s. “Having abundant secure nesting habitat for pheasants that CRP provides was an important factor in 2007,” state officials said.

“But starting in 2007 commodity prices started going up and more acres were going back into production,” Inglis said, adding that pandemic-fueled increases in land values for development have increased the pressure on habitat.

With up to $6 billion a year available for farmers, CRP provides the tools to regain ground for habitat, he said.

“Precision agriculture and technology are opening new avenues as farmers can look at the cost of cropping certain acreage and see how many years out of five they actually make money,” Inglis said. “CRP can look attractive in some areas in light of that data.”

Protecting some habitat for wildlife isn’t necessarily high on a farmer’s agenda, but incentives are a way to raise conservation to a feasible priority for some.

And that would be a good thing not just or me and my hunting dog, but also for the small towns and businesses that profit from the $140 billion Americans spend on wildlife-focused recreation alone every year.