Raising a drink to better active management and improved odds for Nevada’s big game

As I turned off the pavement by the old Santa Fe gold mine and wound down the canyon, my mind filled with memories from past hunts in this area. There was the notch in the knife-back ridgeline where we spotted a friend’s ram bedded. Off to the left was the narrow canyon with the little seep where my son and I hunted chukars. Looming straight ahead of me in the distance stood the big shale-covered mountain where my wife missed a shot at a good ram on Thanksgiving Day almost 15 years ago. The shot haunts both of us to this day.

This part of the Gabbs Valley Range in Mineral County, Nev., is one of several areas recommended to be managed as Backcountry Conservation Areas in the Carson City BLM District Resource Management Plan. Sportsmen and other public lands stakeholders have been calling for this for years, and the final version of that management plan is now expected to be out in late 2017.

Nevada Department of Wildlife biologist Jason Salisbury, who was involved in developing the original RMP proposal, says that the beauty of backcountry conservation areas is the active management component. In other words, implementing this tool adds a layer of protection for habitat, while maintaining the BLM’s ability to build guzzlers, protect springs, remove pinyon pine and juniper, and implement other habitat improvements. This allows a good biologist, like Jason, to achieve his management goals more easily.

And on this particular day, he had more than 30 volunteers to help him. I was there with other members of Nevada Bighorns Unlimited to reconstruct a water catchment—or guzzler—built ten years ago. The guzzler was still fully functional, but the original design didn’t have the capacity to serve the number of bighorns that depend on it now. In Nevada’s arid climate, water is often the limiting factor for populations of desert bighorn and other wildlife. This area has very few natural springs, so several guzzlers have been built by sportsmen’s groups like NBU to provide adequate drinking water and better distribute sheep throughout the range.

NDOW employees had worked during the previous week dismantling the existing guzzler and setting storage tanks in the ground. The guzzler we rebuilt that day will store about double what the previous one held, or nearly 12,000 gallons of water collected on a 50-by-90-foot apron—the largest one I have ever worked on. This presented us with some definite construction challenges. Finding a big enough area to make a level system required moving a lot of rocky material. Moving the rocks and digging the many holes for posts was made much easier by NDOW’s skilled backhoe operator. By 5 p.m., our work was nearly done.

We only had to haul several thousand gallons of water to the site the next morning.

Even with that labor ahead of us, I couldn’t help but feel proud of the real, tangible conservation work we’d accomplished as I drove home. Knowing that more than 80 bighorns we’d observed at the old guzzler would now have enough water to get them through the hot summer months made the effort worthwhile.

So often, the connection between the conservation policies and practices we talk about and the results we’re trying to achieve can seem less than tangible. Here’s what’s clear: The importance of well-coordinated management for wildlife habitat cannot be understated, especially since it is linked to the future of our hunting traditions. And as sportsmen, it’s our responsibility to get involved in the ways we can, whether that’s volunteering for a project like this one, getting involved with a conservation organization, or writing a letter to a policymaker. Jason—or any biologist—will tell you that all of these are crucial to conservation.

Sportsmen now look to Secretary Zinke to restore the public’s voice in the BLM land-use planning process that affects habitat, access, and rural economies

Today, U.S. Senators voted to nullify the Bureau of Land Management’s revised land-use planning rule, commonly known as Planning 2.0, which gives the public more chances to weigh in on land management decisions for 245 million acres of BLM public lands. The House passed a similar resolution of disapproval using the Congressional Review Act on February 7.

President Trump’s signature on this action will revert BLM planning to a decades-old process and may prevent the agency from creating a new rule that has the same benefits for habitat and public involvement. Planning 2.0 was the product of more than two years of collaboration between the agency, state and local governments, and the public.

“Hunters and anglers are puzzled by the fact that Congress would choose to destroy a refined and more inclusive public lands management process,” says Joel Webster, director of Western lands with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “Perhaps some additional fine-tuning could have further improved BLM planning, but this CRA action is the equivalent of burning down the house simply because some window trim needed replacing. It’s an overreaction with real-world consequences for fish, wildlife, and the American people.”

Nineteen sportsmen’s groups wrote Congress in support of Planning 2.0 revisions that created three additional opportunities for the public and key collaborators—like state and local governments—to be involved at the front-end of the land-use planning process. These additional steps were designed to increase agency transparency and public involvement, and these benefits are still sorely needed to boost overall satisfaction with the management of BLM public lands across the country.

“It is tragic to see so much hard work and public input go to waste, only to be replaced with uncertainty,” says Steven Williams, president of the Wildlife Management Institute. “Meanwhile, the agency will continue to struggle in using an outdated, ineffective planning process to deal with modern-day challenges on public lands.”

Consideration for big game migration corridors and other planning tools that account for the most recent scientific data are not written into the previous land-use planning rule, established in 1983. Hunters and anglers are looking to the newly confirmed Secretary of the Interior to find other ways of securing these benefits.

“Sportsmen and women are incredibly savvy about public lands management and how planning efforts affect the places we hunt and fish—these are our lands and we deserve a fair shake,” says Corey Fisher, senior policy director for Trout Unlimited’s Sportsmen Conservation Project. “We stand ready and willing to work with Secretary Zinke to restore the public’s voice in BLM public land management and see to it that important fish and wildlife habitat isn’t overlooked.”