KSBrittman

If you report to KDWPT ag activities inconsistent with hunting, like grazing cattle, it may contact the operator. Of course, that may annoy the operator and result in the withdrawal of the land from the WIHA program. Once in NE I encountered cattle on a piece of walk-in on opening day of the season. I called it in.

I attended a patch burn/patch graze seminar. The brother of a friend is a wildlife area manager in Missouri. He had a power point on telemetry work they are doing on 2 wildlife areas he manages. The study compares a "biologist designed" wildlife area where the ground is broken up into 40 acre units where woody rows are next to grass strips that are next to food plots versus a wildlife area that is more of a pasture/shrub natural layout that was grazed. The first year they are finding that populations on the grass area were over double those on the designed area. The also found that nesting attempts were higher as was nesting success on the grazed system. Further, ungrazed tracts in the grazed unit were avoided by birds. Adding grazing brought an immediate return of quail and the productive increase that they were getting on the other grazed acres. Seems that the "natural" disturbance is preferred by quail. To me, this is just a logical confirmation of what we expected.

As for support, there are many fields of thought there. Many of our hunters complain about the $20 license. That amounts to something in the 5.5 cents per day if figured on the calendar year, but they still complain about any increase that is recommended or discussed. There are others like you and I that would pay 10x what we are for the same experience we're getting now. Others fall somewhere in between. I think keeping things as simple as possible is important. I do believe that the decline in pheasant hunting and the importance of pheasant season in western Kansas parallels the decline in small towns in western Kansas. This loss of local revenue is significant and any drive in western Kansas helps to verify that it is missing.

Did I respond to this KSBrittman? If not, I'll forge ahead. I don't know enough about federal aid to know if a habitat stamp would be viewed as program income with the feds or not. If it was, there would be no benefit of having it as any $ generated would be lost from Pitman-Robertson funding under another column. It that wasn't the case, it might be a feasible funding option. I'm more of a dirt under the nail type in wildlife management. I leave the office work to others whenever I can.