#ihuntbecause

Bighorn rams gathered under the shade of a juniper tree during a scouting trip. Photo credit: M.Meyer/USFWS

….a long 3 1/2 hours in 95-degree sun. I was sweaty, anxious, and thirsty but didn’t move to get water for fear I’d miss an opportunity to shoot. In that time, my ram stood up and moved around the tree three different times, but never presented me with a good shot. Finally, he rose, walked a few steps uphill and moved away from the others. He bedded down alone, broadside. I took my rifle safety off and held the crosshairs on his body, just behind his shoulder - my heart was pounding and my hands were shaking. I put my rifle back on safety and leaned back to take a few deep breaths. Then, I took my rifle safety off, held the crosshairs behind his shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

The rams sprang up and ran out of sight in a matter of seconds. As they were running, I put another cartridge in my rifle and watched my ram disappear. He was not limping, there was no blood, and he ran straight uphill effortlessly. I saw the dirt fly up where my bullet had landed below him. I had held too low for my shot. We followed their tracks up, over the ridge, and down the other side, finding no evidence of injury. We didn’t see any of the rams again that day.

Looking across the canyon, to where we spotted a herd of 10 rams on opening day. Left circle is where they were first spotted; right circle is the lone tree where I first tried to take him.  Photo credit: M. Meyer/USFWS

Day 2. We set out to look for my ram at sunrise. By sunset, I spotted him again. He was with three others, near where I had shot at him opening day. We watched them bed down and decided to return at daylight the next morning.

The sun was setting when we finally spotted my ram on Day 2. Photo credit: M. Meyer/USFWS

Day 3. Three of us hiked up the mountain at dawn. The four rams were still feeding on the same bench as the night before. As we neared, my friend stayed back while my husband and I kept stalking. We were close - only 20 yards away! I hid behind a large rock, unable to get into a shooting position without spooking them. After a few minutes, the rams walked up the mountain, through a rock outcrop and into scattered juniper. Once out of sight, we started to track them.

A few bighorns, roaming through sagebrush country during one of our many scouting excursions. Photo credit: M.Meyer/USFWS

As we snuck through the trees, we could hear them nearby and suddenly we were caught out in the open. We froze. Two rams spotted us, watched a few minutes, and then returned to grazing. Soon they bedded down under a tree. Once they were out of sight, we moved into position. I found a tree that would provide cover and a solid rest for my rifle. I could only see heads and horns. For a good shot, the rams would have to go out and feed. So again, I waited.

An hour passed and I tried not to think about how I missed him on opening day. I leaned against the juniper with my rifle, ready to shoot the entire time. My husband used his range finder to determine a lone juniper on the edge of the hill was 200 yards away. Given my shooting abilities and preferences, I decided I would only take a shot if my ram presented himself between me and that tree.

My hunting party put many miles on our hiking boots scouting the mountains in preparation of hunting season, and again during the hunt. Photo credit: H. Honeywell

Finally, the animals rose and began grazing. My ram was feeding directly across from me, headed toward the 200-yard mark. After what seemed like forever, the ram turned slightly, giving me a broadside view. I placed my crosshairs behind his shoulder - this time I was surprisingly calm- and I squeezed the trigger. As the shot rang out, I put another cartridge in my rifle and prepared for another. The ram jogged around the hillside, while the others ran over the ridge. We tracked my ram up and down, zigzagging along the mountain. There were sheep tracks all over, making it difficult to find him. We found him near the bottom of the canyon. This time my shot hit right where I had aimed.

Proudly posing with my prize California bighorn ram (green score 172 1/8”; official score 170 4/8”); tired, but exhilarated after weeks of planning and days of hunting and honored and humbled by the experience. Photo credit: S. Meyer

Oh, we did have our great television shows back then, no doubt about it:  Saturday mornings saw Jonny Quest, The Pink Panther Show, The King Kong Show, Aquaman and Hot Wheels being counted among my favorites.  These days also included ore thoughtful fare such as The CBS Children’s Film Festival, Davey and Goliath and The Wonderful World of Disney.  And we enjoyed the weekly episodes of such classics as Lost in Space and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.  

Most of the folks in our neighborhood had upgraded to color television from black-and-white only relatively recently, which probably helped make the cartoons of that era even more vividly-memorable.

But while television was a part of growing up, it didn’t so fully dominate your activities, your mother would see to that by booting you outside even if you hadn’t wanted to go. But you already did want to go anyway, because your main activities were centered around, well, actually being physically active.

In our small Iowa town, an annual Easter egg hunt was hosted at the town square, and some of those Easter eggs had prizes associated with them, consisting of a few to several dollars of merchandise at the stores located around the square.  The Holy Grail among these eggs was the lone Golden Egg, a specimen of which I never even saw.  But one year, while pawing through a wind-drifted blanket of fallen pin oak leaves, I did uncover a Silver Egg and still remember redeeming it at the counter of one of those downtown businesses.  I think it was worth $5, which was a fortune to a kid back then.

The manager of the local Woolworth’s store hosted a really neat event:  he had taken numerous bales of straw, spread it on the sidewalk in front of his store and cordoned it off, scattered  $100 worth of pennies though it, and blew a whistle to start an event allowing us kids to dig through that straw and recover those pennies.  A penny would buy you a piece of candy at that time, so it was well worth the effort of uncovering and pocketing those pennies.

And we had some really good kinds of candy too, very much worth buying at those still-abundant little mom-and-pop neighborhood markets with the old creaky and well-worn wooden floors:  NIBS, Lemonheads, Boston Baked Beans, Sugar Babies, Atomic Fireballs, SweeTarts, and Chuckles.  My personal favorite was Hot Tamales, which were then a nickel a box.  There were also Bottle Caps, Reed’s Candy Rolls, Razzles, Zotz, Slo-Pokes, Chick-O-Sticks and Fire Stix.  We had chewing gums like Bazooka, Dubble Bubble and Rain-Blo as well as Beech-Nut, Fruit Stripe, Beemans, Teaberry, Clove and Black Jack.  Candy bar selections included Zagnut, Zero, MilkShake, Mars, Oh Henry!, Clark, Milky Way, Big Time, Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll and another of my favorites, Cherry Mash.

Sometimes in the evenings we visited the local Dairy Queen store, where they served chocolate-dipped and subsequently-frozen bananas which they had entertainingly christened “monkey tails.”

And while downtown, it was decidedly worthwhile to check the local phone booths, because not everyone remembered to retrieve their dime from the coin return slot.

We played little league baseball, with the local businesses sponsoring a team with their name across the shirts they supplied.  The baseball park was riddled with the burrows of thirteen-lined ground squirrels and some of the guys captured a few to try to tame as pets.

The summer of 1969, I played for one of the local drugstores, and we went on to win the championship.  And whenever we won a game, the players were each entitled to receive a free beverage at their soda fountain.

But probably more fun were our neighborhood baseball games, surprisingly-similar in nature to the 1993 movie The Sandlot.

We often went to the community swimming pool during the very hottest days of summer, but not until at least an hour after lunch, because any less time than that and you would “cramp up and drowned!”  

I can remember a very pleasant odor like pink bubble gum emanating from the local plant nurseries, a chief industry in our little town.  It wasn’t until years later, as an adult living in Washington state, when I happened upon a storm-shattered specimen and finally connected that wonderful smell to the exposed wood of the western redcedar; it must have been used in those nursery operations for one purpose or another.

We rode our bikes all over town, and the most esteemed bikes then were of the stingray variety, with the high handlebars and banana seats.  We didn’t come home much except for meals and at bedtime, and we roamed and roved outdoors just about all day in the summertime.  The term “helicopter parent” wasn’t a part of the local vernacular.

We had a gigantic weeping willow tree in our backyard, and we would grab a handful of branches and swing through the air like Tarzan.  

We climbed to far greater heights at the local junior high school in the summer, pulling down the lower portion of the fire escape and then climbing those metal stairs to nearly the dizzying roof of the school.  The view of the surrounding town and countryside was great, and no adults ever came along and chastised us or chased us down.

The street below this fire escape dropped sharply off into a very steep and very long hill. During the slick and slippery weather that accompanied snowstorms, the city blocked access to it from the connecting side streets and thus turned it over to us kids while the homeowners merely parked in the alleys.  The ride down was exhilarating, but that climb back to the top arduous.  Afterwards, we’d enjoy steaming cups of hot chocolate – with heads of melting marshmallows – as we thawed our achingly-cold fingers and toes in warm kitchens while the gray wintery evening descended outside.

We built snow forts and hurled snowballs at one another in the winter, and I recall one ambitious family up the block having actually constructed a real-life igloo in their front yard.

While in Scouting, we would go on wintertime outings – “freezeouts,” we called them – camping overnight and over the weekend in the snow.  You would shiver and shake in your sleeping bag at first, but eventually warm up and fall into probably the greatest slumber ever.  You awoke under a clear sky to find everything encased in heavy frost; you scrounged wood and made a campfire to cook over; we used no stoves with contained fuels that we had bought and brought.  The bottoms of the mess kit items I actually cooked with were black with soot, and those unevenly-cooked pancakes still held gooey batter within, but never had a breakfast tasted or hit the spot better.

In the summer, we built treehouses from scrap lumber; it seems as impossible now as it did then, but my dog would climb those rungs of 2” X 4” lumber that we had nailed ladder-like along the tree trunk, and join us up in treehouse.  But he couldn’t descend, leaving me to carry him down. But I didn’t mind, I was astonished by his ability and amazed at his courage!  

We climbed into the furthest branches of apple trees looking for an apple without worm holes, and ate a lot of tart gooseberries and those sweet and staining mulberries too.  

We caught garter snakes and marveled at their differing personalities; some were quite docile and easy to handle while others struggled and squirmed and any chance they got, tried to bite you.

We collected shiny, fallen buckeyes and on the back steps and used dad’s hammer to smash open the tough shells of black walnuts to get at the tasty contents.

We had chance encounters with poison ivy and stinging nettles, slapped mosquitoes, experienced the maddening itch of chigger bites and the terror of a swollen tick stuck into your scalp.  

It seemed as though every backyard had a sand pile encircled by an old tractor tire.  Looking back on it, this practice may well have greatly contributed to the burgeoning mosquito population, for I remember holding up a clear jar full of water collected from within such a tractor tire – and examining a teeming collection of convulsively-flexing “wigglers” or mosquito larvae.  At the time, the city had trucks that periodically went out and slowly “fogged” their way down the streets in an effort to control the mosquitoes.

I chased a lot of butterflies and learned about them along the way:  red admirals are wary, mourning cloaks are attracted to fallen, rotting fruit and that butterflies are generally attracted to flowers that are similar in color to themselves.  My favorite was a very distinctly-marked species known as the “buckeye butterfly.”

The neighbors down the street had a huge paper wasp nest on the side of the tin shed in their backyard; these wasps have a painfully high-voltage sting.  The mother had to run some errands downtown but before she left, and knowing us, she administered a warning:  “you guys leave that wasp’s nest alone while I’m gone!”  She hadn’t even turned the corner before we were out throwing crabapples at it.  Even though we were missing, it vibrated the tin when the crabapples struck and we were getting the wasps madder and madder with each throw.  The biggest, oldest and bravest kid – the one who was supposed to have been watching over us younger kids – was out in front, and got stung right below his right eye and on the lower lip.  I’ll never forget him looking in the bathroom mirror, then turning to me – with the area around his eye puffed out and reminding me of a goldfish, coupled with a lower lip swollen up like a sausage –  and saying “oh thit, now the’s gonna know!”

We would play hide-and-seek well into the night, and then camped out in our backyards, fashioning blankets into a flimsy tent, erstwhile having captured a sufficient number of lightning bugs – as we called fireflies – to function as a lantern (though much like banging a faulty flashlight on your hip to get it to work, you usually had to shake the jar a bit to get the lightning bugs to actively light up).  We would scan the heavens using the instruments from my Mattel “Super-Eyes” set, and one morning we woke up to find a Carolina wren sharing the tent with us.  We would have a bag of salty, buttered popcorn and wash that down with Coca-Cola, (which was then always bottled, and in that curvaceous glass with the light aquamarine tint and for which you also always needed a bottle opener).  What a great combination of flavors!  

The pop machines for those bottles had a vertical door holding the various selections.  After putting your dime into the coin slot, you would open the door, grasp your favorite (which for me was Nesbitt’s strawberry very early on, then switching to Frostie Root Beer later) and pull the bottle out by the neck.  After the flat bottom of the bottle was pulled clear, a metal contraption would slam solidly down and lock again.

There were also a few of those old-fashioned candy machines still in service around town, the tall and narrow ones that held the individual candy bars on a sort of little shelf that were evenly spaced along a vertical belt.

There was a concrete culvert exiting into a ditch at the end of the next door neighbor’s backyard and we wondered if it was the same one that had an opening at the ditch across the block. So no flashlight or anything, I crawled through – total darkness, dry leaves, cobwebs and all – to find out.  I rounded at least one curve underground and saw a circle of light signaling the exit.  I confirmed it was indeed the same culvert as I emerged – but standing there was mom, ready to administer a spanking.  Later on, I hollered into that culvert and was startled when a pair of reflecting eyes – which were uncomfortably set rather widely apart too – opened up and looked back at me.

One day I saw a grackle catch and kill a young sparrow in midair – I didn’t know that they were capable of inflicting such harm.

We started out with cap guns – these used a long strip of red paper formed into a roll, and with little dots containing a small dab of gunpowder interspersed to create the noise of a gunshot.  And later on, nearly all of us owned a Daisy BB gun.

I explored the surrounding countryside in my Bart Starr tennis shoes, carrying my own little Daisy lever action BB gun (with a length of heavy, coarse twine functioning as a sling) and my dog as a companion.  I always carried extra ammo, just in case, and remember those Daisy BB’s were loosely packaged inside a few inches of lemon-yellow cardboard tube and with a black cardboard cap on top.  

The farmers didn’t chase you away, they just waved in greeting when they saw you.  I learned the hard way during those hikes that around old lumber, tennis shoes can lead to tetanus shots, as their soft soles don’t stop rusty nails from penetrating into your foot!

My dog and I found a neat little spring-fed pond within a glade of toweringly-huge trees.  A great horned owl roosted there and always took to wing as we approached – I remember being amazed at its huge wingspan.  A friend discovered a trickle of cold water draining from a pipe along a steep bank and would fill his canteen from it.

Nor far away early one spring, I found what I later identified to be an owl’s skull sitting starkly atop the black soil rich with soft green shoots protruding; the heavy hooked beak and huge eye sockets were strong clues to its true identity.

The rural power lines still had a good number of the glass insulators associated with them, both of the clear variety and those imbued with a bluish-greenish hue; they seemed to especially adorn the poles that paralleled the railroad tracks.

And I found old bottles – of the type that had once held a cork stopper – sticking out of the gooey mud along the creek; the glass would often have a rosy lavender hue due to the accumulated exposure to sunlight.

We fished too, farm ponds simply abounded in the rural areas around us.  We discovered clever ways to catch bullfrogs and that those captured snapping turtles really could crush small branches in their powerful jaws – and thus teaching us to give them distance and respect as we now could see the potential of getting a finger sheared off.  And crayfish have claws that sure could painfully pinch!

We lived for a year in the northwestern part of the state, and very near the Iowa Great Lakes.   I learned use a small, red cork popper to catch bluegills – I took great pride in having successfully mastered use of an artificial lure.

One afternoon in a sun-dappled cove along Lake West Okoboji I was watching a small school of bluegill lazily lolling in the clear water near the shore when they suddenly panicked and scattered – and into that void suddenly burst a lunging northern pike. It hovered for a moment after its failed ambush and then spying me towering above, turned and shot back into the murky depths.

There was a sort of canal connecting Big Spirit Lake with East Lake Okoboji, and jumbo yellow perch were spawning in the clear water.  These are a particularly-beautiful freshwater fish, with yellowish-gold bodies interspersed with dusky vertical barring and further highlighted by vivid orange fins.  Anglers lined both banks virtually shoulder-to-shoulder, but those fish apparently had lockjaw.  My brother and I both had bobbers, with my brother using a worm and myself a minnow for bait.  Almost simultaneously, a pair of fish accepted each of our offerings, and this pair represented the only fish landed by anyone that day.

I learned that crappies are very gregarious and have such a strong affinity for schooling that free-swimming fish might position themselves alongside the stringer of crappies that you had already captured.  

And I fished in the local streams in southwest Iowa, these being the Nishnabotna and Nodaway Rivers. Once along the Nishnabotna I encountered a gar holding position in the current near the bank and lowered my bait right in front of it.  The gar grabbed it and simply held on - their bony beak will deflect the point of a fish hook quite effectively.  I hauled him up onto the bank, and he finally let go of the bait and flopped down into the water – and returned to exactly where he had been and began holding position in the current again as though nothing had ever happened.  I lowered my bait in front of him a second time and we repeated the scene – but after this second time, he took off for good once he flopped bank down the bank and back into the river.

On another occasion, this time in the Nodaway River, I hooked a mirror carp; these carp have a few gigantically- large scales scattered along their backs and sides and are otherwise scaleless.  I was astonished at the sight as he flopped about on the riprap below, disgorging the hook in the process and tumbling back into the river.  I hadn’t seen a living specimen before that day and I haven’t since.

Today so much Iowa farmland seems to consist mainly of row crops like corn and soybeans – with only a barbed wire fence and a sparse strip of grass separating the fields.  But agriculture wasn’t nearly so intensive back in my youth – the individual fields were a lot smaller and much weedier than now, and often heavily-bordered by osage-orange hedgerows or wide margins of giant ragweed and foxtail and punctuated with wild plum thickets, wild rose  and the sumac that turned such a beautiful scarlet-crimson  the fall. The fields also had not been tiled then as they so often are now, and so there were a preponderance of wet, marshy areas where smartweeds like to grow and turn that rusty, ground-cinnamon color in the fall.  They were a lot more hayfields back then too.  All this in turn meant a lot more small game like cottontail rabbits, bobwhite quail and pheasants.  It seemed that you saw a lot more red foxes, badgers, blue racer snakes and bobolinks back then too.

Most of us moved from our air rifles up to single-shot .22 rifles and .410 shotguns and joined our dads in those fields on frosty autumn mornings.  

Those ubiquitous fox squirrels would scramble around the tree truck to maintain a position opposite you and thus stay out of your line of sight.  This presented a problem when you were alone or separated from your hunting partners, but you could overcome it by temporarily hanging your jacket on a nearby sapling and then circling the tree.  The now-confused squirrel would then cease his own circling behavior, thinking himself suddenly caught between a pair of hunters, and this could afford you a chance for a shot.

Tradition held that we waited for snow before pursuing cottontails, but if there was no snow, the rabbits could be hard to discern among the background of dead vegetation and leaf litter.  A good tip was to look instead for that roundish, dark and liquid-looking eye, which would betray them.

One bitterly cold day in the winter I was in a timbered area hunting rabbits and stopped to rest, leaning against an old tree trunk.  The wood turned out to be so very rotten that an entire slab of wood fell off the trunk, exposing a hive of honeybees within.  I instantly took flight – and so did those bees!  I remember being grateful for the fact that the crusted snow wasn’t deep enough to really slow my progress and after running a good distance away, I turned and looked back.  I could hear very small sounds, soft and muffled, and it was those honeybees falling from their flight through the frigid air and colliding with that crusted snow.  There were little dark dots against a white surface – appearing like a photographic negative of the aftermath of a hailstorm.

This all took place in southwest Iowa, and in autumn we would go over along bottomlands of the Nishnabotna River to witness the waterfowl migrations.  Also while in the Scouts, we migrated to the south ourselves one fine fall weekend and set up our pup tents to witness those “V”-shaped strings of migrating geese using the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge near Mound City, Missouri.  I still recall those cloud-like aggregations of snow geese feeding and resting out there amidst the dark background of the corn stubble.

Once, during a nighttime football game in our small town, a small flock of snow geese appeared out of the dark sky, circling the football field under the lights and not very far above the goal posts, creating a temporary distraction from the game and quite a spectacle for the fans in the bleachers.

Dutch elm disease had devastated the graceful, vase-shaped American elms in our area, but morel mushrooms then seemed to thrive on the ground beneath; in the springtime we might gather paper grocery bags full of morels right out of front yards in our little town.

Later in October, we would trudge across those very same lawns with the same kind of paper grocery bags, going door-to-door harvesting Halloween treats and very nearly filling the bag full before the night was done.

The weather in Iowa generated respect – as it could produce tornadoes.  I recall it as being the spring of 1964 that seemed to have been particularly bad in regard to tornado warnings in our area, and a nearby community was heavily-damaged by what was subsequently judged to have been an F4 tornado. On more than one occasion, I remember an eerie sky with weird light and that strange stillness in the air – and of those sirens starting to wail and then rushing down into the basement – scary stuff for a kindergartner!

Swarms of leafhoppers and June bugs circled the summertime street lights – along with the occasional exquisite and delicate beauty of a Luna moth.  Bats dived in and out of those cones of light, and if you tossed a small pebble high into the air, the bats would quickly turn and snag it – and then drop it when they realized the trickery.  And either because the light lit up the area below or because of all the bugs below, toads were frequently seen too.  

Frogs abounded - and the sounds of peepers during the spring evenings and bullfrogs in the summer night were a part of the experience.  There were occasionally tree frogs appearing under the porch light – and they could emit a shrill sort of scream when badly frightened, as one did in a confrontation involving our tomcat.

The song of the scissor-grinder cicadas would fill the air  – while I sure liked that sound, it was bittersweet in that it reminded you that summer was winding down and school would be starting up again.

These were among our discoveries and experiences that forged such rich memories during an outdoor Iowa childhood, times filled with color, simple enchantment and wide-eyed wonder. Each of these little adventures seemed as big as a safari to us.

In our nation’s early years, there were few laws protecting fish and wildlife and our wildlife resources took a heavy toll. Market hunters took fish and wildlife at will while habitat disappeared under plow and roads, resulting in devastating reductions in wildlife populations. Some species, like the passenger pigeon, were taken to the point of no return; others such as bison, white-tailed deer and wild turkeys, were pushed to the edge extinction.  Concerned leaders within the sportsmen community banded together, using politics and power, to make great strides for conserving our vast wildlife resources.

As the tides turned for conservation, important laws were passed, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp Act of 1934, the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937, and the Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration Act of 1950.  Collectively, these acts laid the foundation for a funding mechanism to state wildlife management agencies and are a large part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s history.

The mountains of Idaho provided a memorable turkey hunt for Brent Lawrence. Photo by John Hafner.

Sportsman-generated funds comprise, on average, more than 75 percent of a state fish and wildlife agency’s annual budget, according to the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

“The financial support from America’s hunting, shooting sports, fishing and boating community through their purchases of taxable gear and hunting and fishing licenses is the lifeblood for funding state fish and wildlife conservation,” said Laura Maclean, Communications Director for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

Today, through self-imposed excise taxes on hunting, shooting, archery and angling equipment, and a tax on boating fuels, hunters, recreational shooters and anglers have generated more than $17.5 billion for wildlife and habitat conservation since 1937. These Wildlife Restoration and Sport Fish revenues, raised through the Pittman-Robertson Act and Dingell-Johnson Act, are managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Wildlife.  This year alone, more than $1.1 billion was distributed to states through the program.

The funds can only be used by state wildlife agencies for a primary wildlife purpose, such as purchasing public land, improving essential habitat and creating additional outdoor recreation opportunities that also benefit hikers and bikers, wildlife and wildlife watchers, canoeists and campers.

“These funds are the cornerstone of state-based efforts that are critical to the preservation of America’s wildlife and natural resources,” said US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe recently said. “But they are also the fuel for a massive financial engine that benefits outdoor recreationists, hunters, boaters and anglers, equipment manufacturers and retailers, and local and regional economies. Their value cannot be overstated in providing opportunities for the next generation of Americans to get outdoors, experience our wild places and learn the importance of conserving our natural heritage.”

The Columbia River provided great salmon fishing for Anna Harris.

North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, however, is about more than money. It’s a philosophy.

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation has seven basic tenets supporting the notion that wildlife is a public trust, an American birthright, and that wildlife species need to be managed in a way that their populations will be sustained forever. The Wildlife Society  and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation both do an excellent job of explaining them, and I borrowed some of their descriptions below.

Wildlife as Public Trust Resources: Natural resources and wildlife on public lands are managed by government agencies to ensure that current and future generations always have wildlife and wild places to enjoy.

Prohibition on Commerce of Dead Wildlife: Commercial hunting and the sale of wildlife is prohibited to ensure the sustainability of wildlife populations. The Lacey Act, which the Service has a role in enforcing, prohibits trade in wildlife, fish, and plants that have been illegally taken, possessed, transported or sold.

Rule of Law: Laws and regulations developed by the people and enforced by state and federal agencies will guide the proper use of wildlife resources.

Opportunity for All: Every citizen has an opportunity, under the law, to hunt and fish in the United States and Canada. This differs from many other countries, where only landowners and the wealthy can afford to participate.

Wildlife Should Only be Killed for a Legitimate Purpose: Individuals may legally kill certain wild animals under strict guidelines for food and fur, self-defense and property protection.  Laws prohibit the casual killing of wildlife merely for antlers, horns or feathers or the wanton waste of game meat.

Wildlife as an International Resource: Because wildlife and fish freely migrate across boundaries between states, provinces, and countries, they are considered an international resource.

Scientific Management of Wildlife: The best science available will be used as a base for informed decision-making in wildlife management. It’s important to note that management objectives are developed to support the species, not individual animals.

Wildlife is a priceless part of our national heritage and the sportsman-funded North American Model of Wildlife Conservation keeps the emphasis on long-term management. This focus benefits a wide range of fish and wildlife, including non-game species, as well as everyone who enjoys nature.

How can you get involved?

First, buy a hunting or fishing license every year even if you don’t hunt or fish. The license fee goes directly to the state wildlife agency to help with all types of wildlife management. As an added bonus, license sales also help determine Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson distributions to states.

Second, get a Federal Duck Stamp.  For every dollar spent on Federal Duck Stamps, ninety-eight cents goes directly to purchase vital waterfowl habitat for protection in the National Wildlife Refuge System. It has raised more than $750 million and protected 6 million acres of waterfowl habitat since 1934. A Federal Duck Stamp also gets you free admission to the Service’s National Wildlife Refuges, which help protect our wildlife and offer some great hunting, fishing and wildlife watching opportunities.

As you can see, the relationship between sportsmen and sportswomen and wildlife conservation is truly special. So to borrow a line from the Colorado Wildlife Council, maybe wildlife enthusiasts everywhere should “Hug a Hunter” and “Hug an Angler.”

I told my increasingly intrigued acquaintance that according to the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, sportsman-generated funds comprise, on average, more than 75 percent of a state fish and wildlife agency’s annual budget.

Photo: Hunters are a major contributor to wildlife conservation, Credit: Ryan Hagerty/USFWS

Through self-imposed excise taxes on hunting, shooting, archery and angling equipment, and boating fuels, hunters, recreational shooters and anglers have contributed more than $20.2 billion for wildlife and habitat conservation since 1937, including $1.1 billion in 2018.

I explained how excise taxes, commonly known as Pittman-Robertson Act and Dingell-Johnson Act monies, can only be used by state wildlife agencies for a primary wildlife purpose, such as purchasing public land, improving essential habitat and creating additional outdoor recreation opportunities that also benefit hikers and bikers, photographers and birders, canoeists and campers.

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, I told him as we walked through the lobby, is about more than money. It’s a philosophy.

It has seven basic tenets supporting the notion that wildlife is a public trust, an American birthright, and that wildlife species need to be managed in a way that their populations will be sustained forever. These tenets benefit a wide range of fish and wildlife, including non-game species, as well as everyone who enjoys nature.

As we reached the lobby door, we stopped and he asked what a non-hunter should do. The answers quickly rolled off my tongue.

First, buy a hunting or fishing license every year even if you don’t hunt or fish. The license fee goes directly to the state wildlife agency to help with all types of wildlife management.

Photo: From the flying mallards created by conservationist J.N. “Ding” Darling (left) in 1934 to the canvasbacks crafted by artist Adam Grimm in 2014 (right), Federal Duck Stamps are a creative and valuable way to contribute to conservation. 

Next, I told him, buy a Federal Duck Stamp.  For every dollar spent on Federal Duck Stamps, ninety-eight cents go directly to purchase vital waterfowl habitat for protection in the National Wildlife Refuge System. A Federal Duck Stamp also gets you free admission to the Service’s National Wildlife Refuges, which help protect our wildlife and offer some great hunting, fishing and wildlife watching opportunities.

We walked outside, and he hailed a taxi. He turned and said, “Well, thank you for ruining my night. … Now I have to figure out how to thank a hunter.”

The moral of this story could be that hunters, anglers and recreational shooters all play a pivotal role in wildlife conservation. This is true.

But to me, the real story is that people with the most to lose fight the hardest to protect it. As a hunter and angler, I know the joy of hearing a turkey gobble from across the ridge or seeing a flock of mallards descending. Those are my memories, my treasures.

I’ll always fight to save it. And so will other sportsmen because it’s what we do.