Or you can talk to Bill Geer. He’s got a map with every favorite hunting ground and fishing hole in the state of Montana, outlined and cross-referenced in a computer database. And nobody’s turned him into a wall mount yet.
“I come to town and find the local rod-and-gun club,” Geer said. “Then I give them big maps and pencils, and they draw on them.”
Last summer, for example, the federal Bureau of Land Management put 500 square miles of Montana land up for energy development leases. Of the 194 parcels offered, Geer showed that 145 fell into one favorite hunting area or another, many of them along the Missouri Breaks.
“Those energy companies chose not to lease a single one of these parcels,” Geer said of his effort. “They leased everything except the ones I protested. I’ll take that for a 'yes’ any time.”
Geer is the policy initiatives manager for the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a national coalition of conservation groups. In 35 years of public and private wildlife management, he’s been seeking ways to balance an equation: We do this because we want that. We study wildlife because people want wildlife. They want wildlife habitat. And they want development that retains wildlife habitat.
Cataloging what people want is a constant struggle for land management agencies. BLM outdoor recreation planner Dick Fichtler said he’s amazed at the paltry handfuls of comments he receives on proposals affecting publicly popular places, like the recent plan to do forest management around Garnet Ghost Town.
Thus his support for Geer’s mapping effort.
“I’ve been working in this business almost 30 years. Any time you can get that level of detail from the public, you’re better off,” Fichtler said. “We’re looking at hard-rock mining claims, making grazing decisions, where to place cows and for how long, all those multiple-use activities. I’ve never had that kind of map information available at my fingertips.”
Geer stresses that his project and organization are not anti-development. But Montana faces a lengthy list of land-use decisions, from residential development in the northwest to coal-bed development in the southeast. All that change affects wildlife.
“In Wyoming, they’ve lost 46 percent of their mule deer habitat to oil development,” Geer said, showing a picture of a mulie buck wandering through a drilling rig. “They’re still there, but you can’t hunt them anymore. That social use is gone.”
Geer didn’t ask his birdwatchers and anglers and hunters to be scientific experts. He simply asked where their “bread-and-butter” places were. He worried people would simply circle the whole map.
“But they were very precise,” he said. “They’d erase lines around areas they didn’t use. Some places would be, 'Over my dead body,’ and some were areas they didn’t have concerns about.”
Nevertheless, the circles enclosed about 76 million acres of Montana’s 93 million acres. And that doesn’t count the state’s seven Indian reservations, which have limited access to nontribal members.
One thing that becomes fairly obvious looking at the map is there aren’t many secret hunting places in Montana. The C.M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, the Rocky Mountain Front, the Belt and Bears Paw mountains - these areas are justly famous for their animal populations. But again, animals don’t talk.
“These maps are important, but the networks they show are long-term important,” Geer explained. “The maps show which clubs like which species. We can cross-reference the areas with oil-and-gas leases. We can look at the biology, the habitat and the social use. Then we can show it to agencies to determine what lands are suitable for what purposes.”
The maps may have some other beneficial consequences. By allowing a more targeted and local discussion of land use, they may avoid the kind of “midnight monument” federal intervention that angered landowners when former President Bill Clinton created one along a big stretch of the Missouri Breaks.
They also allow agencies like the BLM to craft resource leases more carefully. With the hunting area maps, for example, they might design oil or natural gas leases that include drilling areas, but exclude wildlife habitat.
And interest continues to grow. After meeting some resistance in his initial forays, Geer said word of his project has netted him invitations to return to some areas where additional groups want to add their favorite spots.
“I’ve looked at 'follow-and-collar’ studies until I go blind,” Geer said of his time as a fish and game biologist. “This is probably the least scientific thing I’ve done, but it may be the most persuasive.”
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Alice Sampson wrote on Nov 27, 2008 8:49 AM: