Heat, heavy coverage hurt bird hunting

Jim Matthews, Outdoor Writer
Inland Empire Daily Bulletin

APPLE VALLEY - Upland bird hunters reported seeing good numbers of quail and chukar throughout most of Southern California's deserts and foothill regions, but rain just before the opener, then heat and heavy hunting pressure over the weekend, made for difficult conditions and low hunter success.

"At Goat Springs, there was approximately the same number of vehicles you'd find at a large car dealership," said Rick Bean of Hesperia about a popular chukar hunting spot in the West Mojave off Highway 247 between Barstow and Lucerne Valley on opening day. While Bean and his hunting partners, Matt and Debbie Gangola of Glendora, didn't bag a bird - in spite of seeing a covey with 60 or more birds - two young hunters they met near a guzzler north of Goat Springs managed to get seven chukar between them.

Chris Coston of Orange was hunting near Ord Mountain, another popular chukar spot in the West Mojave, and said there were hunters everywhere, but that most guys he spoke with had "one or two birds each."

"There were a lot of birds, a lot of birds," said Coston, who managed to bag two chukar on opening Saturday and then another pair in the same area on Sunday.

Farther north, chukar hunters in the Southern Sierra Nevada, White and Inyo mountains, along with the popular Red Mountain region, all had similar reports: lots of birds but tough hunting conditions. Several hunters complained of chukar flushing well out of range in the Rand Mountains, but the hunting pressure was very high in that area, like the West Mojave, and it was warm.

The Mojave National Preserve had an excellent hatch of quail and chukar this year, but rain apparently scattered the birds and then warm weather made hunting difficult. Most hunters reported seeing birds, but success seemed to be about only a quail per hunter, with the chukar even tougher, flushing out of range.

Ed Tolman, along with his son Andreas and father DeLoy, and Dave Hancock and Ted Werner, all of the Chino Hills area, were out in the preserve Friday and saw good numbers of quail scouting for the opener. But opening day they managed to bag only five quail between them. Werner and Andreas Tolman wore themselves out chasing chukar over some nasty terrain, seeing 120 or so birds but unable to bag a single one.

Jack Ingram of Chino managed to get six Gambel's quail in two days of hunting in the Mid Hills region of the preserve.

"The birds were hard to locate, but I did get into a couple small coveys," said Ingram on Monday.

"I had my shots and I could have taken a limit for the weekend if I were on my game. As it was, I will be grilling six up tomorrow for dinner."

In the Imperial Valley and near the Salton Sea, quail numbers were reported to be well up from the past couple seasons, but the heat made the birds difficult to hunt, especially after the coveys were scattered opening morning.

Along the lower Colorado River, there were generally pretty good reports of quail numbers from Yuma to Needles. Robert Pierce, who managed Walter's Camp south of Palo Verde, said there were a lot of birds in the desert washes this year, and he and his brother-in-law managed to get 11 birds between them on Sunday of opening weekend, after being skunked the day before.

"There were a lot of birds out there, but there are too many guys with quads who chase them on those things and then jump off and shoot them," he said.

"I'm from Texas, where you get out and walk and hunting quail behind dogs, and it's just a shame that quail season was so badly abused.

"On Sunday the quads were gone, the jeeps were gone, and we got 11 birds in four hours of hunting. All the coveys were big, massive, with 20 to 30 birds."

A number of hunters complained about unethical hunters sitting on desert water sources (you can't stay on a water source for more than 30 minutes, so wildlife can come to water) and people on quads who didn't use normal hunter etiquette.

With another warm weekend forecast, it doesn't look like the next weekend of the season will be any better than the first.

Conservationists restore East Mojave guzzlers

Guzzler #S-18 near Goffs, California. (Chris Ervin)

by Leslie Ervin
Exclusive Field Report

Goffs, CA -- The Goffs Cultural Center provided camping facilities for an important work group during the weekend of March 27-29. Cliff McDonald of Needles, California, and XX of his volunteers staged their operations at Goffs while they made day trips to repair five wildlife water guzzlers in the area.

What is a wildlife water guzzler, you ask? Guzzlers come in many shapes and sizes and are made of different materials depending on the wildlife population they are intended to serve. The ones in this area consist of a concrete slab that collects rainwater and funnels it into an underground tank. The tank is covered and has a sloped opening that allows animals and other creatures to walk in and out to reach the water. Guzzlers are vital to desert wildlife like deer, bobcat, coyote, cougar, quail, bighorn sheep, and desert tortoise.

Most of the local guzzlers were built decades ago and over time they develop cracks and collect debris, which makes them less effective. Cliff’s volunteers come prepared with trucks full of equipment to make the appropriate repairs. The work first involves prepping the pad. Chippers are used to clean off the old sealant and then QUIKRETE concrete bonding adhesive is applied to the cracks. Two coats of Merlex are then applied over 24 hours to seal the pad so the water runs down into the underground water tank. The tank is also cleaned out and tortoise nets are installed so the tortoises can get out of the tank.

On Saturday, my husband Chris and I were interested in witnessing this work firsthand, so we took a break from our weeding at Goffs and drove to the closest worksite, just two miles up Mountain Springs Road. When we arrived at guzzler #S-18, they had already fixed the cracks in the pad and were cleaning out the tank. Since this guzzler happened to be in a particularly lush area of spring flowers, we wandered around a bit to take photos. When we returned, they had finished sealing the pad and were moving on to the next work site. You can see how nice the guzzlers look when they finish.

Finished guzzler #S-18. (Leslie Ervin)

The group assembled at Goffs consisted of volunteers from the High Desert Chapter #759 of Quail Unlimited, the California Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, and…. On Saturday and Sunday they divided into work groups and headed out to the guzzlers. They even brought along a cooking crew who whipped up such delicacies as eggs and elk sausage and elk burgers. Those of us fortunate enough to be at Goffs during that time enjoyed exchanging sleepy pre-dawn greetings and friendly waves as their caravans rolled back into camp at the end of the day.

Cliff has been the driving force behind restoration of water sources inside the Mojave National Preserve and surrounding areas. He coordinates with groups like Quail Unlimited, the Safari Club, the Bureau of Land Management, and California Fish and Game to accomplish this important work. He was recently honored with a $5,000 grant as one of three finalists in the 2009 Budweiser Conservationist of the Year Award sponsored by Budweiser and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF).

If you are interested in helping this worthy cause by volunteering or making a donation, you can contact Cliff at 760-326-2935.

Thirty years of outdoor writing

Commentary

By JIM MATTHEWS
Outdoor News Service
www.outdoornewsservice.com

To the best of my recollection, I’ve been doing this column since the latter 1970s, thirty-something years. I know there are some of you who’ve been reading nearly the whole time because when we bump into each other somewhere, you remind me of a column from years ago.

I know you’ve been reading a long time because you talk to me like we are old friends (or old enemies). How you can recognize me from the little photos that have run with the column for decades, I don’t have a clue, but you don’t have to tell me I look older than in those photos. I am older, but so are you.

You usually mention a column about my family or dogs, the personal ones. I think they hit close to home for you and resonate. Talking about the importance of family and marriage, and hunting and fishing, is increasingly the antithesis of everything that is politically correct.

But we know that the fundamental breakdown in American society today relates to the breakdown of the traditional family, about the inability of anyone to take responsibility, and the distance we’ve moved away from the land. It’s not complex at all, but there are whole agencies whose sole purpose is to cloud issues.

We desperately hope our children don’t make up the last generation that understands personal responsibility and the thrill of catching wild trout from a beaver pond on a fly rod. The two go hand-in-hand because there comes a point when you have to decide if you’re going to eat the trout or let it go. It’s like so many choices in life: simple but wrought with consequences on so many fronts. Frankly, I don’t know how I’ve gotten away with writing about it so long.

When this column first began, Southern California newspapers often had two or three pages devoted to traditional outdoor sports -- fishing and hunting. Some of the smaller daily newspapers are lucky to have that much space for an entire sports section today, thanks to newsprint and ink costs and corporate ownership that would rather squeeze more blood from the publishing turnip than actually serve, inform, and entertain readers. We are among the last generation of newspaper readers anyway. The demographics of those who read print versions are gray.

When I was a kid, Sunday morning meant an early trip to church, and then crepe-thin pancakes made by my dad, stacked up five or six deep, and slathered with peanut butter and syrup. It meant all of us sprawled all over the living room reading different sections of the Sunday newspaper, passing them around, and a day together.

Our house transformed from the bustling train station that it seemed every other day of the week into a lounging, luxury resort of reading, discussion, ideas, and games. The television was only allowed on for three things on Sunday, Dodgers’ baseball, that wonderful old American Sportsman show with Curt Gowdy, and The World of Disney. Sunday was what I imaged every day of a cruise would be like. The newspaper was the centerpiece.

Some things have changed a lot over the past 30 years. There are more political threats to hunting and fishing than ever before, and there is a growing contingent of politicians who believe guns are intrinsically evil and want to do away with them, but most of the outdoor things I like have not changed much.

Depending on the weather, more than anything else, I still get to miss my share of doves and upland birds every year. Public land hunting in California still ranks up there as some of the best in the nation when we have wet winters. Unless we put wind turbines on all our public lands, I don’t imagine this hunting will get much worse, either. Here’s the asterisk to that comment: The former superintendent of the Mojave Preserve, Mary Martin, probably did more in one year to reduce quail populations in our deserts by removing cattle water than all of the development in the desert has over the past 30 years. And her move was more damaging to those of us who hunt and watch wildlife because it was all on public land, where we all have access. We have to remain vigilant for these kinds of threats.

Deer populations are at the bottom of the barrel throughout Southern California because biologists still believe deer are at carrying capacity of the land. Maybe. But we can increase K, as they call it. But no one has any interest in management, so fire is the only positive influence we have on the herds. Things can only get better for deer, and they are right now -- but that has come at a huge cost in homes and human lives lost or disrupted. I blame the Forest Service and environmental groups that sue over every tree cut down in the woods. Both of them can’t tell good management from bad management, the forest from the trees, any longer. This long slippery road to the bottom was well underway when I first started writing about deer in the 1970s, and it doesn’t look like it will get better anytime soon. The “managers” are to the point they don’t even try to improve things. It’s a shame I find myself pulling for fires to burn up canyons where I know it will help the deer. That hasn’t changed.

I’ve watched bighorn sheep populations yo-yo up and down, but the long term trend has been upward thanks -- mostly -- to volunteers who keep fighting their way through the red tape to build new water sources in desert mountain ranges. Every new water source is like turning on a fountain the pours more sheep back into our deserts where they were extirpated by livestock diseases, drying up of springs through groundwater pumping, and development. But there are still some who want to shut off the sheep restoration by shutting down the water developments. I have less and less patience for those people.

We’re stupidly moving into a management program for ocean fisheries -- the marine reserve program that locks sport anglers out of vast areas of ocean -- that has proven a failure on land for birds and mammals. We still have vast “game reserves” all over the state under the guise of acting as pools of wildlife that will spill over and keep areas outside the reserve restocked with fish and game. They never have and never will work as envisioned. But no one has the political courage to say the experiment has failed and do away with them. You’d think this lesson should be applied to the marine reserves, which should only ban commercial exploitation of fisheries and allow recreational users. We can fish in national parks. Why shouldn’t we be able to fish in marine preserves? We can hunt on state and federal wildlife areas. Why not marine preserves? It’s the “lock out humans” mentality that is so pervasive today in management of public lands and resources. They forget: We belong here, too. We belong as much as the cougar or kangaroo rat or the vermillion rockfish or yellow-legged frog. We belong here more.

Today, I feel like a lone voice pointing out that simple fact. When I started doing this, there were a lot of us. Laughing and talking with an old editor friend of mine this week, he said we were dinosaurs. I corrected him: Dinosaurs are extinct. I told him I thought we were more like fire-belching dragons. My fear is that new fire-breathers won’t come along, that no one will believe in us much longer, and then we will simply disappear. Like dinosaurs.

Preserve approves science-based alternative to manage water for wildlife

National Park News
Mojave National Preserve

In response to a California Department of Fish and Game proposal to convert twelve abandoned ranching wells to wildlife waters, the National Park Service (NPS) initiated an environmental assessment in November 2005.

After considering potential impacts and public comments, the NPS has selected a science-based alternative from among several proposals for managing water for wildlife in Mojave National Preserve.

The decision was recorded through the signing of a Finding of No Significant Impact document.

The selection of this alternative means that some abandoned ranching wells will be converted to wildlife watering devices, known as guzzlers, in order to carry out research on the need for additional water sources for wildlife over broad areas. The research will provide sound factual information which will be used to make future management decisions about the need for additional wildlife waters.

In implementing the decision, the National Park Service, in consultation with the California Department of Fish and Game, is soliciting independent research proposals for projects that address the presence or absence of artificial waters and their effect on mule deer and other wildlife.

Research topics may include:

• -Effects of water developments on wildlife populations, including both game and non-game animals;
• -Effects of water developments on predators;
• -Water quality at both artificial and natural water sources;
• -Effects of water developments on plant communities;
• -The role of water developments in transmission of diseases.
• -Mule deer population studies to determine distribution, abundance, health, population genetics and water needs.

Over 130 springs and seeps are spread across Mojave National Preserve. The National Park Service recently initiated a long-term monitoring project to determine how precipitation patterns affect the availability of water for wildlife at these natural water sources by surveying them during the driest part of each year. Over 75% had water during the last survey.

In addition to natural water sources, there are also six existing large-game guzzlers (principally used by desert bighorn sheep) and 119 small-game guzzlers (principally used by quail, chukar and other small wildlife), as well as several dozen currently operating water developments for cattle ranching.