By Bruce Ross, Executive Director bross@wisducks.org
This article originally appeared in Wisconsin Waterfowl Association’s April, 2024 Newsletter edition.
A recent survey funded by the International Crane Foundation (ICF) hoped to determine the level of public support for a Sandhill Crane (SHC) hunting season in Wisconsin. The survey found that 17% of those surveyed support a Sandhill Crane hunting season, 48% oppose a season and 35% are neutral on the topic. This may be useful information, but it is not sufficient to manage the growing population of cranes. Wildlife and conservation are best served by science-based management, not by blindly following polls.
A little background. It’s worth noting that as the SHC population continues to soar, Wisconsin farmers have destroyed over 10,000 SHCs in the past decade. This is allowed under US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) depredation permits to address SHC-caused crop losses. By USFWS requirements, these SHC carcasses may not be taken from the field – it’s a bounty of nature discarded and disrespected.
These SHC losses might have been prevented by use of a chemical seed treatment that causes the crane to avoid eating the seeds. That chemical, AVIPEL, seems effective. But it is not free. Current usage costs approach $2M for 200,000 acres. The State’s Agriculture department (DATCP) estimates of SHC depredation impacts could reach 3,000,000 acres – or $30M per year for chemical treatment.
Study design. That significant price tag may be one reason ICF chose not to survey the level of support for public funding to offset these farmer costs. While ICF has floated the concept of a SHC stamp to offset producer AVIPEL costs, current farmer costs would require the purchase of more than 80,000 stamps at $25. Every. Single. Year. And that figure only increases with a SHC population growing at over 4% per year.
Judging by the survey’s narrow focus, it’s reasonable to believe ICF was more intent on foreclosing consideration of a hunt than looking at real solutions to agricultural losses and depredation kills.
Still, there’s no reason to believe the poll data is wrong. With less than 10 percent hunters in our population, substituting bear, ducks, sturgeon, trapping, or maybe even deer would not yield startlingly different poll results.
So what? Like all rights, the right to hunt – which is embedded in the Wisconsin Constitution – is intended to protect minority stakeholders against such poll-driven policy decisions. Or it’s not truly a right. Which should make all hunters concerned.
Even if the ICF’s poll provides some useful data (it does), it is wholly insufficient to manage a game species like the SHC. No serious wildlife manager would rely on poll results to develop good wildlife management practices. ICF was probably not trying to suggest that. But the auspicious timing, narrow focus, and contextual remarks from ICF’s CEO (who was study author) appear intended to disregard the value hunters bring to wildlife management.
To the degree this ICF-funded survey is perceived as developed to support ICF’s pre-existing anti-hunting policy position, their credibility as a neutral provider of crane science will be undermined. Which would be unfortunate given their five decades of remarkable science-driven crane conservation history.
Bottom line: Science-based wildlife management benefits game population health. Hunting can be a valuable tool available to wildlife managers… a tool that produces harvest opportunities that sustain hunters’ historically deep and generous conservation commitment.
ICF may yet comprehend this underpinning of North American Wildlife Conservation, and which has produced the conservation results that allow us to have this discussion. Let’s hope so. Conservationists of both hunting and non-hunting stripes can ill-afford a circular firing squad when truly consequential conservation issues now confront us.