Spending time in America’s great outdoors is good for both the spirit and health of our nation’s people. Recreation and relaxation in nature can reduce stress and anxiety, promote learning and personal growth, nourish the imagination, and provide mental and physical restoration. People who are disconnected from nature are less likely to be committed to and involved with stewardship of our shared natural legacy. Americans must learn anew that national wildlife refuges, while providing beneficial habitat for wildlife, are essential and relevant places for a new generation. In response to national demographic trends, national wildlife refuges must provide new opportunities and actively encourage people, whether school age or in their autumnal years, to connect with nature by visiting their national wildlife refuges, personally or virtually.
The National Wildlife Refuge System provides some of the finest outdoor recreational opportunities in the world. Indeed, more than 44 million people visited national wildlife refuges in 2009, up from 34.5 million people a decade earlier. The vision and work of state agencies for game, fish and wildlife conservation – and their authorities for hunting and fishing programs in the United States – has enhanced these opportunities and the access Americans have to wildlife-dependent recreation.
The Refuge System has a steadfast commitment to the long-standing conservation partnership with America’s hunters and anglers to expand and improve hunting and fishing opportunities for children and people with disabilities.
Recommendation: Conduct an analytical review of and report on wildlife refuge hunting and fishing opportunities and rules and regulations, with special attention to opportunities offered for youth and people with disabilities. Guidance on expanding opportunities will accompany the report.
Recommendation: Work cooperatively with state fish and wildlife agencies to prepare a strategy for increasing quality hunting and fishing opportunities on national wildlife refuges with the goal of doubling youth participation in hunting and fishing on national wildlife refuges by 2020.
Recommendation: Support outdoor recreation access and opportunities on national wildlife refuges by improving coordination, effectiveness and efficiency among federal agencies through close work with the Wildlife and Hunting Heritage Conservation Council, the Sport Fishing and Boating Partnership Council, and other recreational entities.
There are myriad opportunities to provide additional opportunities for people on national wildlife refuges. The Refuge System Birding Initiative has been a successful partnership between the Service and the birding community, and has provided important strategic advice on how to increase birding opportunities and involve avid and casual birders in wildlife refuge conservation and education programs. It is a model that can be expanded upon. The Refuge System must expand opportunities to watch and learn about wildlife, assist people in learning a land ethic to become better stewards of the nation’s natural resources, and build relationships with people who have not had traditional links to wild lands and wildlife.
Comment below and/or move on to next section of Chapter 4 - Welcome to Your National Wildlife Refuge
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Another suitable partner here would be Richard Louv’s Connecting People with Nature Network. A possible additional recommendation along those lines would be to provide the NWRS with the capability of starting family or community nature clubs and “green gyms” as in the U.K. These activities are not hunting/fishing/boating-specific, but hunting/fishing/boating can be incorporated. (or perhaps there is another part of this chapter where they’d fit in better — haven’t read it all yet)
While expanding opportunities and the number of visitors to NWRs is important, it should be coupled with quality services/staff training and while devotion to our wildlife first mission.
It’s good to see the Birding Initiative cited in this section (Connecting People wiht Nature) and in the next section( Welcome to your National Wildlife Refuge) of the Vision Document. This effort by the Birding Initiative has identified 20 essential ways that refuges can work with birders to enhance their visits, contribute to citizen science projects, and promote bird conservation. These 20 characteristics can make a refuge “Birder Friendly” and in turn can make birders “Refuge Friendly.” The entire list – with explanations – can now be viewed here:
http://www.fws.gov/refuges/pdfs/a%20birder%20friendly%20refuge7.08.pdf
Refuges, Wilderness, and the Hunting Tradition
National Wildlife Refuges open to hunting should be formally recognized and managed as places providing opportunities toward the traditional end of the hunting ethic spectrum. Former administrative guidelines for refuge hunts, such as promoting “positive hunting values and hunter ethics such as fair chase and sportsmanship” and “limited interference from or dependence on mechanized aspects of the sport” should be restored to the Hunting chapter of the Refuge Manual. Further, refuge wilderness areas should be recognized and managed as anchor points of the shifting hunting ethic. They should serve as benchmarks of traditional hunting experience, places where hunters of today and the future can find the qualities espoused by Teddy Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, and Olaus Murie.
These recommendations were stimulated by concern that the ethic associated with America’s venerable hunting tradition is eroding. As an indication of present trends, watch a few hunting segments on the Outdoor Channel. Consider what values are being programed into the next generation of hunters and anglers. Convenience, replacement of skill with a catalogue of gadgets, substitution of effort with an ever-increasing variety of ATVs and ORVs, certainty of bag, commercialization of the experience and commodification of wildlife, game feeding and watering structures, bear baiting, artificial stimulation of antler growth, manipulation of habitats and predators to artificially propagate game species: we are getting further and further from the ethic championed by Roosevelt, Leopold, and Murie.
This trend influences the image of hunting held by the increasing proportion of non-hunting Americans. As well, it affects the upcoming generation of hunters. A while ago I talked to a teenage boy whose father had taken him bear hunting. Over a smelly pile of stale jelly donuts, old cooking grease, and other garbage, he shot a bear. Remembering how important telling the story of the hunt had been to me, I asked what he told the guys back at school. With an embarrassing look, he said he hadn’t told anyone. “They’d look down on me,” he admitted. I didn’t ask how he felt about his successful “hunt?” But with no exercise of skill and no more effort than climbing into a tree stand, he couldn’t have experienced much of the challenge, pride, and character-enhancing aspects refuge system founder Teddy Roosevelt espoused.
And even in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness, private hunters and hunting guides base airplanes at their camps, which they routinely use to locate trophy animals. Guides commonly speak of getting their client “his sheep,” as if the animal were a commodity the “hunter” had bought and the “hunting” outcome was as certain as going to Wal-Mart to purchase it. Hunters and non-hunters who have witnessed super-cubs circling the mountains ask: “What kind of ‘hunting’ is this?” Its legal, but a far cry from the hope fair-chase advocate Olaus Murie had that the Arctic Refuge would be a place for hunting “in the tradition of the highest form of the sport.”
In A Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold espoused a hunting ethic requiring “a self-imposed limitation” and based on “a distinctly American tradition of self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, and marksmanship.” “These are intangibles,” he continued, “but they are not abstractions.” Leopold’s message about the hunter as a participant in the cycle of nature continues to appeal to traditional hunters. Many find pleasure in reenacting the experience of the pioneers of our cultural heritage, and in reliving the drama that was central to the 95% of human history in which we were Pleistocene hunters. To Leopold, hunting served as a touchstone to our predatory past, a means of forging connections—physical and emotional connections—to the forces of nature that once formed and shaped us.
But one can hardly be a participant in the natural order when the animal pursued is not a natural product of the land, i. e., its numbers are a result of game farming or predator control. As Leopold said in his 1933 text, Game Management, “. . . the recreational value of game is inverse to the artificiality of its origin . . .” Nor can one experience Leopold’s “cultural values” of hunting when surrounded by those who bought the experience or have substituted knowledge, skill and effort with gadgets and vehicles.
A sorry indicator of the trend in hunting is the change in administrative guidelines for refuge hunts in the FWS Refuge Manual. Prior to its revision in 2006, the Hunting chapter specified that refuge hunting programs should . . .
. . . promote positive hunting values and hunter ethics such as fair chase and sportsmanship. In general, hunting on refuges should be superior to that available on other public or private lands and should provide participants with reasonable harvest opportunities, uncrowded conditions, fewer conflicts between hunters, relatively undisturbed wildlife, and limited interference from or dependence on mechanized aspects of the sport.
The revised (current) hunting chapter deleted reference these positive values and ethics, replacing them with an unspecific reference to “quality.”
In his classic study, Attitudes and Characteristics of Hunters and Antihunters, Yale professor Stephen Kellert identified categories he described as “Nature Hunters” and “Doministic/Sport Hunters.” Nature hunters sought the connection –to-nature experience Leopold described and that reflect well on hunting. Doministic/Sport Hunters are more representative of mechanized, trophy oriented, or get-the-limit hunters. To the extent they act within the law, neither group is necessarily better. They are simply different in their notion of what constitutes quality.
Perhaps the full diversity of legal “quality” hunting experiences should be available in the nation, but it cannot be provided in each area. There should be a spectrum of hunting and fishing areas. There are many private, state, and federal lands available for those whose experience is less dependent on natural conditions of the setting, minimal intrusion from mechanization, and the principles of fair chase. Given present trends, it seems that some public hunting grounds should be reserved for those who seek to participate in a more traditional form of hunting — and for those who perhaps no longer hunt, but find satisfaction and hope in just knowing there are places where the tradition remains alive. Our national wildlife refuges, and especially wilderness refuges, provide the best opportunity for doing so.
I strongly support birding-friendly initiatives for the National Wildlife Refuge system. Our family has spent many hours of many days in various parts of the system, including the Sacramento and other refuges in California.
I have always wondered how a wildlife refuge could be open to hunting, but I appreciated Roger Kaye’s eloquent defense of traditional hunting as espoused by Theodore Roosevelt, Olaus Murie and Aldo Leopold. Though I have never been a serious hunter I can support that kind of hunting, carefully managed. I do insist that we not support mechanized hunting in any element of the NWR system.
While Hunting and fishing are currently the obvious major recreational focus in your document, the passive recreational opportunities are also very much sought after and important to many, many people. Photographers, observers of the vast wildlife populations, organized conservationists such as Audubon, Nature Conservancy, etc. members –on & on –are particularly interested in equal access for people other than those who hunt and/or fish !!!!!!!! In my experience , I have been excluded from entrance to several refuges in N.C. during times when these ” refuges ” were reserved for a special interest function; hunting. Obviously it makes no sense to wander about looking at wildlife while it is being shot at because one might get hit accidentally so it makes some sense. I just hope for equal access and will try hard to influence all authorities/bureaucracies to take as much initiative with the passive visitor interests. Where hunters are allowed to go at Pocosin Lakes NWR, and Matamuskeet NWR, I am not allowed at any time ( Pocosin Lakes posts no access–except fpr their organized hunts — to a major portion of the Pungo unit fron Nov-Feb.–a major observational site for over-wintering warefowl ) They are given vast territorial scope when they attend scheduled hunts. We request the same scope for scheduled ” observer events “. We represent far less adverse intrusive effects upon the wildlife than hunters. If yiou are basing your bias in favor of hunters and fisher-people because they are paying for licenses, then maybe you could establish some ” access license ” equally beneficial to your economic needs so that we could all be as privileged as those other special interest groups ” PLEASE !!!!
Increase the discussion and linkages that relate Connecting People to Nature Benefits for health. Using refuges as a key location for “Nature Champions” will highlight the CPWN-health llinkage and may serve to increase refuge usage by the public.
Recommendations need to be added to this section that are in addition to hunting and fishing. Most recreational outdoor enthusiasts are not hunters and anglers. This population segments needs much more attention in this section. It should include increasing opportunities for birders, photographers, etc. Birders and nature photographers already use refuges, but highlighting these use will strengthen the document and the emphasis on this group.
Another group that this section of the document needs to focus on is youth. They may be hunters, anglers, or photographers, but highlighting this population segment focuses on the future and families. Refuges are already sites for Scouting activities and support communty service projects like Eagle Scout Leadership Projects. This document should highlight this kind of activity and capture it as a separate Recommendation.