South Dakota officials want more habitat for pheasants. So much so, there’s a new generation of programs that pay landowners to plant for pheasants. More habitat means more birds, more birds mean more hunters, more hunters mean more state revenue. But putting land into wildlife habitat long term isn’t easy.
Bill Antonides has spent the last decade turning a dozen acre plot of land back to natural grassland. The Aberdeen wildlife biologist says it is meticulous work. He needs to spot spray individual weeds with herbicide, because what kills a weed can also kill a wildflower.
But when the weather is right and the lake on his property is full of Canada and Speckle belly geese and sandhill cranes, "it’s the peacefulness and the quiet. The only thing that’s breaking that quiet is the sound of nature," Antonides says. "You’re not subjected to slamming car doors from the neighbors, leaf blowers, and vehicles driving by and that sort of thing.”
It’s a landscape once again marked by a horizon that shows off native grasses, six feet tall.
“The settlers say they’d be riding all day and the grasses would be tickling the bellies of their horses all day long. You could get lost in the prairie because the grasses were so deep. We’ve lost most of those places. Nationwide, we’ve lost over 90 percent of those places.”
Antonides says any grass is better than nothing. Pheasants thrive when there’s grassland habitat.
That’s what wildlife experts want to accomplish with the Working Lands Habitat Program. It’s a part of Governor Noem’s Second Century Initiative, which has already included the nest predator bounty program and live trap give away. Those two programs, with a total cost of almost $1.5 million, were meant to encourage trapping and provide ten bucks per tail for each pheasant nest predators, like raccoon and opossum.
The habitat program works like this. A landowner agrees to plant a new mix of grasses and native plants on cropland acres for five years. They get a one-time payment of $150 per acre at the beginning of the contract. After the second growing season, the landowner can harvest hay or graze cattle on those enrolled acres for part of the year.
Tom Kirschenmann is deputy director of the wildlife division for South Dakota Game Fish and Parks. He says they have about 25 farmers and ranchers enrolled in the habitat program for a total of about 1,500 acres across the state.
“This program is specifically designed to work with producers who have current production land right now,” Kirschenmann says. “That would be land that’s cultivated, growing whatever cash crop it is… corn, soybeans, small grains, sunflowers, whatever it might be. This would be taking currently used agricultural production land… taking those acres out and putting it into herbaceous cover.”
Kirschenmann says the habitat program is designed specifically to work with producers who want to turn current under-performing crop acreage into habitat.
“The program also provides the seed, free of charge, to the producers that do enroll those acres into the program.”
Game, Fish and Parks is offering two different types of cool season seed mixtures depending on the type of land that’s enrolled.
“That will provide some good, fast growth habitat for a suite of wildlife, but in particular upland nesting birds,” Krischenmann says. “But it’ll also be some good forage for livestock should the producer choose to use it for livestock, whether it's for grazing or haying also.”
Krishenmann says GF&P wants to continue to make people aware of the habitat program.
During the last legislative session, lawmakers debated a $1 million appropriation to pay for it. That money wound up in a non-profit fund that’s called the Second Century Habitat Fund. GF&P works closely with the entity on promotion and technical assistance.
The goal is to focus on fundraising efforts to support the program - and to bring in other funding streams as well.
Governor Noem launched her Second Century Habitat Initiative because the state government relies on money from tourists. In this case it's hunters.
Jim Hagen is the Secretary of the Department of Tourism. He says pheasant season’s economic impact totals hundreds of millions of dollars. He says hunters can spread tourism revenue to places that can otherwise be overlooked.
“Especially in eastern South Dakota, we know those hunters are incredibly important to our economy especially to our smaller towns, to our main street diners and gas stations and our mom and pop hotels and lodges.”
The state sold 5-thousand fewer small game hunting licenses this year than last year for both residents and non-residents. That’s a loss of almost 435-thousand dollars in license fees for Game, Fish and Parks. Officials say the primary reason is an overall drop in the number of pheasants statewide. They point to the incredibly wet year as a main contributor.
If the state can get more acres converted into wildlife habitat, they hope brood numbers will increase. Kirschenmann, with Game, Fish and Parks, says they anticipated more farmers would sign up this year. He says the first goal is to get 5,000 acres enrolled at a cost of about three quarters of a million dollars. They’re thirty percent toward meeting the goal.
“A lot of the producers that we had talked to that had interest in it quite honestly were just trying to make some real decisions for their operations in terms of what are we going to do in the long term with these wet conditions.”
Kirschenmann says the wet conditions this year kept a lot of farmland unplanted. In addition, he says, the resulting financial strain on farmers may prevent some from practicing conservation techniques.
