Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission
Regulations Committee
May 30, 2001
Commission Hearing RoomTexas Parks & Wildlife Department Headquarters Complex
4200 Smith School Road
Austin, TX 78744
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6 BE IT REMEMBERED that heretofore on the 30th day
7 of May of 2001, there came on to be heard matters under
8 the regulatory authority of the Parks and Wildlife
9 Commission of Texas, in the Commission Hearing Room of
10 Texas Parks and Wildlife Headquarters Complex, Austin,
11 Travis County, Texas, beginning at 9:05 a.m., to wit:
12 APPEARANCES:
THE PARKS AND WILDLIFE COMMISSION
13 REGULATIONS COMMITTEE
14 Lee M. Bass, Ft. Worth, Texas, Chairman
John Avila, Jr., Fort Worth, Texas
15 Alvin L. Henry, Houston, Texas
Carol E. Dinkins, Houston, Texas, Vice-Chair
16 Ernest Angelo, Jr., Midland, Texas
Katharine Armstrong Idsal, Dallas, Texas
17 Mark E. Watson, Jr., san Antonio, Texas
Phil Montgomery, III, Dallas, Texas
18 Joseph Fitzsimons, San Antonio, Texas
19 THE PARKS AND WILDLIFE DEPARTMENT:
20 Andrew Sansom, Executive Director
Other personnel of the Parks and Wildlife Department
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1 REGULATIONS COMMITTEE
2 * * * * * * * * * *
3 MAY 30, 2001
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5 9:05 A.M.
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7 CHAIRMAN BASS: Good morning. I would like
8 to call to order the committee meetings of the Parks and
9 Wildlife Commission. Welcome our two new appointees to
10 join us this morning.
11 Mr. Sansom, will you read our opening statement?
12 MR. SANSOM: Mr. Chairman, a public notice
13 of this meeting containing all items on the proposed
14 agenda has been filed in the Office of the Secretary of
15 State as required by Chapter 551 of the Government Code.
16 This is referred to as the Open Meetings Law, and I would
17 like for this action to be noted in the official record of
18 the meeting and to welcome Mr. Montgomery and
19 Mr. Fitzsimons, as well.
20 CHAIRMAN BASS: First order of business
21 will be the regulations committee. And I would like a
22 motion for approval of the committee minutes from our
23 previous meeting, if there are no comments on such.
24 COMMISSIONER IDSAL: So moved.
25 COMMISSIONER IDSAL: Second.
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1 CHAIRMAN BASS: Motion and a second. All
2 in favor? Any opposed? Thank you.
3 CHAIRMAN BASS: Mr. Sansom, will you give
4 us a briefing on the committee charges, please.
5 BRIEFING - CHAIRMAN'S CHARGES
6 MR. SANSOM: Mr. Chairman, one of the
7 things that you asked to us to do during this biennium was
8 to increase the environment of our advisory committees and
9 to streamline the authority by which we manage with the
10 advisory committees. And this morning, we have the
11 pleasure of having Mr. Bob Corrigan, who's the Chairman of
12 our Migratory Bird Advisory Committee who will participate
13 in this regulations committee discussion. And Mr. John
14 Kelsey will be with us later, who is the Chairman of the
15 Hunting Advisory Committee. And this is, I think, a step
16 in the right direction toward involving these people who
17 volunteer their time and services into our official
18 policy-making meetings.
19 You have asked us to optimize license management
20 in marine commercial fisheries. And I'm happy to report
21 to you that as of May 11, 2001, 450 commercial fin fish
22 licenses have been issued, and the records indicate that
23 about 1,000 individuals are eligible to purchase a
24 license. So we're about halfway done.
25 To maximize recreational opportunity, which was
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1 a major charge to this committee, the Real Texas
2 Adventures, which we've briefed you on, has received over
3 4500 entries as of this date. And as I'll remind you that
4 the program will feature four premier fishing
5 opportunities in both fresh and saltwater available at
6 very low costs to all Texans. So that concludes the
7 charges this morning.
8 CHAIRMAN BASS: All right, then. We'll do
9 the migratory bird proclamation first. Vernon, if you
10 would come forward.
11 ACTION ISSUE - 2001-2002 MIGRATORY GAME BIRD PROCLAMATION
12 VERNON BEVILL: Mr. Chairman, members of
13 the Regulations Committee, my name is Vernon Bevill. I'm
14 the Program Director of the Game Bird program. And today
15 we are here to discuss with you the proposals for the
16 early season species as well as adopt rules in this
17 process for the general regulation of governing migratory
18 bird seasons of 2001-2002.
19 We'll be making several changes. Of course,
20 every year we make adjustments related to the calendar.
21 This year you will be considering a change in the dove bag
22 limit and season length. And I would note to you now that
23 we're going to hold off on our decision making for
24 sandhill cranes until the late season process so that we
25 have more clarity by that time and what the light goose
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1 conservation order might entail this coming year.
2 For teal and snipe, woodcock, rail, those
3 seasons will basically be the same as last year. As you
4 recall for teal, the special teal season, last year we
5 started on a Friday in order to gain the full 16 days.
6 This year, Saturday the 15th of September will give us
7 that -- that same option. And we have -- so we have that
8 little calendar adjustment to go back to opening the teal
9 season on Saturday.
10 And -- and for rail and gallinule and those
11 species, we try to set those seasons as best we can to
12 mirror opportunity to hunt during other migratory bird
13 seasons like water fowl and special teal season. So those
14 adjustments are made like that.
15 For white-wing dove, we are again proposing the
16 special white-wing season in the Valley to commence on the
17 first full weekend in September and cover the two -- the
18 first two weekends of September.
19 As you know, we went out to considerable effort
20 to gather public input toward consideration of a change
21 that would take us back to the pre-1994 regulations for
22 mourning dove that did establish a 12-bird bag within a
23 70-day season. And we have looked at that both on a zone
24 basis and a state-wide basis with a survey effort and
25 through gathering public comment.
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1 Through the mail survey that we sent out and
2 received about 3,000 responses to in a one-mailing survey,
3 one point I would bring to your attention is that when
4 asking Texas hunters about their satisfaction with
5 mourning dove hunting in general, we get high marks for
6 the -- for the mourning dove hunting opportunity that
7 exists in Texas.
8 And in the opinion survey, we looked at two --
9 basically, two parameters: Whether to maintain a 15-bird
10 bag in a 60-day season or a 12-bird bag in a 70-day
11 season. As you can see from the survey results, the
12 central and south zone respondents favored going back to
13 the 12-bird bag in a 70-day season. In the north zone,
14 about one percentage point difference; no statistically
15 significant difference, obviously; that -- about a 50/50
16 split with a slight favor toward 15 and 60.
17 We received more public input this year on the
18 dove proposal than any previous time by a wide margin. We
19 had received about 475 comments as of late last week when
20 we had to put this slide together. And as of yesterday,
21 it had inched up a little bit more into, I think, 483
22 comments. You will note that from a statewide
23 perspective, dove hunter comments slightly favored 15 and
24 60. But when we look at it on a zone basis, the central
25 and south zone both indicated the same results that we
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1 found in the mail survey in favoring going back to 12 and
2 70, but a wide margin exists in the north zone with
3 staying with the 15 and 60 season that they have had these
4 past number of years.
5 When we look at where we would put the ten extra
6 days, if you make the decision to go back to 12 and 70,
7 interestingly, north zone hunters chose to have a winter
8 season. And it's interesting in that the north zone
9 season has always run a straight-through season even when
10 it was a 70-day season. So that was a point of interest
11 to us.
12 In the central zone, we basically looked at
13 three options: Adding the ten days back to the end of the
14 first season, which was where we took them from when we
15 made the change to go to 15 and 60; add days at the
16 beginning of the second season in December - that would be
17 prior to Christmas - or adding those days at the end of
18 that second split and run it further into January. Texas
19 is the only state in the country that is allowed to go as
20 late as the 25th of January in the south zone, actually.
21 And in that south zone, again, we see that --
22 basically the same question. And in the south zone, the
23 preponderance of response was for the days to be added
24 late. And I would like to go back and just point out two
25 things here. When we look at these data, we -- we -- from
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1 a staff perspective, we basically looked at what the
2 preponderance of response was and based our suggestion on
3 that. But when you look at combining the interest of
4 having a set of some days prior to -- or at the beginning
5 of the second split and some days at the end of the second
6 split, you see that 70 percent of the hunters in both the
7 central and the south zone indicated an interest in those
8 late days. And I know that's been a concern to all of you
9 as to where to put these days, if you make this change.
10 So when we put the recommendation together for
11 your consideration, we basically, as I said, looked at
12 what the preponderance of response was and put all ten
13 days where that response was.
14 Because of the interest of staying with 15 and
15 60 in the north zone being as high as it was and public
16 comment, we are recommending that you consider staying
17 with 15 and 60 in the north zone.
18 But because of the 12 and 70 interest in the
19 central and south zone was so clearly in favor of that --
20 that -- going back to the longer season, we are suggesting
21 you consider changing back to that. And -- and in this
22 particular option, we suggested putting the extra ten days
23 in the central zone at the end of the first season, and
24 the extra ten days in the south zone at the end of the
25 second season. But that's just a suggestion that is one
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1 option for you to consider. And there are these other
2 options of splitting days between the front end and the
3 back end of a segment or in the case of the central zone,
4 putting some days back in at the end of the first split
5 and then other days at the end of the second split. I
6 think that's -- you know, all those options are open to
7 your consideration.
8 And, then, Mr. Chairman, that ends my
9 presentation. I would be happy to entertain any questions
10 or call on Mr. Corrigan for comments from the Advisory
11 Board.
12 CHAIRMAN BASS: Yes. I would like to hear
13 from Bob at this time. Good morning.
14 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Good morning.
15 CHAIRMAN BASS: First I would like to thank
16 you for coming and --
17 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Thank you.
18 CHAIRMAN BASS: -- and the effort that you
19 and your board have put into this. Interested to hear
20 your comments.
21 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: We first addressed this
22 issue about five years ago and looked at this more as an
23 issue of opportunity, an issue of regulations.
24 The south -- our original proposal was asking
25 that this change primary affect -- well, only affect the
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1 south zone, not realizing that we are going to get as much
2 support as we would out of the central zone.
3 We feel like that -- and I think some of our
4 statistics will prove it -- is that we have a larger
5 population of birds later in the season than early season.
6 It also gives us the opportunity to involve the families
7 more in dove hunting. You know, most of our kids, once
8 football season starts and once the college kids get off
9 to school, the opportunity to hunt is -- is slim to none.
10 Around the Christmas season, it gives the family an
11 opportunity to get together and enjoy the resource.
12 As I'm sure Mr. Kelsey is going to -- I hope
13 will relate to you this afternoon, hunting opportunity is
14 a critical issue. We're finding now that less than
15 nine percent of our hunters are under the age of 18.
16 Three percent of the hunters are in -- of a college age.
17 We have a situation where we have a relatively flat number
18 of hunting license -- licenses, but a significantly
19 increasing population. So our hunters are actually
20 representing less than 50 percent of where they did ten
21 years ago. And so anything that we can do to improve the
22 opportunity, we think is very beneficial.
23 Another thing is -- is with respect to the Type
24 II hunting property that's available throughout the state,
25 it is one of the few opportunities where the -- someone
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1 who maybe can't afford a hunting lease can get outdoors.
2 And so that's -- we figure that probably - and they say
3 figures lie and liers figure - but somewhere between 35
4 and 45 percent of the people that buy a hunting license
5 participate during the year in dove hunting. So any more
6 opportunity we can give those people to get in the field,
7 and especially on Type II properties, the greater our
8 chance is of retaining, I feel, the hunting heritage.
9 We think this is a very important issue. It's
10 really more in the area of opportunity than just simply
11 bag limits.
12 CHAIRMAN BASS: So, basically, your
13 committee would be in support of the general staff
14 recommendation of going to -- to the 12 and 70 in the
15 central and southern zones and leaving it at 15 and 60 in
16 the north?
17 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Very much so.
18 With respect to the ten days, though, there's
19 been comments should it be at the beginning, should it be
20 at the end and so on.
21 CHAIRMAN BASS: That was my next question.
22 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: And I queried -- heck,
23 we met just last week. Our feeling is that probably you
24 just add the ten to the days and let staff move that
25 extra -- move the whole season as it maximizes benefit to
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1 the public. Saying it has to come five days before
2 Christmas, when that turns out to be a Monday, may not be
3 the best use of it. You may actually want to back it up
4 eight days one year, so you put another week in it. And
5 tying it to just five days before or five days after, all
6 at the beginning or all at the end, may not create the
7 real results we're looking for.
8 COMMISSIONER HENRY: May I ask a question,
9 Mr. Chairman?
10 CHAIRMAN BASS: Yes, please.
11 COMMISSIONER HENRY: I'm trying to track
12 your earlier comments with regard to hunter
13 participation --
14 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Yes, sir.
15 COMMISSIONER HENRY: -- with the extension.
16 Did your committee favor -- in looking at that,
17 did they favor one over the other in terms of extended
18 participation? You mentioned football players and college
19 people going back to school and all.
20 If that's the case, it would seem that there
21 would be more weight given to the earlier additions than
22 the later additions. Am I missing something here? Are
23 you following me?
24 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: There -- there -- Yes, I
25 think I do. Let me see if I can answer it, and if I'm
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1 not, slow me down.
2 We asked to go back to 12 and 70 because it
3 would increase the number of opportunity days. The
4 average dove hunter in the State of Texas harvests 3.1
5 birds a day. Over 85 percent of the people that go out
6 hunting do not get their limit. So we're using up a lot
7 of days when very, very few people are benefiting from it.
8 And so the question was brought up under the federal
9 regulations -- the federal guidelines say that we can do
10 one of two things: We can either have 15/60, which is 15
11 birds in a 60-day season, or we can go 12 birds to a
12 70-day season. The federal regulations allow us to pick
13 which one of those. That's the only options we've got.
14 And we can move those days any way we want. Okay?
15 There was very few people that really wanted to
16 add those to the first season, but there was a lot who
17 wanted to add them to the second season. The question
18 seems to keep arising as to what do we do? Where do we
19 put those ten days in the second season?
20 And so -- am I doing all right?
21 COMMISSIONER HENRY: Uh-huh.
22 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: And so our
23 recommendation was it's just like what staff does now with
24 teal. There is -- there's -- I guess, Vernon,
25 September the 1st is the first day you could be open?
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1 Right.
2 VERNON BEVILL: Yeah.
3 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: But what they do is they
4 look at the timing. And we know on September 1st, there
5 aren't many teal down anyhow. And so what they do is they
6 pick the weekend closest to where they anticipate the
7 flight to begin.
8 So we're recommending something along this same
9 line with respect to dove by saying it allows staff the
10 opportunity to move those dates to best service -- serve
11 the needs of the hunter and the opportunity.
12 MR. WATSON: Well, Bob, it seems like to me
13 what you said, though, would indicate that we would get
14 more opportunity in the central zone with the kids home
15 from school and things like that if we did the second
16 season rather than the beginning of the second season.
17 Because, you know, they're not going to be home before,
18 you know, -- not much before Christmas.
19 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Uh-huh.
20 COMMISSIONER WATSON: The way Christmas
21 holidays are going now, they don't go back until the
22 middle of January. And it looked like to me that, you
23 know, that you're saying that that might be the bird
24 selection just as you've -- staff's recommended for the
25 south zone.
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1 VERNON BEVILL: Mr. Commissioner, I think
2 the paradox of this whole issue is where to put the days.
3 In the central zone, when the season was shortened, we
4 took those days out of the end of the first split.
5 The common thread of interest that we've heard
6 the most since that time is, "Give us those days back in
7 October." But, yet, when you looked at the survey
8 results, while that was probably the highest percentage
9 indicated that preference, you looked at the two
10 percentages for putting those days late and -- and that
11 represented more than 50 percent of responses. So the
12 paradox is how to do this is going to be meaningful to
13 everybody, realizing there are going to be people who are
14 not going to be satisfied with any aspect of this
15 decision.
16 CHAIRMAN BASS: That's the one constant of
17 dove regulations. In the 12 years I've been associated
18 with it is there will definitely be people who are not
19 happy and will be back next year wanting a change.
20 Let me throw a concept out that's come up in
21 discussions I've had with people, and I think it addresses
22 some of these issues of maximizing school vacation
23 opportunities and some of this calendar shift that goes
24 along with that, because, I think, you know, all of us
25 having kids in various schools, sometimes Christmas
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1 vacations kick off the 16th or something of December and
2 other times it's the 23rd, just kind of the calendar shift
3 of what days of the week the actual Christmas holiday
4 falls on.
5 And I think part of where this particular
6 argument would come from is that dove seasons and the
7 opening of dove season has really been kind of a tradition
8 amongst Texans, whether it's central and north zone, that
9 it's September 1st. No matter what day of the week it is,
10 people take the time off, get together with their
11 traditional hunting group and friends, family, and go,
12 whether it be Wednesday or Saturday. And since we have
13 had this winter season, for as long as I can remember,
14 it's opened the 26th. So you kind of have -- people have
15 it in their head, "It's the day after Christmas. I can
16 dove hunt," at least in the central and south zones.
17 And one -- one idea that I've talked to some
18 people about, and it's come up in some discussions, is to
19 try to keep with a tradition that people always know,
20 "Okay. Such and such a date is when the winter season
21 starts," but, yet, accommodate for this -- this school
22 vacation issue, whether it be high school or college. And
23 that it's -- it's this: That it would open the Saturday
24 prior to Christmas. So some years that may be the 24th;
25 some years that could be, I guess, as early as the 18th or
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1 something. I haven't figured the math, but something
2 about that. But that would almost always certainly catch
3 when the vacations start. Because if Christmas falls on a
4 Saturday, almost all schools will let out at least four or
5 five days ahead of that.
6 The other -- other times when Christmas may fall
7 on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, they may go to the Friday of
8 the preceding week. But if you always started the
9 Saturday prior to Christmas and then ran for the allotted
10 number of days, you would -- you would catch the bulk of
11 the early before Christmas school holidays. And then by
12 starting it on a Saturday, you would always maximize the
13 number of weekends that you had in this allotted 25 or six
14 days that we're allocating to the winter split, which I
15 think is another goal, Bob, that you pointed out that we
16 all -- we should always try to maximize the number of
17 weekends in an allocated season.
18 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Right.
19 CHAIRMAN BASS: So as to optimize
20 opportunity.
21 So, you know, that would be one approach that
22 would establish a traditional starting date, provide for
23 the calendar shift as Christmas Day moves around of what
24 day of the week it is and try to increase the opportunity
25 for school kids over what we have now. And then --
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1 without wasting those days by having it open before
2 they're out of school and then letting it run as late into
3 January as we can, because there are obviously, you know,
4 some -- some -- quite a -- quite a few people who are
5 interested in seeing it run as late into January as it
6 can. It's kind of a way to split the middle of a lot of
7 these survey results by doing that. But that's one
8 approach that I've -- that's come up in some conversations
9 I've had, which seems to have as much rationale to it as
10 any. But...
11 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: I don't think we have
12 any problem at all accepting that recommendation. Our
13 wishes were to add ten days for more opportunity. We
14 wanted to leave to staff how those days should be used.
15 From the input you've received if -- I mean, it sounds
16 like a great idea to me, because you do know when the
17 season starts.
18 We're going to have a few times where maybe
19 Christmas is on Sunday and so there's not going to be that
20 much opportunity on Saturday. Mama doesn't like us
21 leaving into Christmas Eve. But I feel very comfortable
22 in saying I think that our committee would support that.
23 CHAIRMAN BASS: I just heard rumblings from
24 one mother who said she would like them out of the house
25 on Christmas Eve.
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1 COMMISSIONER IDSAL: I also looked at my
2 palm pilot, and in 2005 Saturday is the 24th.
3 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: It's good to keep moving
4 around.
5 CHAIRMAN BASS: Maybe you have several
6 years to try a concept such as that.
7 VERNON BEVILL: When Christmas is a Sunday
8 or a Monday or something like that, probably the deadest
9 hunting day of the year is that Saturday, prior to
10 Christmas. But, I mean, like you say, you've got that
11 adjustment just going on.
12 CHAIRMAN BASS: Maybe it will encourage
13 people to shop early.
14 VERNON BEVILL: Well, that's another way to
15 look at it.
16 CHAIRMAN BASS: You know, another issue I
17 know that's come up that we haven't touched on here is by
18 going this direction is that as far as -- for as long as
19 I'm aware of, and maybe since there was a dove season in
20 Texas, we've had a uniform bag limit statewide. And some
21 concern that -- that having different bag limits for
22 different zones would create some potential law
23 enforcement issues and unintended or -- you know, I would
24 call them benign violations rather than ones that were
25 malicious. But, you know, frankly, I think most people
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1 who intend to shoot over their limit are going to end up
2 with more than 15 birds in the first place, or at least
3 they hope to.
4 We really haven't -- haven't touched on that. I
5 know that, you know, one of the -- the -- the goals that
6 we've had from a regulatory point of view for many years
7 around here is to simplify things, make it as easy for
8 hunters and fisherman to follow the rules as possible by
9 having as few rules as possible.
10 We've also had this -- this ongoing goal of
11 maximizing opportunity. And, frankly, this seems to be
12 where the two of those come in conflict to some degree,
13 where we're complicating it by having different bags and
14 in zones in order to maximize opportunity.
15 It has come up in some discussion, but, you
16 know, all the ones I've been party to, at least, people
17 have felt like that the max -- the increased opportunity
18 was well worth the slight complication of bags. And,
19 after all, we have different bag limits in different duck
20 zones, goose zones, you know, the turkey, deer limits
21 differ statewide. So once there was an adjustment period
22 where people got used to it, that it really wouldn't be an
23 issue. But I'm just kind of bringing that up to see if
24 there are any comments that anybody feels they want to
25 throw into the mix from that perspective.
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1 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Could I address that for
2 the moment?
3 Two of the members of our committee are, our
4 ex-Commissioner Bill Graham and Mark Bevins, both from the
5 Panhandle area -- we wanted to propose something. Our
6 original proposal was we wanted to propose something that
7 we thought would be acceptable. The input we received
8 from staff and two of our members were - I say this
9 facetiously - what the north zone would really like is
10 they would like 25 birds in ten days, because by the 15th
11 of September, most the birds are gone.
12 CHAIRMAN BASS: Yeah.
13 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: I mean, if they really
14 had their way. We had no opposition, Mr. Chairman, to
15 standardizing it. We just fell that it would probably
16 hurt our proposal.
17 We were extremely surprised how close the call
18 was in the north zone. We didn't anticipate it being that
19 at all and how many people proposed that the ten days go
20 on the second season, which is even -- seems like there's
21 further -- fewer birds. But that's just to give you some
22 insight on why we did what we did, because the original
23 input we received was just so much in favor of don't touch
24 the north zone. Their season is so limited in reality,
25 that adding days isn't going to help them any.
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1 CHAIRMAN BASS: You know, it was
2 surprising, this -- some of this data about -- it seemed
3 to indicate some interest in a second season in the north
4 zone. And I'm not quite sure what geographic areas that's
5 coming from that they think they have birds then. But --
6 VERNON BEVILL: We could actually look at
7 that by zip code, but I don't -- I don't know that we
8 would have enough specific data to tell anything from it.
9 CHAIRMAN BASS: It may be something
10 worthwhile since most people up there feel by
11 September 15th the birds are gone. That's an
12 exaggeration, but --
13 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Right.
14 CHAIRMAN BASS: -- for all practical
15 purposes -- but certainly in the Dallas/Fort Worth area,
16 we don't feel like we can use 60 days. But it may be
17 something that when we go out for public comment in the
18 next regulatory cycle that will begin this fall, that we
19 might actually try to gauge where that interest is coming
20 from or at least what seems to be an interest, you know.
21 Is there a real interest in the north zone for
22 some limited second season? And, if so, you know, where
23 is it coming from and how much support is there?
24 This is kind of contradictory.
25 VERNON BEVILL: Yeah. We were actually,
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1 Mr. Chairman, surprised that the mail survey result from
2 the north zone were as close as they were, considering the
3 kind of public comment we have received from the north
4 zone over the years and the preponderance of comments so
5 strongly favoring 15 and 60 in this current information.
6 So -- you know, in speaking to your uniform bag
7 limit point, I would probably -- had the public comment
8 been closer to 50/50, had it been 60/40, with the mail
9 survey being basically a dead heat, I would probably would
10 have encouraged a uniform bag limit. But when we looked
11 at it, those two sets of data, they were so different --
12 CHAIRMAN BASS: Yeah.
13 VERNON BEVILL: -- that we felt like we
14 needed to consider a split bag limit.
15 And I believe that most people who hunt between
16 zones probably are more cognizant of regulations of one
17 zone to the other, than people who basically hunt just one
18 zone.
19 COMMISSIONER IDSAL: May I ask a question
20 about -- are there doves in the Panhandle in December and
21 January?
22 VERNON BEVILL: There are doves in the
23 Panhandle, and there is some empirical information that
24 indicates that that wintering population is slightly
25 increasing.
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1 The problem with late dove hunting in the big
2 expansed areas like that is when you organize a group of
3 people to go out and hunt, you get on the field where
4 they're at and you get round of shooting, and they pick up
5 and they go five miles away and there's nobody over there
6 to run them back to you. That's why just slightly over
7 seven percent of the total dove harvest takes place late
8 in the -- in that late segment, anyway.
9 COMMISSIONER IDSAL: Do you see an increase
10 in the dove population in north central Texas?
11 VERNON BEVILL: I don't know that we can
12 tell that from -- we don't have any specific surveys. It
13 would just be somewhat educated observation.
14 CHAIRMAN BASS: I would -- I would be
15 surprised if we don't have some public comment on this
16 tomorrow at our -- at our Commission meeting. So I'm sure
17 we'll get some more input.
18 Any further comments or discussion that anybody
19 would like to make at this time concerning any of these
20 issues? Please.
21 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Can I add something,
22 Mr. Chairman?
23 CHAIRMAN BASS: Yes.
24 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: First, I would like to
25 thank you and the prior Chairman for letting me serve as a
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1 Chair of this committee. I guess it's been nine years.
2 In fact, I think we were the first advisory committee,
3 weren't we, Andy? It has been a real privilege.
4 And I would like throw one thing in, because I
5 am very are concerned about license sales, hunter
6 opportunity, public access and things like that, that I'm
7 not going to try to tie any value to dove hunting as far
8 as license sales. But I do feel very comfortable in
9 saying that 35 to 45 percent of hunters do dove hunt.
10 There is some question kind of milling around in
11 Washington that says maybe we ought to reduce the bag
12 limit and reduce the days of hunting. Very typical. I'm
13 sounding kind of cynical. When they can't prove things
14 are good or bad, they just ratchet down on us until we
15 prove that things are good. That's the way the migratory
16 system works.
17 It has been, Vernon, I guess, 15 or 20 years
18 since we've done any really extensive banding and call
19 count surveys. We know pretty well -- Vernon, would you
20 agree with me that probably the places they're sitting now
21 to listen to call counts are underneath a telephone pole
22 next to an office building? That's just because you've
23 got to go back to the same place every year.
24 I'm hoping that this committee will -- or this
25 Commission will give our committee the opportunity to come
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1 back to you all with a proposal for long-term dove
2 management. We think it's critical. Unfortunately, it's
3 not something that's going to just involve us. It's going
4 to involve everybody in the central management unit and
5 maybe even the eastern management unit. It's something
6 that needs to be done. I think if we all of a sudden wake
7 up one day and we've got ten birds in 30 days when, in
8 fact, we don't need to, we're going to have a problem.
9 And so I'm just -- and thank you for letting me throw that
10 comment in.
11 CHAIRMAN BASS: I agree with you. It's
12 well-founded. And -- and I think there would be support
13 for the Commission level for -- for a review of how we're
14 doing our surveys. I know Vernon brought that up several
15 times --
16 VERNON BEVILL: We are --
17 CHAIRMAN BASS: -- in earlier presentations
18 and to some degree has been fighting the federal system
19 above us to get some recognition of new data sets. But...
20 VERNON BEVILL: And Mr. Chairman, we are,
21 in fact, currently engaged in a research project with
22 Texas A&M to look at the call count survey routes and try
23 to understand those variables that exist on those routes
24 today and their influence on our observer's ability to
25 hear doves. And so we should have some answers as to some
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1 of the weaknesses and strengths of our current survey
2 system within a couple years. I mean, that's the key.
3 There is a nationwide initiative to look at the
4 kinds of research that dove need conducted for future
5 management emphasis. So hopefully -- and Texas is such a
6 big player in any migratory bird initiative, since we have
7 about 19 to 20 percent of all migratory bird hunters in
8 the country who hunt in Texas. We are a pivotal state in
9 that interest group.
10 CHAIRMAN BASS: Bob, on a personal note, I
11 would like to thank you for at least the last six years of
12 your leadership --
13 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Thank you.
14 CHAIRMAN BASS: -- of the Advisory
15 Committee. And you all have done a good job, steady
16 advice that's always been sound and well thought out.
17 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Thank you.
18 CHAIRMAN BASS: And I appreciate it. It's
19 been helpful.
20 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Thank you very much.
21 Appreciate it.
22 VERNON BEVILL: Here, here.
23 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: Thank you.
24 CHAIRMAN BASS: If there's no further
25 comment on -- or discussion on that one, I would propose
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1 moving it to the agenda tomorrow for further
2 consideration.
3 Jerry Cooke, deer management issue.
4 ACTION ITEM NO. 2 - DEER MANAGEMENT
5 MR. JERRY COOKE: Mr. Chairman and members,
6 my name is Jerry Cooke. I'm Game Branch Chief in the
7 Wildlife Division. I'll be presenting to you some
8 proposed changes relative to the deer permit programs in
9 Texas.
10 During the most recent legislative session
11 HB-2710 was filed, which identified a number of issues of
12 concern to those constituents, such as allowing scientific
13 breeder permit bucks to be used as a temporary buck in the
14 deer management permit detention pens; greater flexibility
15 for Triple T transfers of deer for genetic purposes;
16 increases in the number of Parks and Wildlife staff who
17 could approve the Triple T permits to trap, transport and
18 transplant permits, and to provide a formal appeals
19 process for denials of Triple T permits.
20 Staff was directed to look at laying out
21 proposals to the various regulations that it could a
22 accommodate as many of these issues as possible in the
23 Texas Administrative Code, so long as the programs
24 remained incentive-based and habitat-focused, as has been
25 our goal throughout on the deer permit programs. But all
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1 Parks and Wildlife personnel would be responsible for
2 approval or disapproval of all permits, and that deer
3 confined under a deer management permit could be not be
4 trapped and moved under a Triple T permit and that,
5 wherever possible, the rules that would be proposed would
6 be fence neutral -- fence type neutral.
7 One issue that could not be addressed that was
8 included in the bill was creating a single permit for all
9 these various activities, because only the legislature can
10 do that. However, we can accommodate a single application
11 process for multiple permits, and we certainly can
12 accommodate that.
13 The changes would be -- required to address
14 these issues would be in three different proclamations:
15 The Triple T proclamation, the deer management permit
16 proclamation and the permit -- the proclamation for the
17 scientific breeder permit.
18 Many of the resource concerns could be
19 alleviated in some of these issues if we used existing or
20 previous -- previous -- previous reviews and approvals in
21 existing permit programs. For example, if a property had
22 been approved for a Level 3 MLD permit and if they had
23 renewed this and the requests were for doe deer only, so
24 long as the number of does that were to be trapped from a
25 piece of property was no more than the number of MLD
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1 permits that were issued to the property, then it would --
2 could not be a resource issue to move those animals.
3 Also, so long as releases on the property did
4 not exceed the population size larger than the target
5 population size identified in the management plan, then,
6 again, that could not be a resource issue.
7 Also, if there was a reduction in the herd to a
8 accommodate a release, depletion could not be an issue so
9 long as the population was not reduced more than half the
10 increment below the target population size.
11 Currently, Triple T permits can only be approved
12 or denied by Manager IIs, which is our district leaders in
13 the Wildlife Division. We would propose that our senior
14 biologists and our senior technicians be included in that
15 approval regulation. This would provide more personnel to
16 do the reviewing.
17 On appeals process, that was included in the
18 proposal, was fairly straightforward. If a permit is
19 denied, it could be appealed to the supervisor -- direct
20 supervisor immediately. If the landowner doesn't feel as
21 though they had an appropriate review, they could appeal
22 it to a panel and that panel would be made up of the
23 District Leader, Regional Director, the White-tailed deer
24 statewide coordinator, me, and the Divisional Director.
25 The Divisional Director is an amendment to what was
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1 published earlier.
2 If there is any -- if the results of those
3 denials remains a denial and the landowner wishes to
4 suggest, perhaps, a rule change would be in order, then we
5 would review that with all of our advisory committees, as
6 we always -- as we always have.
7 Within the deer management permit proclamation
8 changes would have to be made to allow a scientific
9 breeder buck to be temporarily detained in that breeding
10 facility and removed prior to opening the pen to the other
11 deer.
12 Obviously, removing that scientific breeder buck
13 would have to be -- would have to accommodate the welfare
14 of the other deer in the pen. In other words, hovering a
15 helicopter over a 10-acre pen to net a scientific breeder
16 buck would not be a good method.
17 Also, the scientific breeder permit proclamation
18 would have to be amended to allow for the temporary
19 transfer to the DMP pen.
20 Other changes that was proposed for the
21 scientific breeder permit proclamation would be to define
22 an authorized agent. And, basically, an authorized agent
23 is whoever the landowner says it is -- I mean, whoever the
24 scientific breeder says it is, as we do in all of our
25 other programs. We would require that invoices used for
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1 temporary transfers for whatever purpose be retained on
2 both ends of the transaction for the Law Enforcement
3 Divisions' inspection.
4 Also, for the annual report, instead of
5 providing all of the originals of permits and invoices, we
6 would require photocopies of those permits and invoices so
7 that the originals could remain with the breeder and that
8 the requirement for all deer to be ear-tagged within the
9 facility would correspond to the same day as the annual
10 report which would be March 31 as opposed to March 1st, as
11 it currently is.
12 Also, one amendment to the proclamation that we
13 would suggest is in the notification section that the
14 Department needs to be notified of moving a deer within
15 ten days prior to or during a hunting season. Currently
16 the wording is scientific breeder only. There are other
17 people who may move deer under this program at that time.
18 We need to change the wording of that to include all
19 individuals who might be moving animals.
20 We had public hearings on these issues in Tyler,
21 Bryan, Brownwood, Uvalde, Fredericksburg, Victoria and
22 Falfurrias. We had 92 people attending these hearings.
23 Fifty of those were in Fredericksburg, which is normal.
24 Any time we show up in Fredericksburg, there will be a
25 large crowd. In those 92 attendees, we had 30 comments.
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1 Basically, all were supporting these proposals.
2 We had one petition with 72 names on it that
3 suggested that the DMP proclamation be amended such that
4 deer could not be released from a breeding facility prior
5 to April the 1st. I mean, this -- this would be the day
6 after we stopped trapping under the Triple T. In other
7 words, this would absolutely mean that deer retained could
8 be not be trapped under the Triple T proclamation.
9 We also had one resolution from the Gillespie
10 County Commissioner's Court opposed to the proposed
11 changes, the scientific breeder proclamation and general
12 opposition to the deer management permit entirely.
13 That concludes my presentation. If you have any
14 questions, I'll be happy to try to answer them.
15 CHAIRMAN BASS: Jerry, what's the feeling
16 on the petition stipulating that the April 1 release date?
17 MR. JERRY COOKE: Basically, the 72 people
18 who signed that petition were scientific breeders. They
19 were concerned about the possibility of a scientific
20 breeder buck being placed in a DMP pen, breeding the does,
21 removing the buck, releasing the does and then trapping
22 them with a Triple T and basically selling them as bred
23 does. That was their concern that they expressed.
24 Coincidentally, the section that includes that
25 date is not open currently. So if -- if the Commission
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1 wanted to take action on that, it would require a
2 publication and further action in August. So that other
3 than -- other than suggesting we publish, that's not
4 something we can adopt at this time.
5 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Is the answer to
6 the Chairman's question the explanation for the Gillespie
7 County opposition?
8 MR. JERRY COOKE: No.
9 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Can you explain
10 the Gillespie County opposition?
11 MR. JERRY COOKE: I have a copy of the
12 resolution. And basically what it says is that they're
13 concerned about the use of wild deer in that way.
14 Basically, the permit exists because it's a
15 statutory provision, and we have rules that accommodate
16 that. But the Gillespie County Court Commissioners
17 opposed the scientific breeder proposals because it had to
18 do with the deer management permit, and they're opposed to
19 the deer management permit in its entirety, all aspects of
20 it.
21 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: For what reason?
22 CHAIRMAN BASS: Philosophical.
23 MR. JERRY COOKE: It's philosophical.
24 Basically -- basically, I believe that their opinion is
25 that this would be an inappropriate use of a wild deer,
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1 capturing it and placing it in a pen for breeding. As I
2 said, I would be happy to provide you with a copy of their
3 resolution.
4 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: In that regard, it's
5 a high probability that none of this would not exist if
6 the legislature had not mandated it. Correct?
7 MR. JERRY COOKE: That is my feeling, yes.
8 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Jerry, on the
9 scientific breeder permit change - I guess it's the last
10 bullet point there - "Allow scientific breeder permit
11 bucks to be temporarily transferred to a DMP pen, is that
12 an adjacent or contiguous DMP pen or is that any DMP pen
13 the department --
14 MR. JERRY COOKE: Any DMP pen.
15 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: With no
16 consideration as far as animal health testing,
17 tuberculosis, just they can do --
18 MR. JERRY COOKE: The only time -- the only
19 time under the current Texas Animal Health Commission
20 rules, the only time those testing requirements would come
21 into play is in a voluntary program within their facility
22 for herd certification and for bringing an animal into the
23 State of Texas from outside the State of Texas. Other
24 than that, there is no testing requirement within the
25 state that I am aware of.
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1 CHAIRMAN BASS: So similar movements happen
2 every time there's a transaction between scientific
3 breeders that --
4 MR. JERRY COOKE: Yes, as far as the
5 movement is concerned.
6 Now, taking a deer out of a pen, doing something
7 with it and putting it back into a pen, that's a bit of a
8 different disease issue than simply transferring it.
9 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: But am I correct
10 that that's less restrictive than the tuberculosis
11 requirements on livestock and presumably they're going to
12 be on the same land.
13 MR. JERRY COOKE: I'm sorry. I'm not
14 familiar with the livestock requirements. I'm not. I can
15 check into that for you, though, and see, because I have
16 not read the rules as they relate to livestock; only as
17 they relate to deer.
18 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Presumably,
19 they're going to be -- in a lot of instances be on the
20 same ground.
21 MR. JERRY COOKE: Yes, one would expect.
22 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: And it is the
23 same strain of tuberculosis between cervid and bovine?
24 MR. JERRY COOKE: It is.
25 CHAIRMAN BASS: Any other questions on
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1 this?
2 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: I guess one of the
3 things I wondered about, is this -- do you consider that
4 this simplifies the process, streamlines it, or what are
5 going to be the primary benefits of these changes from the
6 overall picture?
7 MR. JERRY COOKE: It will not simplify the
8 wording of the proclamations. In some respects, it will
9 streamline some processes. For instance, on those Triple
10 T proposals that fall within the guidelines of the
11 management plan for a Level 3 MLD, we would not go and
12 look at those pieces of property again. I mean, their
13 management program is part of their management plan. In
14 that respect, it would -- it would streamline the process
15 in that respect. In other ways, it complicates things.
16 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: The people are
17 involved primarily in the programs, though; these are
18 changes they wanted, are they not?
19 MR. JERRY COOKE: Absolutely. I mean,
20 the -- particularly the scientific breeder positions,
21 because they were virtually all -- virtually all of the
22 attendees at the hearings other than Fredericksburg were
23 scientific breeders that supported the proposed changes en
24 masse.
25 CHAIRMAN BASS: And it appears that the
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1 groups that supported HB-2710 are supportive of those
2 changes --
3 MR. JERRY COOKE: I'm sorry. I didn't -- I
4 wasn't -- I wasn't clear in that.
5 CHAIRMAN BASS: Yeah.
6 MR. JERRY COOKE: When I said that the
7 scientific breeders at the hearings were in support,
8 virtually all of them identified themselves as Texas Deer
9 Association members on their -- on their registration
10 cards.
11 CHAIRMAN BASS: The basic concerns of that
12 have been addressed here --
13 MR. JERRY COOKE: In my --
14 CHAIRMAN BASS: -- therefore, obviating the
15 need for any statutory changes.
16 MR. BOB CORRIGAN: In my opinion. I'm sure
17 they'll comment tomorrow.
18 CHAIRMAN BASS: Any further discussion on
19 this? Without objection, I would move this to tomorrow's
20 agenda for public comment and consideration. Thank you.
21 Gary Graham, you're going to do a quail briefing
22 for us, please, sir.
23 BRIEFING - QUAIL
24 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Morning, Chairman,
25 members of the Committee. I'm Gary Graham, Director of
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1 the Wildlife Division. And today we are privileged to
2 have three speakers that will discuss the quail initiative
3 with us, the quail issues, some of which were brought up
4 at our last commission meeting.
5 When I first started three years ago, this was
6 one of my first lessons on the job. And several people in
7 meetings I attended said, "Pound for pound, quail is the
8 most important game species in Texas." And that was
9 emphasized at a Southwestern Cattlemen's meeting that I
10 attended, where I anticipated people would be talking
11 about the black-tailed prairie dogs for two hours, but
12 instead they wanted to talk about quail for two hours. So
13 there is a great deal of interest in this species.
14 It's very important economically to the state
15 and very important with respect to the hunters. And so it
16 is with pleasure that I will introduce the three speakers.
17 We're going to start off first with Dr. Nova Silvy from
18 Texas A&M. And Dr. Silvy is going to discuss some of the
19 scientific aspects of the quail issues. He will be
20 followed by Steve DeMaso of our staff, who is going to
21 talk about the role of that Parks and Wildlife is playing
22 with quail conservation. And then, finally, Dr. Fred
23 Guthery here from Oklahoma will talk about some of
24 applications of the science and some of the challenges
25 that we're faced with with respect to quail management and
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1 conservation. So I'm happy to introduce mister -- Dr.
2 Nova Silvy.
3 DR. SILVY: Mr. Commissioner,
4 Commissioners.
5 CHAIRMAN BASS: Nice to have you. Welcome.
6 DR. SILVY: Thank you. My name is Nova
7 Silvy, as Gary said. I'm a professor in Wildlife and
8 Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University. I need some
9 water here.
10 What I would like to do here is talk about the
11 quail decline, the methods used by various people to
12 document the decline, talk about the pros and cons of
13 those methods and then kind of give you my idea for what
14 may be going on.
15 So, basically, the quail decline surveys: What
16 do they really mean? Because we're getting different
17 opinions from different people. The two major surveys
18 being used, the breeding bird survey which is a national
19 survey and the Texas Parks and Wildlife quail survey. The
20 breeding bird survey has been run since 1966, so it's a
21 longer duration. There are fewer transects in the State
22 of Texas because that covers all of the United States.
23 Therefore, there's more variability in counts. When you
24 have fewer surveys, you're going to have greater
25 variability.
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1 With the Texas Parks and Wildlife quail
2 transects they have been around since 1978. There are
3 more transects per unit area of Texas and, therefore, less
4 variability in the surveys.
5 Another problem when we're comparing the two
6 surveys is that the TEXAS PARKS AND WILDLIFE COMMISSION
7 ecoregions and the Breeding Bird Survey strata are
8 different. Let me just give you an example. You're all
9 familiar with the map of Texas and the ecological areas of
10 Texas. If we look at the Breeding Bird survey and how
11 they break down Texas, they break it down somewhat
12 differently. I'll put them on the same slide and you can
13 kind of see. They've got different zones in different
14 parts of the state.
15 So when you are trying to compare, say, South
16 Texas with the Texas Parks and Wildlife surveys and trying
17 to compare South Texas with the Breeding Bird surveys,
18 different land areas are being covered, and we've got to
19 keep that in mind when we're talking about these survey
20 methodologies.
21 Now, the other thing we've got to look at is
22 Breeding Bird surveys cover all breeding birds in the
23 United States, not just quail. So the first thing we've
24 got to do is sort out only those surveys in the United
25 States that quail are heard or seen on. And this gives
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1 you an example of that for the United States.
2 Now, with Texas Parks and Wildlife's surveys, we
3 also have a situation that occurs. Here we have the
4 various ecological regions of Texas and the surveys in the
5 Blackland Prairies, there's 13 there that have bobwhite on
6 them, but zero have scaled quail. We go on down there to
7 the South Texas plains, there's 32 that have bobwhite that
8 are heard on and only 19 that have scaled quail on them.
9 One of the problems when people interpret these
10 data, they may lump all the surveys together for South
11 Texas and then see what the scaled quail is doing. Well,
12 three-fourths of them have zero and always will have zero,
13 so that brings the number down. These should be separated
14 out when we're looking at the surveys. And I'm going to
15 point some of this out to you.
16 Looking at the some of Breeding Bird survey and
17 national survey - this is on quail - if you start at the
18 upper left, you can see the dark represents more quail.
19 You go to the lower left, another 10-year interval, you
20 can see less quail even in South Texas. And you go to the
21 upper right, again, less quail. So, basically, the
22 Breeding Bird surveys are showing us there is a quail
23 decline and it's over the range of the bird.
24 If we look at two graphs showing the U.S. as a
25 whole, you can see the decline has been steady. If you
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1 look at the Breeding Bird survey just for the Texas
2 transects, you can see that it was level for a while and
3 then started down. Also, you see more variability. We
4 have fewer transects in Texas, so the dots bounce up and
5 down a lot more.
6 Now, let's look at some data for what we can get
7 from the Texas Parks and Wildlife surveys. This here is
8 for South Texas. You can see we have year-to-year
9 variability. The dark line is bobwhite; the light color
10 line is scaled quail. But they kind of mirror one
11 another. You have less scaled quail in the South Texas
12 area, because they're found on fewer transects. Bobwhite,
13 they're found on more, so you have more numbers when you
14 average them out over the whole. However, if we were to
15 just pick the transects with the scaled quail on them,
16 those numbers would come up. But this is some of the data
17 that we can get here. This is probably controlled more,
18 year-to-year variation, by weather.
19 These data have been presented. This here is
20 for the Rolling Plains of Texas. Here the bobwhite, which
21 mirrors, by the way -- if I overlay the bobwhite data over
22 the south plains data, they mirror the ups and downs. So
23 the weather is a factor. The scaled quail earlier in the
24 period was mirroring the bobwhite data for both South
25 Texas and the scaled quail data for South Texas. But all
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1 of a sudden, it's going down. You can see the scaled
2 quail seem to be in trouble in the Rolling Plains of
3 Texas, some of the data that we can get.
4 Now, when we want to compare Breeding Bird
5 surveys with Texas Parks and Wildlife surveys, one of the
6 problems we've got, we have a longer period of data for
7 the Breeding Bird surveys. And so when you start putting
8 a regression line through, we take all those values for
9 the Breeding Bird survey. And in this case, we have a
10 significant decline when we look at the Breeding Bird
11 survey. We look at the Texas Parks and Wildlife survey,
12 when the line goes through there -- I didn't put one
13 through there, because it's nonsignificant for South
14 Texas.
15 If we compare South Texas bobwhites just in
16 those periods where they overlap for the Breeding Bird
17 survey and the Texas Parks and Wildlife survey, just going
18 back to '78 for the Breeding Bird survey, we get a better
19 idea of what's going on. But, again, you can see here the
20 Breeding Bird survey shows a decline, but the Texas Parks
21 and Wildlife survey does not.
22 What are the differences here? Slopes are
23 different when using all the available data, going back to
24 1966. Slopes are different when you just use the same
25 period. The Breeding Bird survey slope is different from
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1 zero. In other words, something is going on. It's not
2 remaining stable where the -- it's decreasing, where the
3 Texas Parks and Wildlife slope is zero, which means a
4 stable population is showing up.
5 Now, samples in bobwhite surveys in South Texas
6 plains. Here are the number of samples, the number of
7 surveys. You can see that Texas Parks and Wildlife uses a
8 lot more surveys. The Breeding Bird survey numbers have
9 been increasing. They've been adding more surveys, but it
10 hasn't caught up with the number that Texas Parks and
11 Wildlife has been using. That's the reason we get less
12 variability and, in my opinion, a better data set.
13 Comparison of bobwhite surveys in Texas, I put
14 this back in here again just to show you that long-term
15 they're saying we've got a problem, but when we just use
16 our data, we don't.
17 Here's another problem, though, when we're
18 looking at for all of Texas -- that last was. Here's --
19 when we look at the number of samples for all of Texas and
20 for what Texas Parks and Wildlife uses. Now, here becomes
21 a problem with the Texas Parks and Wildlife data. Earlier
22 on, there were a lot more surveys being used by Texas
23 Parks and Wildlife. And then because of budget
24 constraints, the number of surveys were reduced. That may
25 be causing some kind of problem when we're looking at the
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1 whole state. So when people are using Texas Parks and
2 Wildlife surveys and trying to predict what's going on for
3 the whole state, if we reduce surveys in the parts of the
4 state - and that's what happened - east of 35 where we had
5 low numbers, they were all low. Don't get me wrong.
6 Piney Woods always had low number of birds. But now we
7 remove those surveys out and try to predict what's going
8 on for the total State of Texas, the total State of Texas
9 may look better than it really is, because we now have
10 removed the low transects. And so we've got to be careful
11 when we're doing that.
12 We look at bobwhite harvest data produced by
13 Texas Parks and Wildlife, it shows a decrease. Now, they
14 have some problems, because if you've got reduced number
15 of hunters or different conditions or whatever, but
16 generally, they tend to mirror what's going on. So,
17 basically, we may have a problem there.
18 Let's look at the scaled quail data for the
19 whole of Texas. And here, I just compared it with the
20 Breeding Bird survey for the period that we've got the
21 Texas Parks and Wildlife surveys. And, basically, here
22 neither one have any significant trends. They're showing
23 no -- for the whole State of Texas.
24 I showed you earlier for the Rolling Plains we
25 do have a problem. But for the whole State of Texas, the
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1 scaled quail does not appear to have a problem. We're
2 better off with the scaled quail surveys for Texas Parks
3 and Wildlife data. There, those transects were kept
4 pretty relatively stable over times. We're using the same
5 data set. I think we're getting a better data set. Also,
6 the scaled quail data set, say, for the Breeding Bird
7 survey remained pretty stable, so it's more comparative
8 over time.
9 The scaled quail harvest, though, is showing a
10 decline. Now, is that a true decline or is that less
11 hunters or what? We really -- that's hard to -- that
12 needs to be teased out. Right now, people would say it
13 does show a decline.
14 The other thing that we've got to look at - and
15 this is getting into my stat background a little bit -- we
16 need to look at the power of these tests. To tell the
17 difference between one dot and the next, we need to know
18 how -- and that's based on variability. If we've got a
19 lot of variability between surveys, we've got very little
20 power to tell these dots are different from one another.
21 So what I've done here -- and I'll just summarize it.
22 The line to the upper left is the Gulf Prairies
23 and Marshes. And data sets on the Gulf Prairies and
24 Marshes has more power. In other words, if we look over
25 there -- commonly for statisticians, say, if we can have
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1 an 80 percent predictability -- and so on the left axis
2 you'll see 80 percent up there and a line coming across
3 and you drop down, that means if the population changes by
4 30 percent -- in other words, if you had ten and now
5 you've got 13, we can tell the difference 80 percent of
6 the time.
7 If we've only got a 50 percent predictability
8 that means we just as well flip a coin to see if those
9 numbers are different or not. So to get out there to get
10 100 percent predictability, we've got to be out there
11 where we have a 70 percent chance. In other words, we've
12 got to go from 10 birds on a survey to 17 birds to have
13 about 100 percent -- to say if those numbers are real. So
14 the power of the test makes a big difference.
15 For bobwhite, it's pretty good, but -- and we
16 can use it on these particular dots here.
17 The big drops, those are differences. But the
18 smaller differences -- they're probably no difference at
19 all; just random survey error.
20 With the scaled quail, we've got much less
21 power, we've got fewer transects. And you can see, it
22 takes -- we need to get out to about 60 percent increase
23 or decrease before we can even get an 80 percent
24 predictive power. So the scaled quail we have a little
25 more difficulty trying to predict what's going on from
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1 year to year with the scaled quail. But you've got a
2 long-term trend, like we had in the Rolling Plains, we may
3 have problems.
4 Again, the scaled quail and the Trans-Pecos, we
5 can see we've got a significant decline there.
6 Conclusions are quail have declined over time,
7 probably since the 1800s continually, due to habitat loss.
8 Quail numbers change yearly. That's where you get those
9 up and down fluctuations depending on weather. And they
10 may be down for two or three years. We had -- two or
11 three years of drought that we've had. Hopefully we'll
12 have a better year this year. The Breeding Bird survey is
13 good for large areas; like take, all the United States or
14 all of Texas. It's not good getting on down to the region
15 area.
16 The Texas Parks and Wildlife surveys are good
17 for the ecoregions, but again, not by county and not by
18 ranch. Okay?
19 Cannot survey quail by county or ranch using
20 these methods, and we need long-term data sets and we need
21 to be consistent. We can't be changing those surveys.
22 We've got to keep them consistent if we're going to be
23 able to predict what's going on from time to time.
24 I would like to acknowledge DeMaso and Marcus
25 Peterson and Ben Wu, who provided a lot of the data sets.
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1 And I think probably we'll wait for questions after
2 everyone's through, or do we want to open for questions?
3 CHAIRMAN BASS: Why don't we go ahead and
4 let everybody speak, and then we can have maybe a short
5 Q&A at the end of that, if it's appropriate. Thank you.
6 MR. STEVE DEMASO: Good morning,
7 Mr. Chairman, Committee members. My name is Steve DeMaso,
8 and I'm the Upland Game Bird Program Coordinator in the
9 Wildlife Division for Texas Parks and Wildlife.
10 My part of the -- of today's briefing will cover
11 two different sections. First of all, I would like to
12 address some of the quail-related questions from the April
13 Commission meeting. And then the second part of my
14 discussion, I would like to talk about some of Texas Parks
15 and Wildlife's responsibilities concerning quail.
16 Concerning differences in the nesting chronology
17 between north Texas and South Texas, there really is no
18 difference when looking at data from the wings of
19 harvested quail. You can back-date how old quail are
20 based on the molt patterns on the wings. And when you
21 look at the time a nest building occurs, different
22 percentages when the hatch are completed; total days in
23 the nesting season, when 90 percent of the juveniles are
24 at least 90 days old, we see there are no really big
25 changes from the Rolling Plains to South Texas.
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1 And past research by Texas Parks and Wildlife
2 has shown that once quail reach the age of 90 days, that
3 they're pretty acceptable in size and weight to the
4 quail-hunting public.
5 Looking at some more recent radiotelemetry
6 research on quail from South Texas which is the South
7 Texas Quail Project being conducted in Brooks County, and
8 then looking at the -- some data from the Panhandle area,
9 the Pack Saddle Quail Study, which is being conducted by
10 the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, to note
11 that the Pack Saddle area is about 30 miles straight east
12 of where the Gene Howe Wildlife Management is in the
13 Panhandle.
14 Again, this slide illustrates, really, no
15 difference in the distribution of nests through the spring
16 and summer months in north -- in northern latitudes and
17 southern latitudes in Texas.
18 The next question concerned the survival of
19 chicks hatched later in the nesting season compared to
20 chicks hatched earlier in the nesting season. And this
21 slide shows that really chicks' survival is greater for
22 checks that are hatched later in the nesting season,
23 because those chicks have to survive less time to reach
24 the fall hunting population. So you've got to account for
25 that time lag in there, which gives them a higher survival
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1 rate later in the year.
2 CHAIRMAN BASS: Steve, this data is
3 survival as of what? I mean, they're alive on what day,
4 what calendar based on this chart?
5 MR. STEVE DEMASO: This is daily survival
6 rates. And it was -- the research we did -- this was from
7 some of the Oklahoma research. We estimated chick
8 survival from hatching to 21 days. And then we estimated
9 chick survival from 21 days to 39 days. Our telemetry
10 research showed that the brood rearing period was about 39
11 days for quail. If my memory serves me right, the
12 survival from hatching to 20 days was about 36,
13 37 percent. The survival rate from 21 days to 39 days
14 really jumped up to about 92, 93 percent, because by three
15 weeks of age the birds could fly a little bit and were
16 better able to get away from predators. And then the
17 overall survival rate from hatching to 39 days was
18 38 percent.
19 CHAIRMAN BASS: So in other words, this --
20 does this chart -- that's survival versus hatch date to 38
21 days?
22 MR. STEVE DEMASO: Right. That would be
23 the average chick survival for chicks that were hatched in
24 May, after survival for chicks that were hatched in June
25 and so forth.
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1 CHAIRMAN BASS: Survival to 38 days?
2 MR. STEVE DEMASO: Right.
3 CHAIRMAN BASS: Thank you.
4 MR. STEVE DEMASO: Next, I would like to
5 talk a little bit about some of the responsibilities that
6 Texas Parks and Wildlife has concerning quail in the
7 state, and Texas Parks and Wildlife does a lot for quail.
8 It's done a lot for quail in the past. It does a lot for
9 quail in the present and will continue to do so for quail
10 in the future.
11 Texas Parks and Wildlife has more quail-related
12 responsibilities than any other institution in the State
13 of Texas. Like Dr. Silvy talked about, we're responsible
14 for monitoring the quail populations in the State of
15 Texas, and we do this through August roadside survey and
16 then also through a harvest survey that's conducted after
17 quail hunting season.
18 And if we look at some of the data, with the
19 green line being our quail survey route and the yellow
20 line being our estimated harvest from our harvest survey,
21 you can see these two surveys track each other really
22 nicely. And this roadside survey is a real useful tool
23 when you're having to make a quail forecast prior to the
24 hunting season. You can see where the lines track each
25 other and are very correlated. It's a very useful tool.
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1 Looking at some of our harvest data, in 1981, we
2 estimated that about 244,000 quail hunters harvested about
3 2.1 million quail in the State of Texas. In 1999, we
4 estimated that about 118,100 quail hunters harvested just
5 over about a half a million quail. If you plot this data
6 on the map, you can see that the distribution of quail
7 hunters and where quail hunting occurred from 1981 to 1991
8 has changed pretty drastically. There -- back in the
9 '80s, there was a lot more quail hunting that went on in
10 north-central over into northeastern Texas than what is
11 currently taking place.
12 Also, Texas Parks and Wildlife is responsible
13 for managing the hunting season and setting quail season
14 dates and bag limits. Texas Parks and Wildlife manages
15 quail habitat on public hunting areas throughout the
16 state. We provide technical guidance and technical
17 assistance to landowners throughout the state. We also
18 provide training to field staff, technical guidance
19 biologists and staff from other agencies to promote quail
20 management and to provide the most current results
21 concerning methodologies concerning quail management.
22 Currently, Texas Parks and Wildlife is involved
23 in eight quail-related research projects that are -- an
24 estimated cost of these projects is about $175,000. Parks
25 and Wildlife staff conducts habitat field days throughout
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1 the state. We do have quail-related presentations at
2 various functions throughout the state. Staff is
3 currently working on updating many of our quail-related
4 publications in the Department.
5 And that concludes my part of the briefing this
6 morning. And I would be happy to try to answer any
7 questions.
8 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Thank you, Steve. We'll
9 go ahead and introduce Fred Guthery, who will close the
10 presentation on quail, talking about some of the practical
11 aspects of how we conserve and manage these species.
12 MR. FRED GUTHRY: Mr. Chairman and members
13 of the committee, my name is Fred Guthery. I'm
14 (inaudible) Chair in Wildlife Ecology at Oklahoma State
15 University. I was asked to address what are the solutions
16 to the quail decline.
17 And we might start by answering this question
18 with a question. What are the problems? And to answer
19 the question, we might review some of the history of the
20 quail decline in America.
21 In 1855, there's a massive collapse of bobwhite
22 populations in Wisconsin and probably the northeastern
23 U.S. in general. The collapse occurs because a decade of
24 mild winters is followed by a series of severe winters.
25 In 1880, California quail begin to decline
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1 because of market hunting, over-grazing and fire
2 suppression.
3 About 1880, bobwhites experience optimal
4 conditions in Iowa and subsequently begin to decline,
5 according to Paul Arrington and Frederick Hamerstrom.
6 About 1890, masked bobwhites go extinct in
7 southern Arizona because of drought exacerbated by
8 over-grazing.
9 In 1920, bobwhites in Pennsylvania begin a steep
10 30-year decline that bottoms out at practically nothing in
11 1950.
12 In 1935, Val Lehman documents how conversion of
13 native land to farm land, clean farming and intensive
14 grazing extirpated coveys in central Texas.
15 In 1943, L.G. Duck (phonetic) and Jack B.
16 Fletcher observed that despite prolonged drought
17 associated with the dust bowl, bobwhites have increased in
18 western Oklahoma because of the abandonment of farms.
19 In 1949 a survey of Phil Goodrum indicates
20 bobwhites are declining in 15 of 40 states surveyed. In
21 other words, 50 years ago bobwhites were declining in an
22 estimated 60 percent of America.
23 The quail decline's more than a century old in
24 some parts of the United States. The decline has
25 continued more or less unabated through high and low fur
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1 prices and through the presence and absence of DDT. The
2 problem is that landscapes in America have chronic wasting
3 disease. They suffer from the ongoing loss and
4 fragmentation of suitable habitat. Bobwhites and other
5 quails must have permanent cover to which they are
6 adapted. They must be able to walk through it, fly over
7 it, partake of the foods in it and ride out heat waves and
8 cold spells in it. This type of permanent cover is
9 sometimes called usable space. If you erase usable space
10 with crop land, improved pastures, over-grazing and
11 urbanization, you erase quail.
12 America has lost vast quantities of usable
13 space. Call it habit loss for simplicity. Since the
14 Pilgrim's landed at Plymouth Rock and accordingly, it's
15 lost vast quantities of bobwhites. Yet, where suitable
16 permanent cover still occurs in fairly vast quantities,
17 there is no quail decline. Populations go up and down
18 with the weather, but they show no long-term population
19 trend. We just saw some data on that. South Texas, North
20 Texas and western Oklahoma have vast quantities of usable
21 space, and accordingly, their populations -- bobwhite
22 populations are not now in jeopardy.
23 I want to stress that piddling amounts of usable
24 space aren't usable. Scientists estimate that a bobwhite
25 population with high odds of persisting for 100 years
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1 needs enough habitat for 800 individuals. This represents
2 a minimum of 4,000 acres and perhaps, more realistically,
3 a minimum of 8,000 acres of suitable habitat, which brings
4 us to the solution to the quail decline.
5 About 20 years ago, I visited a group of
6 landowners in Nacogdoches, in the Piney Woods of East
7 Texas. They wanted to do something for bobwhites. The
8 countryside consisted of improved pastures and matured
9 timber, no usable space. Late in the day, our group
10 visited a 20-acre patch consisting of scattered oaks with
11 blue stem ground cover, usable space. This was the only
12 bobwhite habitat we saw all day, and perhaps miraculously,
13 the patch usually supported a covey, I was told. It's
14 miraculous that such a small area could support a covey.
15 The solution to the quail decline in east Texas
16 is to take that patch and multiply it 200 to 400 times
17 over to get enough usable space for a viable population.
18 Indeed, the only solution to the quail decline in any
19 region is to reclaim thousands of acres of land that once
20 supported bobwhite populations. I realize I'm dreaming
21 here. But the dream is biologically meritorious, if
22 fiscally and socially quixotic.
23 Spot treatments with food plots, disk strips,
24 arteries, buffer strips, weedy fence lines and so on are
25 not going to create viable bobwhite populations in
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1 landscapes with chronic wasting disease. These practices
2 on those landscapes are tantamount to hospice biology.
3 The treatments are, at best, palliatives for a dying
4 population. So the quail decline is a problem of land
5 use, and its resolution is a problem of community.
6 I want to introduce what I'll call the Code of
7 5,000 as pneumonic for the solution of the quail decline.
8 And the code asserts simply that for every 5,000 acres of
9 usable space saved or created, a viable population of
10 bobwhites will be saved or created -- saved or created.
11 These 5,000 acres need to be in the block of countryside
12 or in a set of smaller blocks that are well interconnected
13 with permanent travel corridors.
14 Let me conclude with a few words on harvest
15 management relative to population viability and quail
16 declines. One must view management of the quail harvest
17 from two perspectives, that of the state and that of a
18 particular ranch or management area.
19 From the perspective of the state and the
20 state's quail population, harvest regulations are less
21 like technology and more like tradition. Bag limits,
22 season lengths and shooting hours don't make much
23 difference to the total state harvest unless they're
24 extremely restricting. For example, reducing a bag limit
25 from 15 to ten quail per day would have virtually no
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1 noticeable impact on total state kill. On the other hand,
2 reducing the bag limit from two to one quail per day would
3 have a noteworthy impact. From the perspective of a
4 specific ranch or management area, it doesn't matter how,
5 when or how many quail are harvested if that harvest takes
6 the population to a breeding objective. This objective is
7 a density of birds expected to be relatively productive or
8 to otherwise optimize harvest relative to a manager's
9 objectives. Managers of specific areas should desire
10 maximum flexibility in the harvest regulations promulgated
11 by a state. And that concludes my statement.
12 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Thank you, Fred.
13 Would you like to ask the three participants or
14 presenters questions now?
15 CHAIRMAN BASS: Sure. I think it would be
16 appropriate to open it to questions from the Commission on
17 any of this.
18 COMMISSIONER HENRY: Mr. Chairman, all of
19 us have received a number of letters and comments
20 throughout the year on the declining quail population. I
21 think, listening to the participants, it doesn't sound too
22 encouraging with regard to the -- what's going to happen
23 in the future in this regard as we become a more urban
24 state. That's the break-up of the farms and all. It
25 doesn't sound encouraging at all, or am I overreacting?
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1 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: How many landowners
2 come to Parks and Wildlife biologists or employees looking
3 for help in improving their habitat? Have we gotten -- do
4 we get much of that? And, if not, what could we do to
5 increase that interest?
6 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Well, thank you. I don't
7 know the actual number that come to us asking for
8 assistance, but I know a number of them do. A number of
9 them go to their wildlife management areas and look at
10 how -- the demonstrations of how we manage quail habitat.
11 But that actually brings up what I was going to summarize
12 with, which is there is no -- there is no magic bullet for
13 this. The landscape scale issues that Dr. Guthery pointed
14 out I think are very real and point, in my opinion, to the
15 paramount role of technical guidance, which is an area
16 that we excel in. And providing information to
17 landowners, we can manage at the appropriate scale. And
18 in some places in Texas, now, that's going to require
19 working cooperatively with your neighbors. If you're
20 going to get to a 5,000 or an 8,000 scale, you're going to
21 have to do it cooperatively. And that's the reason why we
22 do spend a lot of time working with wildlife coops is to
23 get that scale that you can effectively manage, long-term
24 manage some of these game populations.
25 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: But do you think,
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1 though, that landowners in general, realize, first of all,
2 that there is a problem? And, secondly, that the -- there
3 are some resources out there to help them?
4 I mean, are we -- is there more we could do to
5 interact with the landowners?
6 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Yes. I think they are
7 very much aware, judging by the comments at the
8 Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association meeting. It was
9 very much aware of the issue and aware of the sources of
10 information both from us and from the Ag Extension
11 Service. They're aware that they can get information from
12 there.
13 But can we do more? I would say absolutely yes,
14 we can do more, and we should be striving to do more.
15 That's one of the reasons why I recommended and you, the
16 Commission, approved hiring a -- basically, a quail
17 specialist to work with our technical guidance people to
18 further provide more information to landowners. And
19 that's Robert Perez, who's here in the audience.
20 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Gary, how many
21 wildlife coops do we have in the state; do you know?
22 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Last I heard, it was
23 around 82. There may be more than that now, but as of
24 about six months ago, that was the number
25 COMMISSIONER AVILA: We don't have an
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1 awards program for that, do we? Do we have one?
2 CHAIRMAN BASS: Uh-huh. Yeah.
3 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Part of the land
4 stewards.
5 CHAIRMAN BASS: Part of the land stewards
6 program is there is a category for coops.
7 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Gary, do we have
8 any data from the wildlife management plans, which is how
9 acres now, 12?
10 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Twelve million, six
11 hundred thousand --
12 CHAIRMAN BASS: About 12-and-a-half,
13 13 million.
14 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Of those
15 12-and-a-half million acres, how many of those
16 cooperators, landowners identified quail habitat as an
17 objective?
18 MR. GARY GRAHAM: I don't know the answer
19 to that. We could -- we could do some -- some inquiries
20 with our staff to get a better handle on that.
21 CHAIRMAN BASS: One thing I think that that
22 brings up is that we have 12-and-a-half, 13 million acres
23 actually enrolled in the department in wildlife management
24 plans. And primarily that is driven by those landowners'
25 desires to partake in special programs available if you're
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1 in a wildlife management plan.
2 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: It's a deal
3 breaker.
4 CHAIRMAN BASS: And to date, the only
5 species -- game species driving that is deer. And
6 those -- all the special programs really relate to deer
7 management. You know, I'm confident that there are a lot
8 of other acreages out there that are being managed for
9 wildlife and have plans, landowners' plans, that have been
10 developed in conjunction with our extension people in many
11 instances and maybe others, maybe ones from universities
12 or et cetera. They're not -- they don't show up in that
13 12-and-a-half, 13-million-acre figure, because there's no
14 kind of an official log for them to go sign up in.
15 There's no impetus for them to kind of officially be
16 registered, even though they're accessing technical
17 guidance and -- and doing something.
18 You know, I think in many instances what's been
19 helpful about our wildlife management programs that are
20 driven by deer is a lot of what is good for the deer in
21 certain ecoregions is also good for a lot of other game
22 species, including quail; if nothing else, just keeping it
23 in native habitat as opposed to improved grasses or grow
24 crops. But there are a lot of -- a lot of types -- of
25 vegetative types that deer like and quail don't. So it's
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1 not a complete match there.
2 But, you know, I would encourage ways to try to
3 continue to figure out programs to get people and -- with
4 species interests other than strictly deer to more
5 formalize a two-way street, a deal, that provides an
6 incentive for them to come and --
7 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: The direct quail
8 program --
9 CHAIRMAN BASS: -- to say, "Okay. If
10 you'll do this, then you get to do that." And it's --
11 it's -- deer has been the easy one and it's been
12 successful. And it's going to be tricky to figure out how
13 do you do that with quail or with turkeys or other things.
14 But --
15 MR. GARY GRAHAM: I think you're right on
16 the mark. In fact --
17 CHAIRMAN BASS: And part of that may be, if
18 nothing else, just make it a -- you know, something that
19 every time somebody wants to sign up for a deer-driven
20 management plan, part of what our technical guidance is
21 making them aware of what they could be doing for the
22 non-target species, because a lot of them would rather
23 have quail than not have quail than show up at our
24 doorstep because of a deer-driven issue.
25 MR. GARY GRAHAM: We -- we -- I think
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1 you're correct. And we have significantly recently added,
2 expanded our technical guidance capacity with respect to
3 waterfowl. The Texas Care Initiative was all about
4 technical guidance and providing additional information.
5 And so it's basically a hook for increasing awareness and
6 participation.
7 And if I hear you correctly, we need to do
8 something like that with quail, something that can define
9 the initiative in a way that will get more people
10 interested in it and then have some kind of incentives for
11 landowners to be more actively engaged.
12 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Probably many
13 questions based on ignorance. So if I'm asking the
14 obvious, don't let me take up your time.
15 But do we have a policy? Do we have a set of
16 goals? And if not, should we ask to have some developed
17 in this area given the trend lines here that are not good?
18 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Do we have population
19 goals for quail?
20 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Well, just an
21 overall management goal and policy for how we're going to
22 deal with the situation, recognizing it's not completely
23 in our power but that we can do some things about it.
24 MR. GARY GRAHAM: We don't have a quail
25 management plan, per se, at this point in time. And
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1 perhaps that's what you're getting at --
2 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Shouldn't we?
3 MR. GARY GRAHAM -- is through developing a
4 long-term quail management plan, then you could identify
5 those goals and policies in that type of a plan.
6 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Again, I'm
7 completely new to this, so it really -- I am coming from
8 ignorance. But what I hear is reactive research and
9 monitoring, but I don't hear proactive plans specifically
10 targeting or dealing with this problem. Shouldn't we
11 develop one, have one, and isn't that clearly what the
12 data is screaming for us to do?
13 MR. STEVE DEMASO: Currently, there is a
14 group of quail biologists in the southeastern United
15 States that's writing a bobwhite recovery plan. And what
16 I'm hoping to do -- both myself and Robert Perez are being
17 involved in writing the range land sections of that plan.
18 And what I'm hoping to do is take that plan and step it
19 down to a state level and an ecoregion level and look at
20 some of the population goals that are set up in that
21 national plan and look at how much land we could
22 potentially recover that's not been lost to urban sprawl
23 or crop land that could be potentially converted back to
24 quail habitat and try to set up some long-range goals like
25 you're talking about, population goals and also acreage
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1 restored to quail habitat.
2 COMMISSIONER HENRY: Mr. Chairman, I have a
3 question of Andy.
4 Andy, from time to time we get letters from
5 individuals here in the state, excuse me, who make
6 specific recommendations with regard to addressing this
7 problem.
8 Are those recommendations given to these guys?
9 And, if so, are they looked into or -- you know, not too
10 long ago, I remember we got one concerning using three
11 counties as a test area and a series of recommendations
12 with regard to what we could do in those counties. Are
13 those kinds of situations --
14 MR. SANSOM: Yes, sir.
15 COMMISSIONER HENRY: -- to what extent do
16 we address those?
17 MR. SANSOM: Yes, sir. And, as a matter of
18 fact, those kind of discussions go -- often involve
19 Mr. Cooke and myself. They can involve the Division
20 Directors and the field biologists, just depending on
21 the -- but on this one particularly, we've had a number of
22 meetings with the interested -- both landowner
23 constituents and academic community over the last year on
24 this very issue. And we always pass those suggestions
25 along.
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1 COMMISSIONER WATSON: Gary, what is your
2 feeling, positively or negatively, about released birds?
3 MR. GARY GRAHAM: From a recreational
4 perspective, I think that they are filling a gap.
5 Is it a solution to quail conservation? I don't
6 personally think so, but let me address -- or ask quail
7 (sic) who is more the expert and has dealt with this at a
8 larger scale than Texas. What's the consensus?
9 MR. STEVE DEMASO: Pretty much all of the
10 scientific research results say that pen-reared birds and
11 translocating birds have very little impact on restoring
12 quail populations. It all boils down to habitat on that
13 piece of property and, like Dr. Guthery said, having
14 enough available habitat to sustain a viable quail
15 population.
16 I get this question a lot about pen-reared
17 birds. And I think in quail hunting and the shooting
18 sports there probably is a place for pen-reared birds in
19 shooting preserve management, dog training, et cetera, et
20 cetera. But when you really get down to the nuts and
21 bolts and the hardcore part of wildlife management,
22 there's probably some other things that you could do that
23 would be more financially and you get more bang for your
24 buck with regard to quail management other than pen-reared
25 birds.
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1 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Mr. Chairman, I'm
2 intrigued by the issue of habitat and how that relates to
3 native plant species and exotics. If you just listen to
4 what's been said, it sounds as if, well, if you just let
5 things go follow up, everything will be fine; the birds
6 come back.
7 At least in South Texas, where I'm familiar with
8 management, the issue of -- we used to call them improved
9 grasses; now we call them exotic or invasive, which I
10 think shows our change of mentality about what's important
11 to us now.
12 What role does that play in the reintroduction
13 of native species and being able to really build a
14 significant -- a critical mass of native seed to work
15 with.
16 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Well, I think it's a very
17 crucial issue, one of which we are currently doing some
18 work with.
19 We have a native -- restoration of native
20 grasslands project in central and east Texas that we're
21 working on now to look at taking bermuda grass, for
22 instance, and replacing it with native species. And we'll
23 monitor that to see how effective that is in some of the
24 restoration work. So I think you're absolutely right.
25 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Well, is that an
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1 option or possibility to work towards -- as the Chairman
2 pointed, it's the sort of programs that might be available
3 to people who were interested in that with wildlife
4 management plans? Because I've heard a lot of different
5 groups of native -- South Texas Native Plant Restoration
6 Group, Parks and Wildlife, TX-DOT, and there seems to be a
7 lot of different groups going different directions, but
8 they haven't focused on the issue of, I think Dr. Guthery
9 called it, usable space and the preservation and
10 reintroduction, conservation of native species.
11 Dr. Guthery, is that part of your research or...
12 DR. GUTHRY: Well, I can make a few
13 comments with regard to the issue of alien plants and
14 animals. It's become a religious issue, so everybody is
15 looking for the bad parts of it nowadays.
16 I've seen -- in Ricky Garrison and Cynthia Rand
17 we count about three bobwhites per acre in 1986 in what
18 was primarily buffle grass. Your place is a buffle grass
19 mix, nice structure.
20 In Sonora, Mexico, mass bobwhites probably
21 persist simply because there's buffle grass there and it's
22 a tough grass. So we're all -- we're all -- all of us
23 biologists are a little bit carried away about this notion
24 about adversity and what aliens and exotics are doing, not
25 to say that it's not bad.
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1 To a bobwhite, it's a structural question. It
2 has to do with the structure of the ground cover, and
3 that's just what it looks like, a bunch of grass versus
4 other types of grass. And it also relates to the amount
5 of woody cover present. And within that framework, they
6 can do pretty well. They're a pretty tough bird. So I'm
7 not so concerned about exotics as -- with respect to
8 bobwhites.
9 On the other hand, if you take 1,000 acres of
10 mesquite brush land and put in bermuda grass, you've got a
11 problem.
12 COMMISSIONER FITZSIMONS: Monocultural.
13 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: Again, I'm going
14 to have to be briefed later if I'm asking things that
15 everybody knows. But I still want to hear how this
16 relates to the priorities and plans of the wildlife
17 management program and department. What is our program
18 and what are we doing?
19 MR. GARY GRAHAM: Well, in a nutshell, the
20 technical guidance program is an integrated program. We
21 will approach a landowner, if that landowner is interested
22 in quail, deer, turkey, and we'll use that interest to get
23 at a healthy management of the ecosystem and the habitat,
24 not just for a single species.
25 CHAIRMAN BASS: It's a lot -- largely
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1 customer-driven. Basically, voluntary. So what people
2 show up interested in is --
3 COMMISSIONER MONTGOMERY: In a proactive
4 sense on this issue, what is our priority and what is our
5 goal?
6 MR. GARY GRAHAM: To continue doing what
7 we've done and have done very well. I mean, if you look
8 at the growth and the acreage under wildlife management
9 plans, it's growing because, in fact, of our ability to be
10 opportunistic, to take that interest from the landowner
11 and work with he or she towards habitat management goals.
12 That flexibility of being able to take advantage
13 of opportunities when they present themselves is very
14 important. If you direct it at a specific area, then I
15 think it will come out of the cost of being able to take
16 advantage of opportunities elsewhere.
17 So the goal, I think, is more habitat-based than
18 specific species-based. The more acreage we have in
19 wildlife management plans that are actively being managed
20 under our guidance, the better all wildlife species will
21 be.
22 And, in fact, the quail issue -- one of the
23 intriguing parts about it is it's not just quail. There
24 are a lot of other grassland species that are in similar
25 situations. And if you're managing habitat for structure,
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1 just like Dr. Guthery pointed out, then a lot of other
2 species that are not game species will also benefit from
3 that. And the same thing can be said for deer and a lot
4 of the other species that are target species with respect
5 to management.
6 CHAIRMAN BASS: Gary, this is obviously a
7 topic that has, I think, a higher level of interest at
8 this point in time than probably a decade ago. There's --
9 there are more people focused on -- on concern of -- of
10 are there long-term trends that are potentially
11 devastating to something that people -- types of
12 recreation and wildlife -- that a lot of people are very
13 attached to.
14 So it's also something that I think is very hard
15 for us to get our hands around right now. I don't think
16 we've quite unraveled, you know, all of the riddles to the
17 quail as well as we have the largemouth bass or
18 white-tailed deer. But -- so it's more of a challenge.
19 I think this discussion could go on for another
20 hour and be productive, but unfortunately, I'm going to
21 cut it short.
22 I think what I'm hearing today is from a data
23 point of view, you know, we need more data. You know,
24 it's hard to really extract from the data we have
25 definitive answers to our questions. But when you get
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1 down to kind of the back 40, where everything, you know,
2 either happens or doesn't happen, what Dr. Guthry's, I
3 think, pointing out is that it's a habitat issue and
4 perhaps a larger scale habitat issue than most people
5 realize. You know, we're talking five, 8,000-acre chunks
6 rather than 2500-acre chunks to be supportive of long-term
7 viable populations.
8 And it's going to be habitat issues, like most
9 of our stuff is. And if nothing else, maybe the key thing
10 is, you know, let's keep what we've got and figure out
11 strategies to do that, and then start working on how to
12 get back some of the ground we have lost, which is going
13 to be far more difficult and expensive than just keeping
14 what we've got is going to be. But...
15 MR. GARY GRAHAM: The good news is there is
16 a huge amount of economic interest in this species.
17 There's (inaudible) restoration.
18 CHAIRMAN BASS: There's -- there's a lot --
19 there's a lot of money chasing each one of those little
20 birds. So there is --
21 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: That's good news.
22 CHAIRMAN BASS: Yeah, that's the good news.
23 I would personally like to thank Dr. Guthery for coming
24 down from far north Texas. Welcome back. And appreciate
25 your comments, as well as our other speakers from more
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1 nearby locales.
2 Any other -- any other comment before we move
3 on?
4 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Briefly,
5 Mr. Chairman, I think what I hear from our constituents
6 and I guess what I feel as an avid quail hunter myself is
7 that people would like to see a little more high profile
8 effort on our part.
9 It's not so much that what we may not be
10 doing -- we're certainly not doing enough. But I don't
11 think the average person that's concerned about the quail
12 realizes that we're doing much of anything.
13 CHAIRMAN BASS: I think that's true.
14 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: We need to do a
15 better job of getting out to the interested public what it
16 is we are doing and then raise the level of what we're
17 doing.
18 CHAIRMAN BASS: And I think, you know, it
19 also ties back into some of our discussion on the dove
20 issues. Those R&D dollars are not very high profile, but
21 in the long run they're very valuable. And we need to be
22 mindful of that and not skimp. And it's a long-term
23 investment, which we need to make.
24 Thank you all very much.
25 MR. SANSOM: Thank you both very much.
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1 CHAIRMAN BASS: Let's move on to our
2 Aquaculture MOU, and then we've got one piece of other
3 business, a report from a HuntIng Advisory Committee.
4 MS. RAENELL SILCOX: Good morning,
5 Chairman, Commissioners. My name is Raenell Silcox. I'm
6 an attorney with the Resource Protection Division, and I'm
7 here to talk to you about the memorandum of understanding
8 between Parks and Wildlife, Texas Natural Resource
9 Conservation Commission and the Texas Department of
10 Agricultural regarding the coordination of the regulation
11 of aquaculture.
12 Parks and Wildlife already had an MOU regarding
13 the coordination of aquaculture with TNRCC that was signed
14 by both agencies in 1996. And both agencies adopted it as
15 a rule in 1997.
16 Then in 1999, the legislature passed SB-873 that
17 mandated a new MOU regarding aquaculture between Parks and
18 Wildlife, TNRCC and TDA. The three agencies met several
19 times and amended the existing MOU to make the necessary
20 changes to -- in order to implement SB-873.
21 The significant changes from the existing MOU
22 are that it incorporates TDA's regulatory role; it
23 establishes an application review committee; it
24 establishes procedures for evaluating applications; it
25 requires Parks and Wildlife to identify the information it
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1 believes it needs to properly evaluate applications, and
2 requires Parks and Wildlife to develop sensitive aquatic
3 habitat guidelines.
4 The new MOU's already been signed by all three
5 agencies. It was adopted by TNRCC as a rule in January.
6 And the first time we did this MOU, the way we did it was
7 we passed a new Section 57.135 that just adopted by
8 reference the rule that TNRCC had already adopted. So
9 that what we propose to do this time, as well. And we --
10 so we propose to amend Section 57.135 to adopt the same
11 rule that TNRCC -- adopt by reference the same rule that
12 TNRCC adopted in January, and that proposal was published
13 in the Texas Register on April 27th. The comment period
14 closed yesterday, and we received no public comment. So
15 I'll be happy to answer any questions.
16 MR. LARRY MCCANE: Before we go to
17 questions, Mr. Chairman and members, I'm Larry McCane,
18 Senior Director of Aquatic Resources. I did want to make
19 one comment.
20 I thought it was interesting we received no
21 comments, because I think a number of you weren't here --
22 like the Chairman was when we went through this issue. I
23 think it's something really to point out the issue of
24 aquaculture along our Texas coast was an extremely
25 divisive issue; it was a hot one. And I wanted to
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1 recognize, I think -- in fact, in other places in the
2 world where this has taken place, the impact has been
3 ecologically devastating. We've destroyed whole
4 ecosystems in other areas.
5 But because, I think, due to the work of folks
6 like Mike Ray and Raenell Silcox, You Shang Wong, who's
7 our coordinator on the coast, Jodie Gray and others, we
8 took a lead in putting together a process to look at these
9 facilities and integrate them into those coastal area.
10 And over the last several years, they -- you know, they've
11 made money, they've operated in competition with the
12 shrimping industry but not to their detriment. And I
13 think it's been a terrific model of how to make those
14 things work.
15 And the staff here in the department had a lead
16 in looking at how to put that together. It's been looked
17 at as a model around the world now. So we can be proud of
18 the work that they've all done. And this is kind of the
19 next stage to make sure that we don't drift into that kind
20 of situation again down the road. I think this is -- it's
21 a good step forward.
22 CHAIRMAN BASS: I agree with you. It was a
23 very contentious issue for a quite a while. In fact, my
24 first confirmation hearing, that was --
25 MR. LARRY MCCANE: I forgot about that.
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1 That was -- that was that. That certainly was.
2 CHAIRMAN BASS: -- that was about 30
3 minutes of an intense conversation about topics which I
4 knew nothing. So it was a very one-sided discussion.
5 But, no, I think it's a good example of where
6 the departments work cooperatively with the industry, with
7 the constituent group, have been flexible where we could
8 to meet their needs and be -- be sensitive to their needs.
9 On the other hand, being firm in the areas that
10 we felt we had to be, of where we needed to draw the line
11 on something that we felt had to be a part of any
12 agreement. And it's been a good formula that's worked
13 here, as well as -- as well as most other places that it's
14 ended up with no comment. So that's good news.
15 MS. RAENELL SILCOX: Yes.
16 CHAIRMAN BASS: It doesn't -- no comment
17 doesn't mean no one cares.
18 MS. RAENELL SILCOX: Right.
19 CHAIRMAN BASS: Thank you.
20 Under other business today, John Kelsey's here
21 as Chairman of the Hunting Advisory Committee.
22 COMMISSIONER ANGELO: Excuse me,
23 Mr. Chairman. Do we want to consider this for consent
24 agenda tomorrow since there was no comment, or was that
25 something you want --
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1 CHAIRMAN BASS: I think it would be better
2 if, without objection, we just to move it to the agenda in
3 case there is some public comment in keeping with
4 considerations of the Sunset.
5 As I said, John Kelsey is here this morning to
6 give us a briefing on some of the activities that the
7 Hunting Advisory Committee has undertaken in the last year
8 and a half or so.
9 MR. JOHN KELSEY: Thanks for an opportunity
10 to be here, Commissioner Chairman Bass. It's a lot easier
11 to get here without going through the political process.
12 I think I've got some slides here, but I'm not
13 all going to go through every one of them. There we go.
14 All right. This is an opportunity to make a
15 presentation and a report from the Hunting Advisory
16 Committee to the Commission. And we have the charge of
17 the -- of the committee here before us. And one of the
18 things that isn't on the charge is after we've done all
19 the work and done what we're going to do, what are we
20 going to do with it later?
21 And so that's kind of the purpose of this report
22 is to update the Commission on what we've done and some of
23 the ideas we have and the work we're going to do in the
24 future.
25 We've got 26 members representing all aspects of
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1 the hunting community. We've had very good attendance by
2 the -- by the group over the year. We've had five
3 different meetings. The last one is not on this schedule.
4 And one thing we've discovered is it's very difficult to
5 carry out these meetings during sessions of the
6 legislature because of the fact that staff is very much
7 committed to the Commission's and the Department's
8 legislative process. Perhaps if it wasn't a Sunset year,
9 that won't be quite as much of a problem. But it
10 certainly should bear thinking about in terms of any of
11 these committee's activities during legislative sessions.
12 The first job of our committee was to review the
13 status of all the primary huntable wildlife species in
14 Texas, because obviously, if there was going to be a
15 shortage of opportunity, it would show up in -- it would
16 certainly be affected by populations of -- huntable
17 populations of wildlife. And so we had a series of
18 meetings, all of one and part of several others, in which
19 we assessed the status of the primary wildlife species in
20 Texas. And without going into the details of this, I
21 would say that we only came up with two areas in which we
22 think that there are problems that need to be addressed by
23 the Commission to preserve the huntability of those
24 species, one of which is quail. And you've already had
25 quite a bit of information on quail today. And I'll only
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1 briefly mention some of our thoughts on that.
2 But the other one was mourning doves. And the
3 issue there is not the population and not what seems to be
4 the empirical population, huntable population of birds,
5 but the fact that the bird surveys that are utilized by
6 the federal government in order to determine the
7 huntability of migratory species are showing a decline of
8 doves. And the Fish & Wildlife Service is bound by a
9 standard of very conservative review when it uses those
10 surveys to determine the season and bag limits available
11 to the different states to allocate to their hunters.
12 The Department needs to conduct research to
13 prove, in effect, that the current and past survey routes
14 and survey methods are outdated and need to be
15 restructured in such a way to show what the true
16 population of doves are in Texas. And we feel like this
17 is a very important survey for the Department to support
18 and should allocate as much in the way of resources to
19 this study as it can in order to be sure that we have
20 rebuttable evidence to present to Fish & Wildlife in the
21 event this issue comes up.
22 The second item is quail. And we had extensive
23 work on quail. I was really pleased to see this on the
24 agenda here today. I think that the committee had about
25 five hours of hearings on -- and presentations on quail.
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1 And some of the members of the committee have attended a
2 number of other seminars on quail, so we have put together
3 quite a bit of information on the quail decline.
4 One of the things -- I think Professor Guthry's
5 comments on quail this morning in which he discussed quail
6 declines on a more historical and nationwide basis were
7 very important and shows how much decline there has been
8 on a nationwide basis. We need to look very carefully,
9 though, at the quail decline in the southeastern United
10 States and how it seems to be moving in the direction of
11 Texas. And I would only quote a few statistics.
12 But in 1980, there were two-and-a-half million
13 quail harvested in the state of Mississippi, and in 1999,
14 there were only 150,000. And if you look at Steve
15 DeMaso's numbers of 2.1 million harvested in Texas in 1980
16 and 600,000 or so harvested in 1999, you're basically
17 looking at the same trend line.
18 Now, the beauty that -- of Texas is we started
19 out with much higher quail populations than many of these
20 other states. So despite the fact that we have had a
21 decline, we still have huntable populations which may
22 delude us into thinking we're not going to end up with the
23 same problem of these other states. And I don't think
24 that as -- as the speakers clearly describe, there's no
25 certain solution to the problem.
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1 We have some ideas, and I've certainly heard
2 some of the echoes of them from you guys in your questions
3 to the speakers. One thing is a lack of focus. There are
4 the Cesar Kleberg Wildlife Institute is a focus of quail
5 research, and they are running the South Texas Quail
6 Project. Steve outlined -- DeMaso outlined the work that
7 the Department is doing in a broad basis. But if you
8 looked at the budget that the Department has and you
9 looked at all the things that he said that the Department
10 is doing, it would give you a feeling that is actually a
11 fairly thinly supported effort on our part. I mean, we've
12 got a big state and a big problem, and the budget we have
13 deployed for it is very thinly spread. That's also true
14 at Cesar Kleberg.
15 I think the Department ought to consider
16 stepping up and being the leader of quail research or the
17 quail decline problem. I think it was reported that the
18 quail decline initiative before the Texas legislature was
19 not funded except at a very low level, so it is not going
20 to provide any resources for this effort.
21 And I think Commissioner Angelo made a comment.
22 He said it seems like this needs a little leadership. I
23 think having some leadership would be very important, and
24 we recommend, our committee does, that Parks and Wildlife
25 allocate the resources not to solve the problem - that's
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1 obviously too huge an effort - but to be a leader,
2 coordinate what everybody else is doing in the state, have
3 an inventory of research and try to help the joint efforts
4 of everybody else towards a solution of this problem.
5 One thing that might be considered is that next
6 year on January 22nd, Quail 5, which is the fifth biannual
7 conference on quail put together by the major quail pieces
8 of the -- quail parts of the wildlife agencies interested
9 in quail are going to meet in Corpus Christi. And I think
10 that the Department ought to support that
11 enthusiastically. We're going to have people involved in
12 the programming, and it would be helpful to have a bunch
13 of Commissioners and people interested in this subject
14 from our agency there.
15 So, now, there is -- I want to go over and
16 really hit a few slides pretty rapidly. And our
17 presentation is available to people who would want to have
18 a hard copy of it. And we actually have a short copy, a
19 long copy and an impossibly long copy. And I think I just
20 spoke to these recommendations. And I think this
21 allocation of resources -- remember that hunters provide
22 about 43 million dollars a year to Texas Parks and
23 Wildlife's annual resources. And any business that is
24 that dependent on hunting and then, in particular, certain
25 species of hunting ought to pay a lot of attention to
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1 nurturing what's going on in those areas.
2 As far as the future of hunting's concerned,
3 it's clear that we are -- do have a declining proportion
4 of people that hunt relative to the overall population.
5 We have a -- hunting licenses sales are
6 relatively flat, even though revenues have gone up. So,
7 in other words, it -- it's good to keep the revenue stream
8 going through to the Department, but if you don't have
9 increasing sales, eventually you could price a reduction
10 into the number of hunters. Demographically, this slide
11 is one of the most powerful and scary of all, because that
12 circle outlines the fact that of the age groups, there is
13 a significant fall-off in recruitment of hunters recent --
14 in more recent years in key age groups. So we're losing
15 the recruitment of people that we need to have to create
16 license buyers in the future.
17 And you can see that the age of white-tail deer,
18 squirrel and rabbit hunters is all increasing. The two
19 minor species are there because they generally provide the
20 foundation for recruitment for hunters into the larger
21 game species as the individuals mature. And this bears
22 out that same fact.
23 And we haven't had a decline in hunters caused
24 by license fees. And, indeed, Texas still has one of the
25 best bargains in license fees of any state in the nation.
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1 We need to spend some of that money to be sure we can
2 continue to have hunters. It's just like watering your
3 own vegetable garden.
4 And I think that this is -- these are some areas
5 that I'm going to just hit a few slides on. If you can
6 see that, of course, Texas is the second largest state in
7 terms of hunter revenues with a billion-and-a-half dollars
8 worth of retail sales. And, of course, that doesn't
9 measure the lease revenues that Texans pay to landowners.
10 And because of the high percentage of private land, those
11 numbers would be -- put Texas well over the top in direct
12 out-of-pocket expenditures for hunting, hunting gear and
13 land to hunt on.
14 A substantial amount of the money, of course, is
15 spent in rural areas. And that point was made in the
16 presentation on quail earlier this morning that this --
17 this money and these lands are supported to a large extent
18 by hunting.
19 One of the presentations which I would recommend
20 that you try to get in a briefing is a presentation by
21 Texas A&M that we saw that talked about what the values of
22 Texas lands would be without hunting. And they basically
23 had put together the valuation of the land as pure
24 agricultural or pasture land versus the value that it was
25 selling for in the market. And, obviously, the implied
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1 difference would have to be there for recreational use.
2 And as I know Commissioner -- Chairman Bass once
3 commented, Texas is only place in the world that still
4 sells their land by the acre. And that's basically
5 related to the way we think about our land as valuable for
6 hunting and recreation.
7 This chart demonstrates the amount of -- where
8 the majority of land is -- money is spent for -- in the
9 rural economy for hunting; demonstrates the individual
10 species impact. And, of course, white-tailed deer is
11 definitely the largest.
12 I had already commented on the fact that hunting
13 provides 43 million dollars to the Department.
14 We did spend some time on barriers to hunting,
15 and it's interesting to see what some of those are.
16 People do comment on the increased cost of hunting as an
17 obstacle.
18 Regulation complexity is definitely a problem.
19 People are concerned to take it up, because they feel it's
20 too complex from a regulatory standpoint and they don't
21 want to get in -- in trouble for doing something
22 inadvertently illegal while they're hunting. And I've
23 commented on the poor youth recruitment. Obviously, we
24 have the urban concentration of Texans, and there are
25 other demographics working against hunting.
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1 We did spend a considerable amount of time
2 discussing hunter education, as to whether it was a
3 barrier to hunting. And any obstacle to a new
4 recreational activity is a barrier of some type. But the
5 feeling of -- of -- that hunter education was so important
6 to the ethics of hunting and to the activity of hunting
7 that it was not a barrier as just a cost that would have
8 to be undertaken by anybody and any -- hunting and, of
9 course, by our agency in supervising hunting.
10 These are some of the obvious competitions for
11 discretionary time that get in the way of hunting.
12 These are some of the -- we -- you can take
13 these to the deer camp or you can take these back to your
14 home, but the fact is that we have a relatively flat
15 population of hunters in the United States. And a
16 conference in Washington I attended, the fact is on a
17 national basis if it wasn't for the dramatic increase in
18 women hunters in the United States -- the population of
19 women hunters as a percentage of hunters, according to the
20 Wildlife Management Institute, is up three times in the
21 last ten years. And if it weren't for that, hunting would
22 have declined on a national basis, but it's remained flat
23 for the last ten years. Texas, believe it or not, is one
24 of the smallest percentage of women hunters of any state,
25 and very good growth in that area.
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1 We have these issues that were mentioned by our
2 people -- by the people discussing quail. And how do we
3 respond to these issues? We're going to be doing more
4 work at our -- on our committee to try to come up with
5 some of these solutions or thoughts about this. But
6 they're all things that are going to have to be discussed
7 and understood by this Commission in order to continue to
8 have hunting to supervise in the future.
9 I'm going to skip these slides. They're a
10 little bit too busy.
11 This basically points out the changing market
12 for real estate, and I recommend that you have that
13 presentation here from A&M.
14 Hunters -- we went over all the organizations
15 that hunters have and how much they've done to contribute
16 to hunting nationally, and I won't spend a lot of time on
17 that.
18 There are going to be three major presentations
19 next year, wildlife-related conferences in Texas. The
20 Quail 5 is not on this chart. It's on -- in January 22nd.
21 The North American Wildlife Conference in Dallas -- and I
22 wanted to point this out. There are a number of very
23 substantial conferences that take place annually regarding
24 wildlife.
25 The North American, it will be its 68th year
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1 next year, to give you some idea of how long it's been
2 going on. It was in Washington last year. I went up to
3 it. I've never been so proud of our agency to see our
4 guys up there. They got respected by every other wildlife
5 agency person, both federal and state, in the country.
6 The presentations were really kaleidoscopal; in other
7 words, you could -- you couldn't decide what to go to,
8 there were so many interesting presentations. This is
9 going to be next year in Dallas.
10 And I don't know what the census of Parks and
11 Wildlife Commissioners is that have been to the North
12 American, but there ought to be a lot of them that go to
13 it every year. And since it's going to be in Dallas next
14 year, I recommend that a number of people go.
15 And then in the fall, there is going to be the
16 7th Biannual Governor's Symposium on Hunting Heritage in
17 Houston. And I didn't know this, that there's been a
18 group of people worrying about what's happening to
19 hunting, meeting on an international basis, people from
20 Mexico, Canada and the United States, every two years now
21 for 15 years and having two or three days of work on
22 what's going on with hunting. And this is going to be
23 next year in Houston, November the 10th through the 13th
24 and Governor Perry is the sponsor of it. Governor Bush
25 originally agreed to do that before he was elected
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1 President. And we need to be a participant at that
2 program, also.
3 I would recommend -- our committee, in going
4 over these different conferences, actually has a
5 recommendation to this committee and to the Commission,
6 and that is that because of these various conferences,
7 Quail 5 and the Wildlife Society, the North American,
8 which is a major event, and the Governor's Symposium, that
9 next year be declared the Year of Texas Hunting Heritage
10 or Texas Hunting Heritage Year. And that would be part of
11 the welcome that we would give to the delegates to each
12 one of these different events from around the country and
13 show the support Texas has for these programs and for
14 hunting.
15 Now -- and one other item that I really do
16 believe is important, that we have concluded that no
17 agency -- wildlife agency in the United States has, as
18 part of its policy, that it supports hunting; in other
19 words, a part of its mission to support hunting. We all
20 take it for granted. The other agencies take it for
21 granted. The Hunting Heritage Symposium is developing a
22 statement to support hunting to be adopted by both
23 non-governmental organizations and by wildlife agencies to
24 show that they do support the heritage behind hunting and
25 the motivations and activities of hunters.
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1 Our committee recommends that the Commission
2 consider these -- this motion or this statement. It could
3 have some input to this statement and that it adopt this
4 statement to show that we do have a commitment to hunting
5 in this state. It's part of our heritage. It's part of
6 the value of our state to its landowners, and it's a
7 critical part of this agency's mission.
8 And that concludes our report. We are
9 continuing to have meetings. And next week we are going
10 to have a meeting, and we are going to discuss opponent --
11 we're going to have a one-day presentation on the
12 opponents of hunting of which there are many. And we're
13 going to try to deal with privatization and some of the
14 other issues that affect hunting in future meetings over
15 the next year.
16 Be glad to take any questions. Thank you for
17 your time.
18 CHAIRMAN BASS: Thank you, John. You all
19 have covered a lot of ground, and I think made some good
20 points. You know, I would -- I would think it would be of
21 interest to the Commissioners to be sure to get notice of
22 your meetings as soon as they're scheduled in case any of
23 them have an opportunity or interest to attend and --
24 what -- what your agendas might be might be helpful. And,
25 as I say, I think you've made some very good points that
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1 that are additive to the process.
2 MR. JOHN KELSEY: Thank you very much. And
3 I want to thank my committee members. We've had a very
4 high percentage of people attend all of our meetings, and
5 that means that people are traveling all across the state
6 to be here and spending on the average of six hours of
7 hearings during the day going over these issues. So
8 there's been a real commitment of time on the part of the
9 membership.
10 And I want to thank the staff, particularly
11 Jerry Cooke, who's had to mess with a lot of my
12 handwriting. And -- but Gary and Kirby and all of the
13 members of the Wildlife staff has been very supportive.
14 Thank you very much.
15 CHAIRMAN BASS: Anybody have any questions
16 or comments for John while he's here?
17 Thank you. Thank you for your leadership. I
18 think that concludes our Regulations Committee. Which --
19 MR. SANSOM: Finance.
20 CHAIRMAN BASS: I would like to move to
21 Finance. We'll move to finance.
22 (11:26)
23
24
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1 STATE OF TEXAS )
2 COUNTY OF TRAVIS)
3 REPORTER'S CERTIFICATION
4 I, Rhonda Howard, Certified Shorthand Reporter in
5 and for the State of Texas, hereby certify that on May 30,
6 2000, I was present at the Texas Parks and Wildlife
7 Commission for committee meetings and that this is a true
8 and complete transcript of the proceedings.
9 I further certify that the proceedings were put
10 into writing by myself with the help of Lori Estrada of
11 the TEXAS PARKS AND WILDLIFE COMMISSION.
12 I further certify that I am neither counsel for,
13 related to, nor employed by any of the parties or
14 attorneys in the action in which this proceeding was
15 taken, and further that I am not financially or otherwise
16 interested in the outcome of the action.
17 Certified to by me, this 28th day of June,
18 2001.
19 _____________________________________
20 ____________________________
RHONDA HOWARD, Texas CSR No. 4136
21 Expiration Date 12/31/02
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