Hunters and wildlife lovers will no longer be allowed to use trail cameras for hunting big game animals in Utah. The measure passed with a 4-3 vote by the Utah Wildlife Board, which also banned the use of thermal imaging night vision devices.

The interagency group developing a comprehensive Sagebrush Conservation Strategy (SCS) reported to the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA) Directors at their recent meeting that the draft of Part II of the strategy will be released for review in early February, 2022. Part I of the strategy was published in early 2021 and discussed in a previous edition of the Outdoor News Bulletin. Part I addressed the importance of the sagebrush biome to people and wildlife, the extent and impacts of change agents affecting the biome, and identified conservation needs. Part II will lay out strategies that partners in sagebrush conservation can use to achieve the vision of “a sagebrush landscape with native understory that creates a large, functioning, intact biome.” In addition to the agency and public review, the draft SCS will undergo rigorous peer review before publication by the U.S. Geological Survey later this year.

Conservation in the United States is funded largely by hunters and anglers, however, the number of licensed hunters is exhibiting a long-term decline. Recruitment, retention, and reactivation (R3) of participants in conservation-related recreation is paramount to preserving our outdoor heritage. However, restricted funds and inadequate personnel time limit R3 efforts. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the efficacy of R3 programs and strategies to invest resources into the specific programs that are most effective. To address this, the Wildlife Management Institute, in conjunction with Chase & Chase Consulting, is working to develop and implement an approach to evaluating R3 programmatic impact directly by using license data from participating states to document hunter behavior across time.

The USGS Arkansas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit is leading new research on restoring prairie grasslands with prescribed burning in the Loess Canyons of Nebraska. Private landowners have used prescribed burning for nearly two decades to address the greatest threat to their working grasslands, the expansion of trees into grasslands (woody encroachment). This is the first study showing how long-term management across an entire region or ecosystem can reverse the impacts that trees have on grasslands and on birds that depend on intact, resilient, and tree-free grasslands.