Feathers in February

Judd, the Author and Lynden: tired, but happy

February can be a challenging month, especially living in northern Michigan. Snow and low temperatures tend to make outdoors activities besides ice fishing and snow sports improbable, if not impossible. But a road trip may completely change the landscape...literary!

On Sunday, 17th, we start early in the morning with my truck navigation systems strongly disagreeing from my sense of direction. The only positive thing is that in the first hour of the trip, between Mesick and Cadillac, we saw a beautiful male coyote in full winter fur almost at  the side of the road. A beautiful view of an accomplished predator!

I will not bother you with details, but at one point I also turned my phone navigation app on, and since it took us to our destination well ahead of the truck system we decide to follow that one. I kept both systems on just to follow the disagreements. What a fight! (Anything for entertainment on a ten hours plus trip.)

Eventually we arrived at Upland Addiction (www.kentuckywingshooting.com) fine lodge, in Marion, western Kentucky, late in the afternoon. Dinner was MacDonald's since restaurants in the Bible Belt don't open on Sundays, as explained by Judd, young entrepreneur and our guide for the next two days.

Before I forget I should mention that Lynden and I bought this hunting trip on the Traverse City Ruffed Grouse Society banquet last September, and we scheduled it around a trade show that we had to attend in Indianapolis. The good news was that the logistics were perfect, the not so good ones was that we might have run away from snow to drenched in rain: Kentucky was having some of the worst floods in the past decade!

But the forecast for Monday was dry, overcast and cool with several days of rain to follow, so Judd asked if we would mind cramming two hunts in one day. Better that then spending an afternoon reading and no more birds the next day. In the end, Tuesday morning was fair weather and we packed more bird hunting there.

What I have to tell you is that Judd knows his business. Due to the flooding we concentrate our hunting to his family farm, moving from different meadows that we divided by wooded hedges and always ended in water, at least during the floods. Judd ran three different pointing dogs for the three half-day hunts. 

First was the thirteen years old setter Bonnie, and she was a class act. I wish to have the drive she has when I am that age (in dog years!) What a sweet old lady! After Bonnie we had Queen, a strong willed German shorthair, as if any other shorthairs were not. Queen ranged a bit farther than Bonnie, and behaved differently, but produced just as well. On the Tuesday hunt we had old Jack, and English Pointer. Bigger ranging, working the wind, and suddenly freezing, holding birds for as long as we would take to be there, or maybe until hell freezes over. Jack reminds me why English Pointers are in the world: to hunt birds, period!

Besides each of the pointers Judd ran little Lady. An English Spaniel with a heart and desire to hunt bigger than her tiny body; she was the flusher and a fantastic retriever. When she didn't make to a bird before the long legged pointers, she would gently snatch the birds from the larger dogs' mouth! In the water she might believe that she was a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Once Judd could give her the bearings, she was out in the water and never failed to bring a bird back.

It is very hard to describe all the action that comes from a single quail cove rising, with birds buzzing front, right, left or towards you, let alone tell the limitless rises that we had. Let's just say that it started well, as in the first cove a dropped one bird from with the bottom barrel of my Beretta 28 gauge shotgun, and immediately after that another bird fell to the top barrel.

At the end of the third hunt we had a number of birds that was almost obscene, except for the fact that quail tastes so good!

With heavy legs and light hearts we bid farewell to Judd and his father with hopes of coming back next season We drove then to Indianapolis for a trade show and on the Friday I continued to Portage, Michigan, in order to make peace with my grandson. From the lodge I had called Sylas and told him that I was "bird hunting" and his only reply was "But without me!"

In order to remediate the diplomatic incident I called Rolling Hills Hunting Preserve in Marcellus, Michigan, about a half an hour from my daughters home, and scheduled a pheasant hunt for Saturday afternoon. Around 11:30 AM our friends Mike and Jordan met Sylas and I at my daughter's home and we departed to Rolling Hills.

When we got to the club house we were asked if we would be three hunters, and Sylas immediately corrected Bob saying that we were FOUR HUNTERS!

Let's just say that we had a well timed hunt: Mike shot the first bird, Jordan the second and then it was Sylas and my turn. We kept rotating the points and I backed up a couple flushes, but not many. At one point the birds became heavy and we went back to the truck to drop them and take a rest. Sylas wanted to warn up as well. Of we went again and we shot the last bird just before the rain started. It would turn into drenching rain by midnight and a full day high wind storm.

The pheasant became a good stroganoff served with white rice and helped down by a couple good bottles of Italian wine. And diplomatic relations were fully restored!

The Gang: Jordan, Mike, the proud grandfather and Sylas

Thundering Pheasants

Bill, Andrew, Carly, Ken, and the writer

Last week I received an invitation from friend Bill Habich to take part on the first pheasant hunt of the season at Thundering Aspens Sportsman Club, in Mesick, MI, about an hour from my home, and at the time I could not imagine how great and memorable an occasion this would become.

Thundering Aspens was established in 1987 and currently has a 84-person waiting list (including yours truly) to become members in the family operated private club that offers the opportunity to hunt bobwhite quail, chukar and Hungarian partridges, and of course pheasants in its 600 acres carefully managed to ensure habitat for birds to thrive year around.

T.A.S.C. is not your usual hunting preserve where birds are raised in pens and released in the fields shortly before the hunt starts. At T.A.S.C. birds do what their are supposed to do year around, breed, hide, forage, run and eventually fly after being pointed by fantastically trained dogs, mostly brittany spaniels, without any enclosures to tame them.

I arrived at Thundering Aspens beautiful lodge at about 7:30 AM on Friday and had the opportunity to talk a bit with Greg, Jason and Jon, the brothers that run the club and was introduced to the world class taxidermy that is Jon's passion. Shortly after the other members of our party arrived, Bill and his son Andrew, and Ken and his granddaughter Carolyn, or Carly.

We followed Jason, who also handled the two brittanys, Olive and Misty, and one black labrador, Wilco, to a large field planted with strips of corn and sorghum that held the promise of many birds. Jason explained that from their opening on September 1st to about November we are allowed to shoot both roosters and hens, but from November to the end of the season (which could be as early as January depending on weather and number of birds taken) only cock pheasants are taken in order to ensure enough breeding stock to the following years.

About the hunt itself it is sufficient to say that the dog work was outstanding and every bird shot was retrieved, the birds were all strong fliers and except by paying attention to the dogs it was impossible to tell when one or more birds could flush (there was no marked paths or vehicle tracks so common on other places that indicate where birds were planted), and that all hunters and huntress were safe and had a great time.

We hunted until about noon and then drove back to the lodge where a great meal of barbecued pheasant, maple finished white beans and homemade apple pie waited for us. The lunch was really a feast when we celebrated friendship and the passion of hunting.

Pheasant Tales or Pheasant Tails

Tales or Tails

 

Several years ago I bought "Pheasant Tales," an anthology about what probably is our most cherished immigrant, edited by Doug Truax and Art Delaurier, Jr. and elegantly illustrated by Eldridge Hardie, at Fieldsport (www.fieldsportltd.com), the definitively elegant wingshooter purveyor here in Traverse City.

 

Don't ask me why, but I had many false starts at the book and it sit on my bed stand collecting dust, for the horror of my wife, night after long and lonesome (for the book) night, but a week or so ago I decided to put an attend to the book anguish and give it the attention it deserves.

 

I really can't tell you why reading, or at least start reading, this fantastic book was such an odyssey. I love pheasant and pheasant hunting, although I must confess that I am hunting them less than I would like, maybe it is due to the soft flight of the woodcock and fantastically elegant flavor of the ruffled grouse, or maybe work and life gets in the way of pheasant. Go figure!

 

Anyhow, the herculean work has been completed and I had derived a lot of pleasure from it, had a lot of laughs and may have shed a tear or two. And now that I am done, I may even think about one more pheasant hunt before the virtual  (preserve) season is still going.

Feathers That I Have Ruffled

A unique achievement

It is winter right now, temperatures are frigid and snow is coming down burying all cover, bird season – the wild kind – is over for all practical purpose, and to cope with that I mind travel to times and places where I had the opportunity to ruffle some feathers and these are the top birds and places that I visit while daydreaming.

I cannot say that I am an accomplished shooter since I never experienced the gentlemen’s circuit of grouse in Scotland or driven pheasant in England or red-legged partridge in Spain, and considering the cost associated with driven game it is unlikely that I ever will. But although not an accomplished shooter, I am an enthusiastic bird hunter and have done my fair share, again probably much less than many, of rough shooting after great, and many times not so great, bird dogs. And although I will not be talking much about dogs today I am the first to recognize that the heart and hopes of passionate bird hunters ride on the nose a bird dog.

It is just fair that the first bird that I revisit should be the South American perdiz or codorna. Some of my earliest memories send me back to some pasture or stubble field in northern São Paulo state in Brazil following my father’s footsteps and occasionally being censored by Diana, the English pointer, by making too much noise while she held one or more perdiz under her nose. After the shot and while Diana retrieved I would collect the fired 28 gauge waxed paper hulls and bring it to my nose with its inebriant fragrance.

 

Sugar cane, soybeans and other changes in agricultural practices along with “liberal laws” that outlawed hunting decimated the perdiz population where I grew up, but I would finally reconnect with them in Uruguay where I have been going to Uruguay since 2008. In Uruguay I hunted in all kinds of weather, from a balmy windless day where a T-shirt is more than adequate to gale force winds that provide a good excuse for missing easy shots (the shot pattern was disrupted by the wind), to deep killing frosts and a day after a veritable deluge that sent some of the local rivers up over twelve feet and left the fields half submerged for several days.

 

The perdiz and the grassland of South America are made for pointers, English, shorthaired, setters or my personal favorites Épagneul Bretons. Early in the season you will find mostly singles, but birds start to form couples there are the opportunity for memorable doublés. As the right barrel folds the first bird there is a smooth swing towards the second, and this one also crumbles under the left barrel before the first perdiz touches the ground.

 

Next in line is probably the most beautiful of all upland birds in what is for me probably the most emotionally charged place in the world. The first time I went pheasant hunting in North Dakota I was taken by surprise by the landscape, at the same rough and delicate, settled by somewhat unconquered. The vision of my first tumbleweed drove me back to my childhood as I watched cowboy movies with my grandfather. And I was absolutely unprepared for the savageness of the pheasants. They may or may not be related to preserve birds, but their soul is wild and free, and their flashy colors and tormenting cackle mock the naïve hunter.

 

Tupã, my black lab, flushed and retrieved the first wild pheasants that I shot. We were exploring PLOTS and this one was removed from the road, maybe an acre of unkept prairie grasses and vines crawling upon the once upon a time fence that surrounded a decaying homestead. I could only but imagine which dreams could have led people to the desolated and unwelcoming Dakotas and what they may have endured. But eventually perseverance failed their bloodline and the homestead was abandoned, left for their ghosts and pheasants. A hen flushed under Tupã’s nose, I called him back and he continued to push the brushy fence line and at the very end, from under a thorny apple tree came the thundering cock, and down he came like a rock. The second bird came out of the other end of the fence with nothing but the cold blue sky to disguise him and I botched it. I shot his landing gear out and he flew a good quarter of mile before collapsing.

 

Then one morning we stopped our trucks near a marsh, maybe to eat a snack, maybe to find out where we were (not lost, of course. We knew we were in North Dakota!), and at the slamming of a door pheasants started flushing in droves, blackening the sky. They did not flush at once, but in groups, large and small, almost as if flushing and cackling of a group would energize the others. We watched all that mesmerized, guns cased as we did not have permission to invade pheasant heaven.

 

A rather short time ago I experienced the most frantic bird hunting so far. I took a break from a week of bow hunting in the Limpopo and spent a day shooting. Waterfowl in the early morning, then decoyed pigeons and doves, followed by upland birds with point dogs after lunch and again waterfowl in the evening. Well, I thought I had seen everything and was I wrong!

 

We had four dogs and six guns on the field and we just could not circle the guinea fowl in any way, shape or form. No matter what we tried they would run and flush out of range, so we did the unthinkable. We run, and run, until we barely got into shotgun range when the huge polka-dotted birds would take to wing. This may not be the most orthodox way to hunt birds, but it worked.

 

The thorns took their share of the action. My chaps took a beating, my shell bag was almost ripped apart, I was bleeding from both arms and just this weekend I noticed that the shirt I was using that day is well ventilated in the chest. I hate exercise, but I will sign up for another guinea fowl hunt anytime. I just need a ticket to fly 8,571 miles!

 

And from all those faraway places we end up back at home, hunting the forests of northeastern lower Michigan during the greatest month of the year, October for two birds that are so different and that cannot be hunted apart – Ruffed Grouse, the darling of my palate, and the darling of my heart, Woodcock.

 

After I moved to Traverse City it is almost impossible for me to go anywhere else during October. The days may be balmy or may be frosty, sunny or rainy, still or blowing, still fall is in the air, the grouse are doing what they do, making us believe that they only exist in our imagination and then exploding from under our very feet or from a branch where they should never be allowed to be, and the woodcock, local or migrating, fill our days with joy zigging when they should be zagging or the other way around.

 

No matter what year it is, it appears that grouse are always at the bottom of their cycle, and every bird is a true trophy, at the field and at the table. Last fall was even worth as there was little or no fruit to gather the birds, but I can replay the shots of each of the three birds I shot.

 

Oh, but talk about a fall of woodcock! The lite, delicate and brave birds abounded. For me nothing compares to hunt woodcocks where the trees give way to the ferns, and when the ferns are just starting to die and the trees are bursting with colors.

 

I will never forget a woodcock that I never shot but that almost impaled me after it flushed coming within inches of my face before it veered away. And I will never forget the true double that I shot on 9^th October. The right barrel of my old Laurona hit the first bird going straight away and then I swung on the second bird that took to my right and dropped it with the left barrel. And yes, I had witnesses: Mr. Bill Berghuis and Mr. Del Whitman, Jr. Now, whether or not you consider them reliable, that is your call.

Wild Behaviors

My son Daniel and me

Yesterday we left Traverse City in the early morning and drove a couple hours to Morley, MI, to hunt pheasants at Haymarsh Hunt Club (www.haymarsh.com). Before anyone asks, there is fantastic hunting all around Traverse City, but woodcock season is already finished for the year and grouse are at the bottom of their cycle, and probably the main reason was that we were taking my son, Daniel, on his first hunt over dogs, and common sense told us it would probably be easier and more gratifying for him to hunt pheasants in more open cover than breaking bush all day long in the hope of a couple flushes from almost invisible birds.

My friend Randy Halseth arrived on Friday afternoon and we had dinner before Daniel arrived past 11:00 PM. We started the Saturday (yesterday) morning driving to Meijer's so Daniel could buy a Resident Small Game hunting license, and then we drove south on Garfield Road to meet the other members of the expedition, Del Whitman with German Shorthairs Zap and Gina, David Reed with Vizsla Oliver and Gus Newbury with English Setter Pepper.

We arrived at Haymarsh around 10:00 AM, were guided to our fields and even before parking saw three roosters walking across the road. We backed up, parked, got dressed, released the dogs and went after the colorful roosters.

As we started down the road a rooster flushed wildly and Del got it with a crossing shot while the dogs pointed another one. Every body motioned Daniel forward as it was his first pheasant hunt. Daniel walked behind the dogs and when the gaudy pheasant flew his gun did not fire and I took it with the right barrel from my BSS 20 gauge.

It was a great start, but anyone that taught that we would have an easy hunt was deeply wrong. The cover was dense and in a lot of places it looked a lot more like grouse and woodcock coverts than pheasant country. We went south against the wind to give an edge to the dogs and crossed some wet ground from where besides bagging some more pheasants we flushed several whitetail deers.

After a couple hours we came back to the vehicles for refreshments, both for dogs and hunters, drop a heavy load of birds, rest some tired legs, lie about great shots and the normal things we all do when hunting with friends.

We went back to the north field and very soon we had a double point along the tree line and within seconds of each other two hens flushed, David got one and Daniel and Gus hit the other. Along that edge, all the way to the end of the field the dogs pointed and we eventually flushed several woodcock. Too bad the season was already closed or we could have supplemented our bag with several gorgeous timber doodle.

At the end of the north field Pepper, Gina and Zap came to a beautiful point, and as Del, Randy, Gus and Daniel approached a large dark feathered rooster flushed into the trees. Gus hit the bird twice, but it continued to fly and Del dropped it with a shot from his twenty-eight in a relative open spot. We all marked the spot, but three dogs and five men were unable to locate it. After almost a quarter hour we gave up, all of us with broken hearts.

We started again walking the big field with the wind on our faces and flushed several other woodcocks. At one point Pepper and Gina got very birdie near a ditch and after relocating several times a hen flushed very near me and I got it with a single shot.

We were all getting tired, especially the dogs that were running a hundred yards for every couple yards we walked, but before we got to the cars the dogs took us again to the heavy cover in the south field, and again after relocating multiple times Pepper, Gina and Zap cornered a rooster that took off wildly. I hit it with my first barrel and missed with the second and saw where the bird landed. Soon after Del was there with Gina, Zap and me, and after a couple minutes the rooster flushed a second time and came down hard after I fired the right barrel.

We got back to the cars around 2:00 PM and counted fourteen birds, equally divided between roosters and hens. After the photo session and splitting the birds Del was the first to leave as it was his birthday and he had to take his wife for dinner.

We stopped at the Moe-Z-Inn tavern for something to eat, and after the two hour drive we all, minus Del, arrived at my home in the Old Mission Peninsula for an improvised wild game dinner. The Big Green Egg was going in no time and I quickly had some venison kaftas (venison, garlic, onion and pistachios) and black bear back straps going while I cleaned some spruce and ruffed grouses that I brought from Canada. I seasoned the grouse with garlic, kosher salt and olive oil, and while we waited for the meat to be ready my wife served some mashed potatoes and beef pie.

To help the meal we had a bottle each of Stags Leap Cabernet, Dona Paula Malbec and Renwood Zinfandel, and to close the night just the right amount of Sandeman's Founders Reserve Porto.

Overnight I smoked a large piece of bear and Randy, my wife and me had some of it for breakfast this morning. It is wonderful the magic that salt crust and hardwood smoke can perform on a good piece of wild game.

Even if Daniel was absolutely safe during the day and got his first pheasant I guess that he was not prepared for the hunt. He went to bed at 8:30 PM last night and only woke-up around 11:00 today!

The Best Photo I Ever Took

I am not a good photographer and I don’t even enjoy taking pictures that much, but once in a while accidents happen and a picture becomes memorable.

Back in the 2008/2009 hunting season my friend Bob decided to start a pheasant hunting preserve in his property near Battle Creek, MI. He really wanted to have his own place to train his dogs and wanted to keep the preserve low profile and attendance was by invitation only, and as far as I know I was the first and last, if not the only, guest.

A major difference at Bob’s preserve is that although he would release both rooster and hens, he wanted only roosters to be shot to better represent real wild pheasant hunting. The hens would provide more opportunities for the dogs to work and Bob hopped that they would breed with rooster that would occasionally scape become the seed for future wild pheasants.

Unhappily the experience did not prove successful.

By the last day of the season Bob had a couple roosters left and asked me to come by and help him work the dogs.

Since released birds are slower and shot much closer than wild pheasants, I decided to take a small bore shotgun that I would probably never use otherwise. The little Browning Model 42 Grade VI that I bought from Dave Grosser was perfect to the job. The full choke should put the entire half once payload of the .410 shell on the birds or miss them completely.

After Bob planted the two lost roosters and a couple hens, he released his German short-hair Daisy and we followed her. First she pointed a hen, and we flushed it and watched her fly over the tall grass towards the tree line. Good luck!

Next was a rooster, and both I and Bob shot at him.

The last bird of the day was the last rooster. Daisy pointed and Bob flushed it. He started climbing and I shouldered the little pump gun and hit it on the head, and he tumbled.

Daisy retrieved the last bird of the season and we walked back to Bob’s front yard. He offered me a whisky and we spent the remaining of the afternoon enjoying the spring sun and talking about life. The amber liquid inside the glass was almost the same color as the setting sun.

A Taste of North Dakota

In the second half of October 2007 (repeating the experience in 2009) I spent a week pheasant hunting with a group of friends in North Dakota, a landscape of distant horizons and constant winds, and where according to local folklore there is a beautiful woman behind every native tree. The only problem is finding those trees.

The basis of the five hundred thousand inhabitants state economy is farming and ranching, and to foster those activities the state is crisscrossed by a network of county roads in the North-South and East-West directions, just like an endless chess board. Each side of the squares is a mile, and each square is roughly 640 acres, and these form the standard module for the states rural properties, the mostly unpaved county roads forming “natural” property lines.

Just like farmers all over the world, and despite government subsidies, North Dakota farmers and ranchers live a somewhat difficult economic life and uncertain future, where any additional income is welcome.

And sporting hunting is just the source of such welcome income.

As little as fifteen years ago “hunter” and “pheasant” were bad words for many North Dakota farmers, especially in the Southwest regions, where the cities of New England (500 people) and Regent (300 people) are located, right in the center of the “Golden Egg”, which is the cradle of the nest wild pheasant hunting in the world.

For the farmers pheasants were simply a nuisance, braking headlights, damaging radiators, and helping to jam combines during harvest season. And for the majority of landowners, and due to the actions of an irresponsible minority, hunters were more than a nuisance, leaving gates open e allowing runaway cattle, damaging tiled land with their vehicles and littering the landscape.

But a lot changes in these fifteen years, changing a somewhat difficult situation and evolving to an environmental management model that is so successful that is sets a benchmark to be followed by other stated and even other countries.

The main point is that wildlife became valuable, both for the State as well as for land owners.

As we are all painfully aware, one of the main activities of any state, and for many their only reason for being, is to collect taxes and other tributes, and with small North Dakota population dwindling every year, attracting out of the state visitors that would pay the State directly or indirectly for the privilege and pleasure of their visit looks like a magic solution.

Faraway from everything (my round trip from Michigan was over two thousand miles) and with few attractions besides the already mentioned pheasants and other wildlife population, the few tourists really interested in North Dakota are hunters, and for enjoying the pleasure of two weeks of hunting, during which time the sportsman can harvest up to three pheasants a day, during the three month season (from mid October to mid January), each out of state hunter pays just under one hundred dollars for the small game license, that can be purchased at the internet, to any hunter that completed a hunter safety course in its home state.

But to attract hunters, it is first necessary to guarantee access to game reach tracts of lands, and with less than ten per cent of public lands in North Dakota, and the majority of those being less than prime for pheasants, a solution had to be reached.

Such solution is called PLOTS, an acronym that means Private Land Open To Sportsmen.

The mission of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department is to protect, conserve and improve fish and wildlife populations and their habitats, and this could not be accomplished without working directly with landowners and land users, and the PLOTS program is the backbone of the Game and Fish Department to improve habitats and hunting access in private properties.

The PLOTS program include grazing land, annual crop land, and also other areas many times unusable for conventional farming and ranching practices, and the participation in the program is based on points reached by the different type of landscapes, like wetlands, forested areas (few and far apart), no till farming, and selective grazing. Property location to other PLOTS land is also important.

The payment to landowners varies according to the eight different management options available, in cash or tax exemptions, and currently there are around half a million acres that are managed according to PLOTS guidelines, mostly dedicated to hunting.

But as with most things in life, there is almost always a second path, and in 1992 a group of Regent landowners got together trying to develop a business model that would allow them to profit from the pheasants present in their properties.

Instead of joining the PLOTS program in which the free access to hunting land is free to all hunters, they formed a type of cooperative called Cannonball Co. (http://www.cannonballcompany.com/), one of the few rivers in the region.

Landowners that signed contracts with the Cannonball Co. receive a payment for each bird taken in their properties, e hunters are only allowed with a guide that is associated and certified by the company, and they also must stay in one of the Bed & Breakfast available at many of the farms associated.

In their first season in 1992, the Cannonball offered hunts priced at one hundred dollars per day, including lodging and meals, and just less than fifteen thousand acres, and the landowners received two dollars per bird.

In the 2007 season, the Cannonball Co. had over three hundred thousand acres under management, and forty associated landowners, eleven of them offering Bed & Breakfast services. Around eight hundred hunters paid between two and four hundred dollars per day, depending on when the hunt took place, and harvested around five thousand five hundred birds, mostly rooster pheasants and some sharp tail grouse, each netting twenty three dollars.

The economic impact of the Cannonball Co. in Regent is estimated at one and a half million dollars, or around forty thousand dollars per associated landowner. Not a bad return for the basic investment of leaving some untouched corners and ditches in the properties as well as some standing crops here and there to feed the animals during the tough North Dakota winters.

In the yellow metal triangle that identifies all the PLOTS areas, there is a word in each side: SPORTSMEN – LANDOWNER – WILDLIFE. Clearly, the three elements benefit from the relationship. Hunters have legal and free access to land and the wildlife they pursue, landowners have a financial benefit from fostering wildlife, and wildlife enjoys a healthier habitat and established and properly managed seasons.