One of the rules I set for myself when I started this outdoor-writing gig 20-some years ago was to always trust the pros who manage our wildlife and fisheries. One of my favorite writers is a guy from Alabama named Tom Kelly, who writes about turkeys and turkey hunters. He was a timber man by trade, and he once wrote that anybody who’d ever cut down a pine tree considered himself an expert on timber, just as anybody who’d ever killed two squirrels considered himself an expert on wildlife biology.
That’s fine, but it becomes a problem when the tenderfeet among us try to have too much influence over the wildlife and fisheries pros, all those guys who have the master’s degrees from places like Clemson, Auburn, Georgia, N.C. State, Mississsippi State, Virginia Tech and Tennessee, the guys who live and breathe deer and quail and redfish and speckled trout for a living.
I’ve heard striper fishermen who spend two days a week on the water on one lake tell veteran fisheries biologists that they were clueless. I remember thinking to myself, the clueless guy is the jerk who figures there must not be any big fish in his lake because he isn’t catching any. The biologist is the guy with 20 years of data, from fish sampled through electrofishing or trap-netting — which takes fishing talent totally out of the equation. I wondered what that fisherman might do if the biologist showed up at his office and pretended to know more about pest-control, bookkeeping, carpentry or retail sales.
The management of wildlife and fisheries is a public trust. I don’t think, dating back to 1985 when I started writing about bucks, bass, ducks and deer, that I’ve ever really come across a biologist with an agenda. They’ve almost always been dedicated to the resource, protecting it and doing everything in their power to enable the public to enjoy whatever it is we go into the woods or onto the waters to kill or catch.
So, when I hear that the state legislature has been considering a couple of bills that would move in the direction of taking some of the responsibility of managing our fish and wildlife away from those wildlife pros, I sit up and take notice. In some shape or form, the legislature is considering taking away from the DNR the responsibility of managing whitetail deer in the midlands area, giving it to the legislature. Until early last month, when smarter heads prevailed, it was considering legislation that would have done away with the DNR Board, replacing it with a cabinet-level governor’s appointee.
There may be some really intelligent legislators out there who have the best interest of the species foremost in their minds, but there aren’t enough of them, and very few if any have the background of a couple of degrees in wildlife biology and years of on-the-ground, field experience that our biologists regularly possess. And even though members of the DNR board are largely political appointees, they still provide a layer of insulation for the working guys in the fields and marshes that a cabinet appointee doesn’t.
It is imperative that we give biologists a free hand to manage the Palmetto State’s wildlife and fish. A state senator from Spartanburg County doesn’t need to have a vote on how many deer tags a hunter in Horry County gets. A state representative from Aiken has no business pushing an agenda that changes the turkey season in York or the creel limit for redfish.
The people with the background to do that are already working for the state and its sportsmen. Let them keep doing their work.
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