A long-needed cup of legislative coffee

Bills take aim at coyote, hogs, deer bait

It’s great, for a change, to see politicians actually getting down to the business of helping protect South Carolina’s wildlife and fisheries resources.

In the past several weeks, the state legislature has stepped to the plate and taken some big swings at two issues that affect an awful lot of hunters across the Palmetto State.

First, the legislature drafted bills that address the burgeoning populations of coyotes and feral swine, which threaten a number of species that are favorites of South Carolina hunters, not to mention the destruction of wildlife habitat.

Studies done at the Savannah River Site have determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that coyotes have a horribly negative effect on whitetail deer when they share the same habitat. Coyotes literally take a bite out of a huge percentage of the fawns that are born annually in May and June.

With the state’s habitat changing more and more from field agriculture to timber, and with much of the pine timber aging out of the young, early successional stage that helps deer and other game species, the double shot of habitat loss and a jump in fawn mortality has the potential to negatively affect hunters in every county in South Carolina. Add in the destruction of habitat caused by wild hogs, which appear to be expanding into places they’ve never been, and you’ve got what biologists like to call, a “landscape-sized” problem.

While details are still being bandied about, suffice it to say that in a very few short months, hunters will have opportunities to take coyotes and wild hogs — plus armadillos — that they’ve never had before. Each hunter has almost a responsibility to take advantage of them.

The second sticky little problem is that of deer baiting in the Upstate. When the legislature took over the management of deer in the Upstate and Piedmont from the S.C. Department of Natural Resources several years ago, it drafted legislation that prohibited putting out bait for deer in Game Zones 1 and 2. But a month or so ago, the state’s Attorney General ruled that the law might prohibit putting out bait, but it didn’t prohibit taking deer over bait — a tiny little enforcement problem.

The legislature jumped in and has bills in the mix that will cover the problem, prohibiting not only the action of putting bait in an area, but also of shooting deer over it.

Now, if we could get the long-awaited, much-needed freshwater fishing bill through, the 2012 session of the legislature would be one that sportsmen should remember fondly for many years to come.