Upland Game Bird Management Account Projects

Novice Turkey Hunt Coordinator-Sacramento NWR Complex

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:17:04 GMT

California hunting license sales have declined steadily from 767,149 in 1970 to 260,685 in 2023. A leading cause of this decline is the loss of hunting opportunities and access. To help reverse this trend and to recruit, retain, and reintroduce hunters to the field, CWA developed a program based upon the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s lottery system for hunting on public lands. Through CWA’s relationship with private landowners, the program has created access to private and public lands and is identified as the California Waterfowl Hunt Program. The program has grown steadily over the past 15 years and now includes almost 40 individual properties encompassing over 60,000 acres. Since its inception in 2009, over 25,000 hunters have participated in the program with hundreds of landowners and volunteers providing in-kind services (donating, hosting, guiding hunts, etc.) and access to high quality hunting opportunities being made available to the public. The program currently hosts waterfowl, pheasant, quail, dove, deer, turkey and pig hunts. Applicants have an extensive variety of hunts to choose from which include access to some of the most prestigious and exclusive hunting properties in the country. Hunt locations range from the Klamath Basin in Northern California to the San Jacinto Valley in Southern California.

CWA will hire a Novice Turkey Hunt Coordinator to coordinate, manage, and execute a public novice turkey hunt program at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex, specifically at the Sacramento and Delevan National Wildlife Refuges. This program is a collaboration between the Sacramento NWR Complex and California Waterfowl, aimed at implementing spring turkey hunts for novice hunters. The goal is to provide a high-quality and educational hunting experience. Each novice hunter will be paired with an experienced mentor for two days of turkey hunting on the Sacramento or Delevan Wildlife Refuges. The coordinator will work closely CWA staff and Sacramento NWR Complex staff to perform various tasks, including conducting draws, website design, scouting hunting areas, setting up blinds, contacting and screening drawn hunters, communicating with volunteers, installing signage, checking in hunters and volunteers on the day of the hunt, conducting hunter safety meetings and assisting refuge staff with miscellaneous tasks and projects around the complex.

CWA Public Access Upland Game Hunt Program

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 14:44:18 GMT

Through CWA’s relationship with private landowners, the program has created access to private and public lands and is identified as the California Waterfowl Hunt Program. The program has grown steadily over the past 15 years and now includes almost 40 individual properties encompassing over 60,000 acres. Since its inception in 2009, over 25,000 hunters have participated in the program with hundreds of landowners and volunteers providing in-kind services (donating, hosting, guiding hunts, etc.) and access to high quality hunting opportunities being made available to the public. The program currently hosts waterfowl, pheasant, quail, dove, deer, turkey and pig hunts. Applicants have an extensive variety of hunts to choose from which include access to some of the most prestigious and exclusive hunting properties in the country. Hunt locations range from the Klamath Basin in Northern California to the San Jacinto Valley in Southern California.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife outlined in the 2019 California Hunting and Fishing Recruitment, Retention and Reactivation Action Plan that access and opportunity were among the eight topics of interest. Specifically: “Participation in hunting and fishing is

limited by many types of access barriers. Access barriers include anything that prevents or obstructs participation. Opportunity barriers include circumstances that make it impossible to participate. Having access to fishing and hunting opportunities is contingent on addressing multiple types of barriers within both. For example, some opportunity barriers are physical or related to resources, like having access to land and water, technical equipment and the training or skill required for participation.” CDFW R3 Action Plan

Our objective is to continue offering upland hunts through the California Waterfowl Hunt Program, but we need additional support to make this a reality given the ever-rising costs associated with managing and improving the habitat, stocking pheasants and facilitating public access. This proposal requests funding to assist with managing food plots, pheasant stocking and administrative tasks to provide public upland game bird hunting opportunities on 2,545 acres.

We propose a stocking program of 800 pheasants from October through January at CWA’s 2,175-acre Goose Lake. This would allow us to host 20 hunt days in the fall, allowing us to reach up to 24 hunters per date, totaling up to 480 potential hunters. These hunters will be provided with a hunt map on specific hunt zones and areas of past hunter success. During shoot days, hunters will be allowed to harvest dove (during fall season) and pheasants. In addition to dove and pheasants, we will allow hunters to pursue waterfowl as well. The hunt will be advertised as a sportsman package given that hunters can hunt dove, pheasant and waterfowl in a single hunt day.

Additionally, we would plant safflower food plots totaling 65 acres for mourning doves: Locations Butte County, (Butte Creek Island Ranch and Sanborn Slough, 10 total acres of safflower) and Kern County (Goose Lake, 55 acres of safflower).

Public dove hunting program at CWA’s Butte Creek Island Ranch, Sanborn Slough, and Goose Lake will provide 10 hunt days giving 100 hunters the opportunity to hunt doves during the first dove season September 1-15th.

Project Proposal (PDF)

Identifying the Influences of Fire, Climate Change, and Habitat on California’s Population of Mountain Quail through Time to Inform Population Management

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:57:00 GMT

Mountain Quail are one of the least studied quail in North America (Crawford 2000). As such, basic life history information necessary to inform management decisions, such as population abundance, distribution, trends, and habitat associations, are not well understood across its broad geographic range in California. The montane habitats this species occupies in California are rapidly changing, but it is not clear how climate change, altered fire regimes, insect-driven deforestation, and other factors may be affecting their populations. Understanding the current status of this species and the factors that influence their populations is important to inform data driven Mountain Quail management approaches, including setting harvest quotas and guiding habitat management and restoration.

While some assessments using Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data suggest a stable (Church et al. 1993, Ziolkowski 2022) or potentially declining (Miller et al. 2017) Mountain Quail population in California, these data are not suitable for identify important temporal and spatial changes that would be necessary to evaluate the effects of habitat and environmental changes at scales meaningful to inform most management decisions.

The objectives of this project are to:

Unlock tens of thousands of hours of existing Autonomous Recording Unit (ARU) data by developing a workflow for detecting Mountain Quail from audio recordings.
Develop Mountain Quail occupancy and abundance estimates and trends from 2010- 2021 using existing USFS and CDFW-funded regional monitoring datasets for the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and northwestern California.
Use these data to understand the effects of fire, climate change, and habitat attributes on Mountain Quail abundance, and make management recommendations based on the findings.
Inform approaches for a state-wide monitoring framework to track Mountain Quail populations to guide management of the species across the state.

Determination of Population Structure in Mountain Quail to Facilitate Management

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:30:00 GMT

The secretive nature of the Mountain Quail (Oreortyx pictus) makes it a difficult species to study. Consequently, many aspects of Mountain Quail biology remain poorly known, including population dynamics and vital rates, dispersal and migration behavior, and the degree of isolation among populations. Addressing the latter gap in our knowledge is of particular importance for understanding the distinct evolutionary histories of populations, delineating management units, and guiding potential translocation efforts (Pope & Crawford 2004).

Much of the current data on patterns of population differentiation come from qualitative analyses of plumage variation. Five subspecies of Mountain Quail have been described based on these plumage analyses, four of which occur in California (van Rossem 1937; Gutiérrez & Delehanty 1999). O. p. palmeri is found in mesic coast ranges from Washington state south to San Luis Obispo Co., California with a gap around the bay area. O. p. pictus is found in the interior coast ranges eastward across northern California and south through the central sierras. O. p. eremophilus occurs in the more arid mountains of southern California and ranges northward through both the southern Sierras and southern coast ranges. Finally, O. p. russelli is confined to the Little San Bernardino Mountains of southern California. The validity of these subspecies has been questioned and the geographic boundaries among subspecies is fairly arbitrary in certain cases (Grinnell & Miller 1944). Genetic data will be important for testing subspecies designations, refining management units for Mountain Quail, and determining whether local adaptation to different climatic regimes exist within the species.

Genetic data have long played a critical role in documenting patterns of population structure that can inform conservation units (Allendorf et al. 2022). The power to resolve even fine-scale patterns of genetic structure has improved dramatically with increasing affordability of genome-scale datasets. Genomic datasets also provide novel opportunities to understand the genetic health of populations through quantification of genetic diversity and to explore local adaptation to distinct environments that may be important to consider in population management. For example, genomic analyses of sage-grouse (Centrocercus spp.) revealed fine-scale patterns of population structure and documented signatures of selection at several genes that may be associated with their dietary specialization on sagebrush (Artemisia spp.), plants rich in toxic secondary metabolites (Oh et al. 2019). Little genetic data of any kind exist for Mountain Quail.

Whole genome sequences from 29 California samples of Mountain Quail were recently obtained as part of the California Conservation Genomics Project (CCGP; Shaffer et al. 2022). Preliminary analyses of this dataset indicate that structure does exist among California populations of the Mountain Quail (FIGURE 1). The principal divide is between populations in the mountains of southern California and more northern populations. Evidence for additional structure also exists within the Sierra Nevada, and between northern coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada (Fig. 1). However, major geographic gaps exist among the samples included in preliminary analyses. These gaps make it difficult to exclude the possibility of isolation by distance and hamper population delimitation efforts. Filling these gaps will be critical for establishing accurate management units for Mountain Quail in California. To this end, we are partnering with CDFW personnel to obtain an additional 100 Mountain Quail samples from these sample gaps. We plan to generate whole genome sequences from these additional quail samples to address the following objectives:

Resolve patterns of population structure among Mountain Quail populations in California.
Quantify genetic diversity across different populations of Mountain Quail.
Explore patterns of adaptive differentiation among populations to further establish the importance of certain populations as management units.

Project Proposal (PDF)

Sacramento NWR Complex Spring Turkey Hunt Coordinator

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:04:00 GMT

The National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) is dedicated to the conservation of the wild turkey and the preservation of our hunting heritage. As such, the NWTF recognizes that hunters and anglers are the number one constituency that provides funding for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), and in 2017 alone directly contributed more than $42.4 million to the Department’s budget (CDFW, 2018). However, California hunting license sales have seen a 65% decline since 1970 (USFWS, 2016), and as revenue from this group declines, there is a direct and measurable effect on California’s ability to conserve its fish and wildlife and other natural resources (CDFW R3 Plan, 2019).

To help reverse these trends, CDFW, along with a list of diverse stakeholder groups and state/federal/tribal partners, created the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Hunting and Fishing Recruitment, Retention and Reactivation (R3) Action Plan, which aims to increase statewide hunting and fishing participation. “We need the recreational fishing and hunting communities, our state and federal agency partners and others to continue working with us as we move forward together to address the barriers and opportunities to hunting and fishing in this state.” - CDFW Director Charlton H. Bonham.

In recent years, wild turkey populations on the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex (the Complex) have been steadily increasing. Wild turkey populations have now increased to the point where wildlife managers on the Complex feel that they can sustain a limited opportunity, limited harvest spring hunt on both the Sacramento and Delevan refuges, as wildlife-dependent public recreation is mandated by and according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) law and policy. Therefore, in February 2019, the Complex submitted a hunt plan (attached) to the Regional Chief of the National Wildlife Refuge System in support of a hunt during the spring 2020 California wild turkey season for both the Sacramento and Delevan refuges. The plan outlines that hunts will occur on alternating weekends between the refuges. 4-5 hunters will utilize Sacramento refuge and 2-3 hunters will utilize Delevan refuge. Take limit will be set at one bearded wild turkey per hunter per weekend. Unfortunately, due to COVID, the hunt was cancelled for the 2020 and 2021 seasons and was picked back up for a successful 2022 spring season with every hunter harvesting a bearded turkey.

To help facilitate this spring turkey hunt program, the Complex has entered into a partnership with the NWTF to not only provide volunteer guides as mentors for each successful applicant, but to also seek funding to hire a seasonal staff (GS-7) Biological Technician to serve as the Spring Turkey Hunt Program Coordinator. The Turkey Hunt Program Coordinator will begin the first Monday in March and run through the last Friday in May. The Turkey Hunt Program Coordinator will work a maximum of 40 hours per week and will coordinate all activities associated with the facilitation of a successful hunt program. Job duties will include signing/posting all access routes into and out of each hunting zone, contacting successful applicants and notifying them of all rules and regulations specific to the hunt, coordinating and assigning successful applicants with NWTF volunteer mentor guides, assigning each hunter/mentor to their specific hunt zones, and hunter check-station responsibilities throughout each hunt day. The daily supervision of the Turkey Hunt Program Coordinator will be maintained by the Complex’s Visitor Services Specialist, but the position will be held and administered by the NWTF.

This hunt program will help to address all three of those barriers by

creating a brand-new opportunity for 30 possible new hunters,
only “novice” hunters will be able to apply, and
each hunter will be paired up with a mentor that the mentee can learn the ropes from and ask questions.

Project Proposal (PDF)

CWA Public Access Upland Game Hunt Program

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:39:00 GMT

California hunting license sales have declined steadily from 767,149 in 1970 to 268,841 in 2021. A leading cause of this decline is the loss of hunting opportunities and access. To help reverse this trend and to recruit, retain, and reintroduce hunters to the field, CWA developed a program based upon the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s lottery system for hunting on public lands.

Through CWA’s relationship with private landowners, the program has created access to private and public lands and is identified as the California Waterfowl Hunt Program. The program has grown steadily over the past 13 years and now includes almost 40 individual properties encompassing over 60,000 acres. Since its inception in 2009, over 19,000 hunters have participated in the program with hundreds of landowners and volunteers providing in-kind services (donating, hosting, guiding hunts, etc.) and access to high quality hunting opportunities being made available to the public. The program currently hosts waterfowl, pheasant, quail, dove, deer, turkey and pig hunts. Applicants have an extensive variety of hunts to choose from which include access to some of the most prestigious and exclusive hunting properties in the country. Hunt locations range from the Klamath Basin in Northern California to the San Jacinto Valley in Southern California.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife outlined in the 2019 California Hunting and Fishing Recruitment, Retention and Reactivation Action Plan that access and opportunity were among the eight topics of interest. Specifically: “Participation in hunting and fishing is limited by many types of access barriers. Access barriers include anything that prevents or obstructs participation. Opportunity barriers include circumstances that make it impossible to participate. Having access to fishing and hunting opportunities is contingent on addressing multiple types of barriers within both. For example, some opportunity barriers are physical or related to resources, like having access to land and water, technical equipment and the training or skill required for participation.” [CDFW R3 Action Plan]. Our objective is to continue offering upland gamebird hunts through the California Waterfowl Hunt Program, but we need additional support to make this a reality given the ever-rising costs associated with managing and improving the habitat, stocking pheasants and facilitating public access. This proposal requests funding to assist with managing food plots, pheasant stocking and administrative tasks in order to provide public upland game bird hunting opportunities.

We propose a stocking program of 700 pheasants from October through January at CWA’s 2,175-acre Goose Lake. This would allow us to host 20 hunt days in the fall, allowing us to reach up to 24 hunters per date, totaling up to 480 potential hunters. These hunters will be provided with a hunt map on specific hunt zones and areas of past hunter success. During shoot days, hunters will be allowed to harvest dove (during fall season) and pheasants. In addition to dove and pheasants, we will allow hunters to pursue waterfowl as well. The hunt will be advertised as a sportsman package given that hunters can hunt dove, pheasant and waterfowl in a single hunt day. Additionally, we would plant safflower food plots totaling 50 acres for mourning doves: Locations Butte County, (Butte Creek Island Ranch and Sanborn Slough, 5 total acres of safflower) and Kern County (Goose Lake, 45 acres of safflower). Public dove hunting program at CWA’s Butte Creek Island Ranch, Sanborn Slough, and Goose Lake will provide 10 hunt days giving 100 hunters the opportunity to hunt doves during the first dove season September 1-15.

Imperial Valley Dove Hunt Fields

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:23:00 GMT

Hunters have limited access to public hunting in California. The lands developed through this project in the Imperial Valley provide hunters with opportunities to hunt migratory and resident upland game birds. Specifically, the Imperial Valley provides hunting opportunities for the Los Angeles and San Diego populations, two of the 3 most populated regions in the state. This program will provide public hunting access consistent with the legislative intent of the Upland Game Bird account. All of the lands that are part of the project are open to the public for hunting opportunities from September 1 through January 31.

The objective of this project is to implement upland gamebird food crops on 262 acres that will be planted and available for hunting, an additional approximately 1,600 acres will also be available to access for hunting, providing a total of more than 1800 acres of hunting opportunity. The applicant will coordinate with both the CDFW and the Imperial County Fish and Game Commission to promote the use of these fields by public hunters.

Desert Wildlife Unlimited enters into lease agreements with landowners in the northern Imperial Valley to provide public hunting opportunities. A subset of land parcels will be seeded with various upland game bird crops and flailed to liberate food grains for mourning and white-winged doves as well as resident game birds.

Project Proposal (PDF)

Statewide Habitat Fragmentation and Habitat Inventory Assessment for California, Gambel's and Mountain Quails

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 14:51:00 GMT

The three species of quails native to California (California, Gambel’s and Mountain quails) are iconic game birds of the American West. Each of these three species attracts the attention of upland game bird hunters, as well as birders across the state, yet each of these three species of quails faces threats related to loss of their habitats from the impacts of urbanization and industrial development, expanding agricultural land use, and changing forest and rangeland management.

The goal of this project is to provide a quantitative basis for prioritizing areas for quail population and habitat conservation on a state-wide basis for California. This proposal has three primary objectives for all three species of quails native to California: (1) quantify how changing land uses related to urban development, forest and rangeland management, and agricultural land uses have impacted broad-scale and localized population changes; (2) use broad-scale landscape databases to compile an inventory of habitats that have the potential to sustain populations of these three species of quails, and (3) develop predictive landscape-level models to identify how project increases in urbanization and development are likely to impact quail populations in California over the next 50 years.

Data compilation and analyses will take place at the Geospatial Technologies Laboratory at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University – Kingsville, in Kingsville, Texas and utilize geospatial data, including:

Breeding bird survey
US Census of Agriculture
Road network data
US population and housing
LANDSAT coverage
National Agriculture Imagery Program. Digital orthophoto quadrangles
Percent impervious surface and housing density projections

To achieve the goals of this project, we will use a hierarchical approach with three spatial scales: state, county, and home range to link the broad-scale population dynamics of three species of wild quail in California to statewide landscape metrics.

Our results will provide spatially-explicit information on places throughout the state where stewardship of these populations and for other grassland shrubland birds will most likely be successful. Our results will also provide upland game bird hunters with spatially-explicit information on places where they are most likely to maximize their chances of hunting success and satisfaction.

Project Proposal (PDF)

CWA Badger Almond Public Hunt Program

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 14:19:00 GMT

California hunting license sales have dropped steadily from 767,149 in 1970 to 273,391 in 2016. A leading cause of this drop is the loss of hunting opportunities and access. To help reverse this trend and to recruit, retain, and reintroduce hunters to the field California Waterfowl Association (CWA) developed a program based upon the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s lottery system for hunting on public lands. Through CWA’s relationship with private landowners, the program has created access to private lands and has been identified as the California Waterfowl Hunt Program. The program has grown steadily over the past eight years and now includes over 40 individual properties encompassing over 50,000 acres. Since the inception, over 6,500 hunters have participated in the program with hundreds of landowners and volunteers providing in-kind services (hosting, guiding hunts, etc.) and access to high quality hunting opportunities to the general public. The program currently hosts waterfowl, pheasant, dove, turkey, and pig hunts. In addition to providing opportunities to the general public, specialty hunts cater to families, youth (apprentice), women, mobility impaired hunters and veterans. Applicants have an extensive variety of hunts to choose from which include access to some of the most prestigious and exclusive hunting properties in the country. Hunt locations range from the Klamath Basin in northern California to San Jacinto Valley in southern California.

In the spring of 2014, through a Wildlife Conservation Board (WCB) Grant, CWA acquired 2,200+ acres in Kern County. The acreage is made up of two separate properties known as the Houchin and the Badger Almond parcels and is collectively referred to as Goose Lake. The Badger Almond property is in need of habitat restoration and development of infrastructure before it can be fully utilized for waterfowl hunting, but has hosted successful dove hunts over the past three years.

Since 2014, 939 hunters have hunted on Badger Almond and Houchin. The proposal requests funding to help offset the substantial operating costs of running an upland game public hunt program on Badger Almond. We anticipate 200-400 people will enjoy time upland game hunting as part of the Badger Almond Hunt Program.

The proposed 2017/2018 project will fund a public pheasant hunting program at Badger Almond. We propose a stocking program of 700 pheasants from October through January. We will host 20 hunt days in the fall reaching up to 24 hunters per date. Hunters will be provided with a hunt map on specific hunt zones and past hunter success. During shoot days, hunters will be allowed to harvest dove (when in season) in addition to waterfowl and pheasants. The hunt will be advertised as a combo waterfowl, pheasant, and dove hunt with the main focus on waterfowl and pheasant.

CWA will handle reservations and liability waivers through the well-established CWA Hunting Heritage program. Hunters are chosen through a random lottery process administered by a third party. CWA provides professional staff, including a Hunt Program Coordinator and the necessary supervisory and support staff to administer all aspects of the hunt program, including but not limited to general correspondence, advertising, habitat management, hunting preparation, hosting hunts, accounting, invoicing, reporting, etc. CWA has a well established track record, fiscal policies and procedures to effectively administer and manage this very successful hunt program.

The hunt program at Badger Almond will consist of 20 hunt periods (Wednesday and Saturday) from October - January. Each hunt period will include 8 hunting parties of three (may consist of four hunters if one or more hunters are juniors). These hunt periods can reach more than 400 hunters.

Statewide Apprentice Pheasant Hunts

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 14:04:00 GMT

California hunting license sales dropped from 767,149 in 1970 to 273,391 in 2016. A study by Response Management (US FWS report “Fishing and Hunting Recruitment and Retention from 1990 to 2005”) showed that in 2005 the Pacific region only retained 27% of hunters which was a drop from 36% retention rate in 1990. The report highlights that over 70% of people who took a hunter education course are not continuing to hunt 5 years later. California Waterfowl Association (CWA) Hunting Heritage programs hosts beginning hunter skills camps and hunting opportunities, some of which include hunting mentors / guides. The Hunt Program currently provides high quality hunting opportunities including waterfowl, pheasant, dove, turkey, and pig hunts. We will incorporate FREE upland hunts for new hunters at private, licensed upland game bird clubs into 2017-18 Hunt program.

The specific goals of this project are to:

Work to expand the list of participating licensed game bird clubs for the upland game bird coupons. Coupons will be for 2 hunters (new hunter plus guest) for pheasant, chukar or quail.
Develop registration page and promote these opportunities.
Manage hunt drawings, mail materials and answer questions from participants.