Science Spotlight

They came from as far away as Los Angeles, Truckee and Crescent City. They showed up with their shotguns, bird dogs and blaze orange and returned over, and over, and over again.

It was a turn-back-the-clock experience at the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area during California’s 2024-25 hunting season. The wildlife area set a new record for its wild pheasant harvest at 687 birds and, for one season at least, rekindled memories of the Sacramento Valley as the wild pheasant hunting destination it used to be in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

“We probably had more pheasant hunters this season than the previous two years combined,” said Chris Rocco, Wildlife Habitat Supervisor I at the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area, who has worked at the property since the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) opened it to public use in 1996.

“I could tell it was going to be a real good pheasant year, a fantastic year, I just didn’t anticipate it was going to be as good as it was,” Rocco said. “I was predicting 350, maybe 375 birds (harvested), but we blew past those numbers by the third week of the season.”

The hunting public got its first glimpse of the potential not during the November pheasant opener, but rather when the area opened to dove hunting September 1. The wildlife area’s dove hunters couldn’t stop talking and texting about all the wild pheasants they were seeing.

For more than a decade, the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area, with the downtown Sacramento skyline as its backdrop, has been California’s top wild pheasant producer, accounting for about half of all the wild pheasants taken on public land throughout the state.

The area’s annual wild pheasant harvest usually fluctuates within the 225 to 325 range. (Only male wild pheasants may be taken.) The previous high of 606 wild roosters was reached during the 2003-04 hunting season immediately after the wildlife area expanded and opened 5,000 additional acres to hunting for the first time. Although considerably smaller in size at the time, the wildlife area harvested just 19 roosters when it first opened to public hunting for the 1997-98 season.

Today, the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area is California’s largest Type A state-operated wildlife area at almost 17,000 acres. As much as 40 percent of the area consists of various upland habitats needed by pheasants, songbirds, nesting ducks, pollinators and other species. This type of habitat has largely disappeared from the Sacramento Valley landscape. Neighboring farms and private duck clubs add to the habitat footprint.

Yolo’s expanse of upland habitat, however, doesn’t fully explain the record pheasant harvest, which more than doubled the 304 birds taken during the 2023-24 hunting season. Although the area hosts some planted-bird pheasant hunts for new hunters and youth hunters each season, those pen-raised birds aren’t included in the area’s pheasant count.

Listening to Rocco, a combination of nature and nurture led to the record harvest.

On the nature front, two years of wet winters and springs in 2023 and 2024 led to back-to-back flooding of the wildlife area, which is also used for flood control. That temporary flooding benefits ground-nesting birds such as pheasants, Rocco explained, as the floodwaters kill or force out the four-legged predators hardest on pheasants, particularly skunks. The upland habitat and pheasants return quickly when the floodwaters recede while the predator populations take more time to recover.

“Normally, we are lucky to have two hatches, but we actually had three hatches this last year,” Rocco said. “We had birds coming off the nest in August, which is not common. And the survival rate was so high I was seeing broods of eight to 10 chicks.”

Video: Not just pheasants! The Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area set an all-time-high harvest for geese and cinnamon teal in 2024-25. The area’s mallard harvest at 844 birds was the second-highest total in area history. CDFW’s Darian Marico Clark-Stinson has the complete season recap, including free roam and blind totals, in a special “Yolo Alert” report.

On the nurture front, the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area team, led by CDFW Senior Environmental Scientist Supervisor Garrett Spaan, applies a light farming touch to the landscape, leaving edge habitat for protective cover and wildlife travel corridors, integrating water into upland fields to foster broadleaf vegetation that produces the invertebrates, notably grasshoppers, pheasant chicks and other bird species need in the early stages of their lives.

“Even in dry years, it’s important for us to maintain adequate summer wetland habitat and wetland irrigation for moist soil management across the area to benefit pheasants and other wetland-dependent species,” Spaan said.

Part of the habitat management strategy is also practical necessity. The area has only three full-time employees working in the field and five seasonal employees to manage CDFW’s largest Type A land holding.

“We’re dirty farming out here,” Rocco said. “It’s kind of the old-style farming where everywhere you have a ditch, you have vegetation growing on it. Everywhere you have a fence, you’ve got a windrow growing on it. You’ve got the edges of fields out here you can’t get water to or you can’t disk, so we just leave it. That’s when you get wildlife utilization.”

Rocco takes pride in the area’s wild pheasant numbers as an indicator of healthy uplands.

“Everyone is talking about our pheasants right now, but we’ve got Swainson’s hawks everywhere, we’ve got a massive deer population here with some monster bucks just hanging out. We’ve got turkeys coming in, giant garter snakes and a lot of endangered species out here,” Rocco said. “This is a wildlife area in the broadest sense, and we manage it so that everything benefits.”

Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area Wild Pheasant Harvest Through the Seasons

2024-25 – 6872020-21 – 306

2023-24 – 3042019-20 – 229

2022-23 – 2632018-19 -- 361

2021-22 – 2192017-18 – 185

Media Contact:
Peter Tira, CDFW Communications, (916) 215-3858

CDFW Photo: The Western Section Wildlife Society president Randi McCormick and Atlas staff (Sardinas, Richardson and Winkler) receiving the Conservationist of the Year award at the 2023 conference.

CDFW Photo: Yellow-faced bumble bee.


CDFW Photo: Community science volunteer photographing a chilled bee at an Atlas field training.

The California Bumble Bee Atlas (Atlas), a collaborative community science project developed to track and conserve the state’s native bumble bee species, has been awarded Conservationist of the Year by the Western Section Wildlife Society.

The award, given to a person or group that has made an outstanding contribution to wildlife conservation in California, Nevada, Hawaii or Guam, was presented by the Western Section at its meeting earlier this year.

“It’s an honor for the California Bumble Bee Atlas to be recognized for its contribution to conservation and a testament to the power of community science in addressing critical issues like pollinator decline,” said Hillary Sardiñas, statewide pollinator coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), and one of the scientists behind the Atlas.

CDFW was awarded funds through the competitive State Wildlife Grant Program to support the Atlas, which is led by CDFW in partnership with The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (Xerces). CDFW and Xerces staff developed a website to compile resources for volunteers, recruited and trained community scientists from around the state and are using data gathered to help identify priorities for bumble bee conservation in California.

Bumble bees are charismatic and easily recognizable pollinators thanks to their large size and distinctive striped patterns. Bumble bees are predominantly black and yellow but can have red, orange or white coloration. They play an important role in keeping the environment healthy by pollinating flowers in natural areas and contributing to successful harvests on farms.

Recent declines of pollinator populations have drawn attention to their importance in providing ecosystem services, including to over 30% of agricultural crops. In California, eight of the state’s 25 bumble bee species are classified as endangered or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

“Many bumble bee species are in a precarious position due to interacting threats, including habitat loss, climate change and disease spread. The California Bumble Bee Atlas can help track population trends to help identify species and locations for targeted conservation actions,” said Leif Richardson, Atlas lead for Xerces.

To improve understanding of trends in bumble bee populations, Atlas staff train volunteers to collect data without harming bumble bees. Volunteers net bumble bees then chill them to take close-up photos that enable identification. The bumble bees then slowly warm up and fly away. All data and photos are uploaded to the website Bumble Bee Watch, where species are identified by expert taxonomists.

Over 2,000 people have registered for the Atlas as volunteers. These volunteers have conducted thousands of surveys across the state and are the driving force behind the Atlas. Between 2022 and 2023, volunteers and project staff recorded 10,009 bumble bee observations.

“The Atlas wouldn’t be possible without the support of community science volunteers, which have included a number of CDFW staff from around the state. We’re still looking for new volunteers to survey bumble bees and help contribute to this important project,” added Dylan Winkler, CDFW scientific aid for the Atlas.

Going forward, the Atlas will have a new objective: to identify long-term monitoring sites that volunteers visit multiple times a year. This data will provide short- and long-term trends in high-priority locations that support or historically contained California’s bumble bees of greatest conservation need. All data collected from the project will help with the development of a management plan for bumble bees in California, which CDFW and Xerces hope will continue to catalyze conservation of these charismatic and important species throughout the state.

For more information or to get involved, visit the Atlas’ website at cabumblebeeatlas.org.

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Media Contact:
Amanda McDermott, CDFW Communications, (916) 738-9641

CDFW’s existing black bear management plan was last updated in 1998 and there have been significant advancements in scientific methodologies and wildlife population modeling since then. The new conservation plan incorporates these advancements and includes contemporary scientific methods like using an integrated population model to determine population sizes and trends. Integrated population models use multiple sources of data, are robust enough to account for changes in hunting opportunity and produce accurate estimates of California’s black bear population size. This approach allows the Department a strong basis for effective and evidence-based conservation and adaptive management.

The draft plan also calls for the creation of nine different Bear Conservation Regions throughout the state where bear populations would be monitored and potentially managed based on specific needs.

Among the goals identified in the draft plan are conserving the state’s black bear population and their habitats, recognizing black bears as an important game species and offering more educational and safe viewing opportunities for the public while minimizing human-black bear conflict.

In the coming weeks, CDFW will host a virtual informational public meeting to provide an overview of the draft plan. The most up-to-date information regarding this meeting will be posted on CDFW’s Public Notices and Meetings web page when the information becomes available.

Please locate the draft plan and options on how to provide public comment on the CDFW Black Bear page. CDFW is asking for comments to be provided by June 14, 2024.