Hunting in Wyoming is changing.

Always an integral part of the state’s culture and way of life, hunting is also an important wildlife management tool and a popular form of recreation that brings critical dollars into the state’s economy and its Game and Fish Department. But outside forces—such as disease, oil and gas development, and expanding subdivisions—are threatening the state’s wildlife and potentially its hunting legacy.

“The hunting experience around here has definitely changed,” says Mark Winland, a science teacher at Campbell County High School in Gillette, and an enthusiastic 4th generation Wyoming hunter. He says the changes began with the first oil boom in the 1960s, but they have accelerated with the recent coalbed methane rush. “If you are the type of hunter that likes to sit in your vehicle, stay on the roads, and pop the first thing that you see, you’ll still find good hunting,” Winland says. “If you are looking for a more primitive experience, that’s harder to come by now.”

Winland says that the Powder River Basin has become semi-industrialized and broken up by roads and power lines. He believes these changes are having an adverse effect on wildlife, but says that effect is difficult to quantify. What is easier to see is the change in the hunting experience.

That change is not limited to the Powder River Basin. In the Red Desert, Tom Maki, the staff representative for the United Steelworkers of America District 11, says many of his union buddies followed his lead in joining in a Blue-Green Alliance with conservationists protesting leasing in the Jack Morrow Hills because they did not want to see their hunting grounds “destroyed.”

Courtney Skinner, an outfitter in Pinedale who has run a wilderness camp in the Upper Green River Valley since the 1950s, told NBC’s Nightline that hunters have told him they don’t want to come to Pinedale anymore because the area is too crowded.

He says the changes he has seen in his backyard bring tears to his eyes. They have also pushed him to join forces with “the greenies.” This alliance is not a comfortable one for Skinner, who says he has always considered himself a hard-core conservative until now. But like a born-again Christian, Skinner has seen the light and is now on an evangelical crusade against unbridled oil and gas development in the West. To spread his message, he grants interviews to reporters, testifies at meetings, preaches at the barbershop, and talks to clients around the campfire.

“When a hunter first starts out, taking the animal is the most important thing,” Skinner told reporter Kevin Berger from Salon.com, “And once you catch your first fish, you’re a fisherman. But then hunting and fishing just become reasons for the journey—reasons to get out, lose yourself in nature, look at the stars and hear the river run. That’s the way to confront a little bit of America’s past and rejuvenate your soul so you can move forward to the future. That’s the tradition we want to preserve. Those are the things increasingly more valuable than all of the natural gas mines.”

Preserving the tradition
In order to ensure a good hunting experience, you need abundant wildlife, clean water, clean air and sound stewardship of public lands. The rush to develop oil and gas reserves without adequate attention to these concerns worries some sportsmen and has them beginning to rethink their traditional allegiances.

IS ROADLESS HUNTING ELITIST?

A side argument to the whole hunter, gun-control, habitat protection debate revolves around roadless areas.

According to two studies conducted by Trout Unlimited, the best hunting in Idaho and Oregon—as measured by size and number of big game taken and fish caught—occur in roadless areas. A similar study has not been conducted in Wyoming, but given the amount of elk and deer habitat and trout fisheries found in the state’s roadless areas, it is likely the results would be similar.

But the National Rifle Association believes roadless hunting is elitist. According to a Washington Post article from July 9, 2004, the NRA “wants to make access by car to hunting areas a priority.” According to the Post, the NRA’s major complaint about roadless areas is that they limit “mainstream hunter access to valuable hunting land.”

An NRA spokesman was quoted in the article saying, “You are talking about people having to hire hunting guides, which is a financial burden, or you are talking about trekking. It would take exceptionally long to hunt, and what about disabled hunters?”

In a place like Wyoming, where for many the hunting experience is synonymous with backcountry adventure and where there is a well-developed economy based on guiding and outfitting, such arguments are far-fetched.

They have generated considerable heat among outdoor writers as well. The Lewiston, Idaho Tribune ran an editorial that said “most of the legions of people insisting on a driveway right” to hunt “simply have more invested in their beer bellies than their boots.”

Pat Wray, a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America’s board of directors and the author of “The Chukar Hunter’s Companion” says, “The NRA will make a push on behalf of politicians who are strong supporters of gun rights, but very often these are the same people who are the least supportive of efforts to protect hunting habitat from roads, logging and mining.”

“We’re alarmed at the rapid rate of development by the oil and gas industry without adequate investigation and planning into the effects of this development on wildlife,” says Cathy Purves, the western Wyoming field director for Wyoming Wildlife Federation.

“Hunting is a part of Wyoming’s way of life. People here do it to supplement their groceries, they do it for recreational sport, they do it to help manage wildlife. They are deeply connected to hunting,” Purves says. “We [at the Wyoming Wildlife Federation] are calling for no net loss to wildlife,” she says. “To do this, we need to make sure drilling operations are done in the right way.”

Doing it right to protect wildlife
Doing it right has become a rallying point for people across the state in their fight to protect Wyoming’s natural heritage from ill-conceived and poorly considered natural gas development. But so far, the federal government has failed to take up the cause. This failure may be enough to push hunters into the so-called “green” camp.

For example, in the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Jack Morrow Hills Study Area, the BLM acknowledges that there are oil and gas leases that will be developed in the some of the most important big game habitat found in the Red Desert and that the impacts of this development could be “severe” for mule deer, pronghorn and desert elk.

Severe impacts to these animals inevitably means severe impacts to hunting, but the BLM plan does not suggest any way to prevent them from occurring.

Conservationists and gun control
Sportsmen comprise the vast majority of America’s law-abiding gun owners and they are intent on maintaining their gun rights. In the past, this has made many hunters single-issue, single-party voters, but some are beginning to argue that it is time for hunters to look beyond the barrel of their guns and start considering other potential threats to their sport.

In an op-ed piece for High Country News’ Writers on the Range, Tom Reed, a freelance writer based in Laramie, argued that it takes more than the Second Amendment to ensure an American’s right to hunt. There also has to be wildlife, habitat and open space, and these things are increasingly threatened by oil and gas.

“As an outdoorsman living in the West, it’s hard for me to ignore the damage that has been done to our wildlife heritage…,” he writes. “Places where I used to hunt pronghorn and sage grouse on the Upper Green River outside Pinedale, Wyo., are now oil and gas fields.

“A ranch where I once killed a dandy buck in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin was roaded and tapped for coalbed methane two years ago. It won’t recover in my lifetime.”

Common Ground
The conservation community is working hard to change its unearned image as anti-gun, anti-hunting and to help develop a relationship with hunters based on their common goals for healthy wildlife. In Wyoming, this relationship is nascent, but Purves wonders if this year’s hunting season will change that.

“I spoke to a hunter the other day who had just come back from the Red Desert and was appalled at what he’d seen there,” Purves says. “He could not believe the change in just one year. There were more roads, more traffic, more wells, more rigs. It took away his hunting experience.”

Winland, in Gillette, believes that the loss of the hunting experience that is already occurring in places like the Powder River Basin, the Upper Green River Valley and the Red Desert is just the first thing people will notice. What he worries more about are the long-term effects on habitat and wildlife. Effects he thinks we cannot quantify yet.

“This is the test,” Winland says. “Is the landscape resilient enough to bounce back when this is done? The optimistic side of me says yes, the pessimistic side is worried.

“I’m worried about things like noxious weeds. I’m worried that the landscape could be biologically pretty different when this whole thing is over. I hope that isn’t true.”