Wildlife Conservation and Management
Wildlife Management and Conservation
Hunting is not only about harvesting game. Wildlife management involves adapting game populations to human activities, making ecological trade-offs, and aiming to get good returns from the natural resources managed by the hunter.
Management can be divided into two parts: small game management and big game management.
Management of Small Game
Managing small game is mainly about harvesting from an abundance – similar to berry picking or fishing. It is almost impossible to regulate small game populations through hunting, and hunting has only a marginal impact on the populations. These are instead controlled by habitats, climate, diseases, and predators.
To improve small game hunting, the most effective measure is usually to control the predators – and since many of the predators are also small game, it is important to use traps, bait hunting, and other methods to ensure that predator control has the intended effect.
Management of Big Game
Big game management, from roe deer and lynx upward, involves more active control and clear goals. Here, humans can influence and manage game populations through hunting. It is possible, not least because meaningful population monitoring and understanding of game populations can be carried out.
In the case of moose, for example, hunting is the leading cause of death. Generally, it is estimated that hunting accounts for about 80 percent of the mortality among Swedish moose.
Feeding of Wild Boar
Feeding wild boar is especially important during harsh winters and in climate zones at the edge of the wild boar’s natural range. In extreme cases, feeding can save the lives of some animals, but primarily it affects reproduction, resulting in sows having more piglets.
Feeding wild boar is also a method to keep them away from fields or other sensitive areas.
A feeding site for wild boar should never be used for bait hunting. The animals should be left undisturbed here. This also applies to the feeding of other game species.
Wild boar should be fed with natural feedstuffs such as peas, corn, grains, silage, or potatoes. Avoid leftovers and animal products and do not place the feeding site near where people are present.
Be sure not to place the feeding site too close to the hunting area boundary. Always consult with neighboring landowners.
Wildlife Care
The term wildlife care usually refers to actions taken to benefit the game.
For example, wildlife care can involve helping game through tough winters by supplemental feeding. It can also involve controlling unwanted species, such as mink and other numerous predators (including some invasive species) that may heavily prey on birds and other small game. Wildlife care can also mean using various measures to divert game from areas where they might cause damage – thereby allowing for stronger game populations elsewhere. Sometimes, more massive efforts can be made, such as restoring wetlands or creating wildlife fields. Another type of massive effort, which of course is difficult for an individual hunter to engage in, is making forestry and agricultural adjustments to benefit wildlife.
Supplementary Feeding
Feeding the animals can mean a lot for wildlife populations if it’s done correctly, which doesn’t mean feeding the animals all year round, but rather helping them through bottlenecks, especially during the late winter. Partly, you can save the lives of some animals during the harshest period, and partly, you give them extra energy that can be crucial for the females to produce slightly more offspring.
Still, maintaining feeding sites throughout the year is important so that the wildlife learns to find them.
In combination with supplementary feeding, you can help the wildlife in other ways. For example, during winter, you can occasionally drive snowmobile tracks between night and day resting places, to and from running water (water can be in short supply in cold winters), and to and from feeding sites, which gives the animals much-needed energy. If you have a tractor, you can also scrape away snow in suitable areas so that the animals can access heather, autumn crops, and other ground vegetation under the snow.
Forestry Plays an Important Role
Much of wildlife management depends on the cooperation of landowners. Driving off-road vehicles and building feeding installations requires the landowner’s permission. In some cases, it’s actually only the landowner who can carry out wildlife management — for example, when it involves tailored logging and clearing activities. Freshly logged areas contain a lot of animal food, and wildlife populations can benefit depending on how and when the logging is done.
Moose, for example, love pine crowns. If it’s practically possible to leave the crowns untrimmed over the winter, it means several kilos of food per large tree. Moose also like to browse on deciduous trees and pine in areas that have been thinned and cleared. The requirement, however, is always that the branches remain on a stem. Moose cannot eat loose, chopped material on the ground, like a cow or a horse can.
Of course, it’s best for the wildlife if logging and clearing are done when food is most scarce — that is, during the winter.
Don’t Clean the Forest
Another forestry adaptation is to avoid “cleaning” thinned forests by cutting all trees close to the ground. If it’s possible to leave deciduous shrubs and trees that don’t interfere with the main stems, that’s good—or cut them high so that they sprout new, palatable stubs and shoots. Previously browsed trees that don’t disturb the main stems can remain and continue to produce forage (moose tend to browse again on previously browsed trees).
When thinning and clearing, one can cut the upper parts of competing trees (top thinning), which is often sufficient from a forestry perspective but means the tree continues to produce forage for wildlife for a few more years.
By always keeping the welfare of wildlife in mind, many small forestry adaptations can be made that mean a lot for wildlife. The cost doesn’t have to be higher—it’s more about slightly different work with the clearing saw.
Along ditches in arable land and along stand boundaries in the forest, it’s beneficial to leave untouched edge zones. Bushes, brushwood, wild grasses, herbs, and low spruces provide excellent cover for wildlife, produce insects, and create forage.
Feeding Roe Deer
It’s an advantage to get roe deer used to the feeding site already in the autumn or early winter. When the winter gets harsh, usually around January, you increase feeding by spreading the feed in several places so that animals lower in rank can also access it.
Once you’ve started feeding, you must continue until the snow melts. The hardest time for roe deer is late winter and early spring.
Feeding should be done where roe deer naturally tend to stay and never close to roads or where animals can cause disturbances. It’s good if the site is near water.
Silage, game pellets, grain-cleaning pellets, and fine (early harvested) hay are good roe deer feed. It should contain lots of carbohydrates and lower protein content. Do not give feed that is too rich (such as crushed oats or hay) if you start feeding late in the winter or to animals already starving. That can kill them. Use grain-cleaning pellets or silage.
Changing habitats
More extensive wildlife conservation efforts involve permanent changes to habitats. One such measure is to restore wetlands and create wildlife ponds, which benefits nearly the entire food chain, increases biodiversity (even beyond game species), and creates valuable habitat variations. This of course requires the cooperation of landowners and often also permits for water-related activities. Additionally, such projects can be expensive, but since they are comprehensive and beneficial for entire ecosystems, there may be funding support available. Talk to your County Administrative Board about the matter.
Wildlife fields
Wildlife fields can be established in edge zones, on old pastures, and near watercourses.
Crops may include anything from clover to forage kale, preferred is also oats.
The wildlife field should be placed in the shelter of trees and shrub belts. In open landscapes, you can combine the field with planting trees and shrubs to create protective cover.
The crops can be adapted to different species of game, from deer to hares and birds.
Releasing game animals
Releasing game animals is a type of wildlife management measure that should be carefully considered before committing time and money. If one thinks a local wildlife population is too low, one should first investigate the reasons. Why is the population low? If it turns out to be due to poor habitat, high levels of predation, or something else, those are the areas that should be addressed first. Controlling predators like foxes, badgers, mink, and crows is often the most effective way to benefit other bird species or small game populations.
Releasing game can be successful if it is preceded by habitat improvements and predator control, or if one knows that the causes behind the previous population decline have been resolved. One should also be prepared, provide long-term support efforts in the form of predator control, and possibly also feeding, to maintain the wildlife.
It is also important to do it right, so read up and talk to breeders and others with experience. Some private landowners with large hunting grounds that operate commercial hunting often support wildlife populations with releases, for example of ducks, often in combination with measures to make the ducks stay in place. But in those cases, it’s more a matter of extreme hunting pressure, and the wildlife management can be compared to fishery management in so-called “put and take” lakes.
Give the animals minerals
Salt is a scarce resource in nature, and salt licks are usually enriched with various minerals that animals need.
The easiest way to put up a salt lick is to cut down a small tree to shoulder height. If you’re confident with a chainsaw, you can carve the top of the high stump into a narrow peg that fits the hole in the salt lick. Otherwise, you can saw a cross into the stump and insert a suitable stick.
The salt spreads down over the high stump via rain, among other things, which helps preserve the stump, and even smaller animals can lick salt from the sides of the stump. A salt lick usually lasts between six months and a year in areas with normal wildlife density.
Inventories
Inventories are fundamental for conducting both wildlife management and wildlife conservation. You need to know what is in the forest in order to determine how to achieve various goals. You also need to understand how different actions, such as culling, affect the ecosystem and wildlife populations in order to practice adaptive wildlife management. Here are some examples:
Browsing Damage Inventory: Usually carried out by the Swedish Forest Agency and sometimes by forestry companies. The method provides a measurement of damage in young forests, especially young pine forests, and shows trends.
Browsing Pressure Inventory: Can be carried out by forestry companies, the Swedish Forest Agency, and hunters. Provides a measurement of total browsing pressure and shows trends.
Moose sightings: Carried out by hunters and may include other game species besides moose. It involves noting all wildlife observations over a certain number of days. The method shows trends in wildlife populations and possibly their sex composition.
Culling Statistics: Carried out by hunters and landowners and is particularly interesting when one is to interpret trends for small game (larger game species are usually inventoried in other ways, but harvest statistics are, of course, a useful complement).
Line Inventories:
Often conducted in collaboration with hunters and can therefore cover large areas (entire counties) that are inventoried in a single day. One example is lynx inventorying, but other game can also be surveyed this way. Line inventories are usually carried out on fresh snow, and each track found is followed for a certain distance. The tracks are quality-assured by specially trained personnel. This method provides data on the number of animals.
Droppings Inventory:
Usually performed by hunters and landowners. By counting fresh moose droppings in the same plot each year, one can observe trends in the moose population. It may also involve collecting moose droppings from a given area to analyze DNA. This allows for estimating how many individual animals live in the area.
Aerial Inventory:
Performed by specially trained personnel and provides data on the number and sex ratio of the moose population.
Winter Population – After the Hunt
Most inventories are conducted during winter or late winter, after the hunt but before the calving season. This population is referred to as the “winter population.” Droppings inventories and browsing and damage surveys are generally conducted in spring, when the snow has mostly melted but before vegetation starts growing. No inventory method is 100% accurate, and the quality may vary depending on conditions at the time of the survey.
Sometimes it is therefore difficult to draw definitive conclusions from one year to another. The trends become more reliable the more years the same type of inventory is conducted.
Large Areas
It is often not possible to draw any conclusions from an inventory in smaller areas, for example within a wildlife management area of a few thousand hectares. The larger predators or hoofed game species usually move within much larger areas. Chance, weather conditions, and land use mean that game prefers certain areas in some years and other areas in other years. For example, when it comes to moose and bears, one must assess both the population size and harvest within areas that are several thousand hectares large (depending somewhat on the region in Sweden).
Complicated Relationships
Analyzing inventories and drawing the right conclusions is often complicated. One example is the competition that arises in areas with several strong wildlife populations. In Östergötland around 2010, a project was carried out using DNA analysis of moose droppings in browsed pine forests. It showed that the severe pine browsing, which caused serious damage, was due to moose. However, what was puzzling was that the moose population was still moderate; 7–10 moose per 1,000 hectares. Analyses and further inventories revealed that the moose were forced to use pine as a staple food even in summer (which is not normal) due to competition from the strong red deer population.
This example highlights the importance of broad inventory efforts and a holistic approach when analyzing the situation.
Moose Management
The County Administrative Board divides hunting areas into moose management areas and appoints moose management groups to lead the work.
In each moose management area, there are moose management units with multi-year moose management plans. The plans are reviewed by the moose management group and approved by the County Administrative Board.
Within a moose management unit, there are hunting clubs and wildlife management associations. These receive annual quotas for moose hunting within the framework of the management plan.
Independent hunting areas not included in a moose management unit may receive quotas directly from the County Administrative Board or be allowed to hunt calves during a limited period.
Each county also has a wildlife management delegation, politically composed, working with broader wildlife management issues.