Off-Highway Vehicle Abuse Can Ruin the Hunt

I stumbeled across the article below in the most recent issue of the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers journal. The entire journal is online in PDF format, but I've reproduced the article here to encourage more folks to read it. The author, Mark Clifford, was born and raised in northern California and completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Pathology at the University of California, Davis. His passions include hunting, fishing and habitat conservation.

Off-Highway Vehicle Abuse Can Ruin the Hunt

By Mark Clifford, California

This past archery season I found that my childhood hunting area had been spoiled by thoughtless riders on off-highway vehicles. My brother and I have hiked and hunted this steep and rugged terrain on and off for the past 20 years, always enjoying the solitude and challenge. In just one afternoon the individual on the off-highway vehicle had impacted the habitat more than our 20 years of hiking and hunting.

The "hill" as we called it, is located along the edge of the Shasta Valley. The foothills are covered with acorn-rich oak trees, dense manzanita and buck brush, and as you climb higher these species give way to dense stands of pine, fir, and cedar. On different occasions we've seen owls, bobcats, black bears, turkeys, squirrels, foxes, skunks, quail, rabbits, badgers, snakes, vultures, coyotes, plenty of blacktail deer and have also found fresh mountain lion kills. We've put some nice bucks in the freezer...but you've got to hunt hard.

Going up there this past August, I found that someone on an off-highway motorcycle had mangled the trails and cut trees and bushes just to get to the summit—a place where we've been going on foot since we were children. This is the same story that you'll hear all across the West. Off-highway vehicle abuse is directly impacting land and water habitat, compromising our fishing and hunting opportunities. I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't be allowed to have their fun off-road, but no one has the right to damage our publicly owned National Forests. In a perfect world we could trust individuals to use common sense and good ethics, but it seems like these days even sportsmen are running rough shod over game habitat. Why would we desecrate the very habitat on which our game species rely?

As published by Trout Unlimited (Public Lands Initiative) the roadless backcountry is where Idaho's biggest mule deer bucks and bull elk are found, and of the remaining 7% of Idaho's healthy native bull trout populations, 87% of these are in roadless areas. Like many states in the West, even the populous State of California is blessed with large tracts of public lands available for public use and for the protection of animal habitat.

For some time it appeared that hunters and anglers were stuck in the middle between groups that want to destroy habitat, and groups that want to ban hunting and erase the Second Amendment. Conservation-minded sportsmen had little representation, despite the large number of Americans who do consider themselves sportsmen and women (34 million Americans went fishing or hunting in 2006).

Thankfully today there are groups working for solutions like BHA and Trout Unlimited As stated by Theodore Roosevelt, "I recognize the rights and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize a right to waste them or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us".