Stewardship Looks Different from the Highway
Clearing trees can sometimes look like deforestation to someone passing by. But on the land I know, removing cedar trees—an invasive species that can quickly take over—is often part of restoring native habitat. Give the land a few years, and what looked like destruction can become healthier forest and better habitat for wildlife.
Hunting can look cruel, too, especially to people who have always gotten their meat from a grocery store. But people who live with wildlife see things differently. When deer or rabbits become overpopulated, they don't simply remain cute animals in a field. They compete for food, suffer when drought reduces that food supply, and can become more vulnerable to disease. Sometimes the most practical response is to harvest some of that population. If we'd rather have a hamburger, that's fine—but some rabbit stew or venison can put food on the table while also helping keep the wildlife population in balance.
Coyotes are another example. Hunting them with hounds is a sport that has become less popular, but predators are part of the ecosystem, and sometimes their populations become a problem. When coyotes have abundant wild prey, they stay mostly in the wild. When that balance changes, however, they may discover that chickens, newborn calves, or even household pets are considerably easier meals.
Everything is a balance.
People who have lived for two or three generations on farms tend to see these cause-and-effect relationships play out over decades. They don't learn about the land by looking at it for a few seconds through a car window while traveling 70 miles an hour. They learn by watching what happens after a drought, after a timber harvest, after a population of predators increases, or after a particular piece of ground is managed one way instead of another.
My dad has spent his entire life thinking about habitat and wildlife management, and for the past thirty years he has had roughly a thousand acres of his own canvas on which to work. His father spent most of his life on his own farm before him. His primary focus was farming—first dairy cattle and later beef cattle—but when he wasn't farming, he was hunting.
I grew up hearing and seeing the lessons that came from that experience.
During much of the middle of the twentieth century, this part of Missouri supported deer, turkey, rabbit, squirrel, coyote, quail, and a host of other wildlife. At the same time that the state was experimenting with wildlife-management policies and watching how those policies worked across an entire region, my family was living right alongside the wildlife. They weren't studying an abstract ecosystem. They were seeing the results in their fields, woods, livestock, gardens, and hunting seasons.
Some of the principles I remember learning from them seem obvious—but only after you stop and think about them.
The land I'm familiar with is a mixture of cultivated fescue used for grazing and hay. Fescue isn't native, and it may not be the ideal habitat for everything, but it is hardy and it does its job. My grandfather fed it to cattle for most of his life. I'm not going to criticize that choice without first understanding why it was made and what alternatives would actually accomplish. Like my dad always said, know why a gate is open or closed before you go closing or opening it.
I remember the forests as a mixture of oak, hickory, elm, maple, walnut, and cedar beneath a dense canopy. Even today, I know I'm "home" when the mix of trees and underbrush changes to that distinctive Missouri landscape. Deer, turkey, squirrels, and birds depend on the trees and their mast—especially the acorns. Those animals, in turn, become food for predators and people.
That's the ecosystem.
And wild animals are, in fact, wild.
Standing in the yard in the evening and watching rabbits and deer grazing or moving through the grass near the house, it can be easy to imagine that they are almost tame. They aren't. Make a sudden noise inside the house or step outside unexpectedly, and they react just as wild animals should. They are simply comfortable enough with their surroundings to tolerate our presence—until we give them a reason not to.
That distinction matters.
I think deer, at least the does, like to be chased. The number of times I have seen a deer pretend to be startled by something it knew was there or saw coming, run away a few yards, then stop and turn to look over its shoulder. It's like it wants to be chased, like continuing a fun game it played with mom when it was little. The bucks are a bit different. They are much more single-minded and take things much more seriously. They run to get the heck out of dodge. They are experts at camouflage, know how to hide behind trees, read the wind and use it to plan their getaway. One thing the bucks often do is sleep in the afternoon on the leeward side of a ridge, looking downwind. They can see anything that approaches from the front, and can smell anything coming from behind. I guess to the left and right they rely on their ears. They are smart cookies.
There is a tendency, especially among people who live far from working farms and large tracts of undeveloped land, to look at a landscape and immediately judge what they see. A cleared patch of woods becomes "deforestation." A hunter becomes cruel. A person cutting down cedar trees becomes someone destroying nature. Cattle grazing in a field becomes exploitation of the land. I had a conversation with an intelligent woman I worked with who had such feelings and was surprised to learn about the depth of thought that went into someone like me from down in the holler, who had thought of me as a gun nut that she would probably disagree with on quite a few things. Turns out, we both cared about the environment, but one of us actually lived there part of the time.
Sometimes those judgments may be justified. But sometimes they come from seeing only one moment in a much longer story.
I've lived on both sides of that divide. My life has straddled city life and what people sometimes dismiss as "down-home common sense." What I've seen is that the supposedly simple people living on the land are often working remarkably hard to maintain a balance they understand through years and generations of experience. Meanwhile, supposedly sophisticated people who have never managed a thousand acres can look at a photograph, or a view from the highway, and confidently explain what the people who live there are doing wrong.
That doesn't mean every farmer or hunter is a good steward. It doesn't mean every traditional practice is automatically the right one. Good stewardship requires learning, adapting, and being willing to change when something isn't working.
But it does mean that the people who live with the land deserve to be part of the conversation.
They aren't just occupying the landscape.
They are watching it.
They notice which trees take over. They notice when deer numbers get too high. They notice when rabbits disappear. They notice when coyotes start visiting the chicken coop instead of hunting in the woods. They remember what happened ten, twenty, or fifty years ago when someone tried something different.
And over time, those observations become something more than theory. They become knowledge.
So it goes: predators are part of the ecosystem. Control is sometimes necessary. Change is inevitable. Stewardship is always necessary.