Guns and Greens

Second, as the NRA has figured out, alliances depend on communication. Wherever you live in the United States, there is a local rod and gun club or a nearby Ducks Unlimited chapter. Join and attend meetings. If you don't hunt or fish, tell the members so. But also explain that you want to help them protect fish and wildlife habitat. You can't restore or create a wetlands for ducks (which is what Ducks Unlimited does) without also benefiting thousands of other creatures, from otters to marsh wrens to avocets to turtles. If there isn't a good project you can collaborate on, come up with one yourself. Your participation and support will deeply touch members, because they feel unloved and unappreciated and have repeatedly been told that enviros and animal-rights zealots are one and the same.

Finally, choose your battles wisely. A good example of an unwise battle is trapping. Sportsmen ardently believe (often with good reason) that the ultimate goal of anti-trappers is to ban fishing and hunting. With rare exceptions trapping is a humane issue, not a management issue. Leave it to the animal-rights folks. My wife, Donna, is the conservation advocacy coordinator of the Massachusetts Audubon Society (independent of and older than National Audubon). In 1996, much to Donna's anguish, her organization joined with ardent anti-hunting groups in a successful effort to outlaw quick-killing conibear traps. Since then the state's beaver population has increased from about 18,000 to 70,000. Flooding of streets and cellars is now a major problem; and animal-control agents must be hired to catch beavers in "humane" traps that immobilize them all night so they may be clubbed to death in the morning. We've converted a resource to a pest.

The real damage in Massachusetts, however, has not been to property but to the potential for alliances with sportsmen. When Donna started stumping for the Massachusetts Rivers Bill—which would bar development from 200 feet on either side of perennial streams—she was informed by sportsmen that they would oppose it. If an anti-trapping outfit was for rivers, then, by God, they were against them. After the bill passed, Donna talked to sportsmen at every opportunity, telling them why natural floodplains are in their best interests, about new fishing and hunting opportunities in and around the cleaned-up Blackstone River system, about wild brook trout populations desperately in need of protection, about her own fishing with me. She publicly defended hunting, explaining the need to control the gross irruption of white-tailed deer that is wiping out forest understories throughout the East and, with them, rare plants and shrub-nesting birds. She attended rod-and-gun-club dinners and drank beer with members. Eventually, she was asked by a local club to help release snowshoe hares purchased from Canada as part of a press event promoting an alliance. It wasn't the time to comment on the project's questionable worth (if we had local hare habitat, we'd have local hares), but hares are native to Massachusetts, and there was no harm. Education could come later and, with it, truly important projects.

On a cold winter night Donna and I, accompanied by club members and a reporter and photographer from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, lugged the hares up onto conservation land Donna and I had helped our town of Grafton purchase from a developer, and which—because sportsmen had assisted—Donna had posted with signs that welcome hunters. When the moon shadow of the last hare had melted into the snow-draped pines, Donna got a big kiss from the club's president. I can't report that the alliance is strong statewide, but at least there's a foundation.

Ted Williams sits on the Circle of Chiefs of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Sportsmen and environmentalists have no better opportunity for interaction than supporting national wildlife refuges, where the public can hunt, fish, photograph, and watch wildlife. To find out how, go to the National Wildlife Refuge Association's website: http://refugenet.com.