Sustainable Ranch Resource Management

Sustainable Ranch Resource Management

Summary

Second Semester Report, Sustainable Ranch Management: 4-15-2012
During this semester many things have gone on, we have primarily focused on wildlife management. We began with the history, and open the eyes of the students to find out that once White tail Deer and Turkey were rare! But with modern management people have been able to reverse that and now they are very abundant. We then worked our way through modern management, and worked on ways to manipulate situations to better the wildlife with not only grazing, but also haying and prescribed fire. Once we understood these items, we moved in to more detailed discussion and breaking the wildlife into groups such as Upland birds, Large Game, Migratory Birds, extra. this way we could focus on more specific items such as habitats and predator management. While doing this one particular management area kept getting referred back to: the riparian zones. I did this to help emphasize the importance of this area to the students. While working in the Modern Waterfowl Management chapter of the second edition of the Wildlife and Natural Resource Management book by Kevin H. Deal, the students were able to realize the importance of the migratory routes and the importance of Nebraska being a “staging area” for the long migrations. After obtaining an understanding of the above water wildlife we moved into understanding fish and in stream and lake/pond management and stocking. With the warm spring we took advantage of some properly stocked ponds and spent some time catching Large Mouth Bass, Blue Gill, and Crappie. All in all the students enjoyed the class and I believe that they have gone away with an understanding of both range managing and wildlife management and that they can work together. I will be offering this class again to the seniors at Loup County, and from what I have heard the Student enrollment should be larger next year.

Collaborators: