With declining populations of pheasants and waterfowl plaguing South Dakota sportsmen, the state has instituted a new bounty program aimed raccoons, badgers, striped skunks, red foxes, and opossums. A household can earn up $590 from trapping and hunting these animals during the new bounty season, which runs from April 1 through August 31. The state is paying $10 per tail of these predators, but it will stop once the bounties pay out $500,000.
This state, which relies heavily upon nonnative ring-necked pheasants as a game animal to attract sportsmen, is essentially trying to turn the whole state into English gamekeepers.
I’m not opposed to controlling nest predators, but I’ve always had a problem with bounties. Bounties are easily defrauded. My grandpa used to tell the story of his friends in Ohio, one of whom was a city cop, who would drive to West Virginia and shoot crows. They would take the crows back across the river and present them for the bounty payment, and no one would know.
Controlling nest predators is important to promoting gamebird population, but humans can only do so much.
The predators that the state is targeting are mostly ones that have only existed there since colonization and settlement. Raccoons didn’t live in the Upper Midwest or the Great Plains until barns spread everywhere. Opossums were originally restricted to the Southeast.
The pheasant is entirely introduced. The first successful introduction was in 1908, and the state promotes that bird to the hilt.
So in this new world, there really isn’t any wild that is let go. This is the world of the English gamekeeper managing wildlife for gamebirds on the American marshes and prairies.
It’s not really all that natural. But it is the new world of wildlife on this continent.
