GIANT Restoration Project in Arizona

it means a lot to be a conservationist in arizona hopefully people see what we're doing out here we're not being passive about our management because i don't think we have time to do that i think we have to get out as an agency and get stuff done on the ground and we've got to figure out how to work with people to do that he ended up leaving a ton of stuff on the lines and just opening up those valleys making it this is awesome when you're here last here right yeah none of this is done so [Music] so i'm wade zarling i'm with arizona game of fish landowner relations program and we're in northwestern arizona where we're two years into a large landscape scale project we're looking at doing approximately 50 000 acres of juniper grassland or browse release treatments in pinyon country and the main goal with any of this stuff is trying to maintain water on the landscape and so by removing these trees in a systematic way we're able to remove that plant that's taken moisture out of the ground which is a significant amount and we're also allowing a herbaceous cover to grow or browse which holds that water on the landscape and you don't get sheet erosion so that's the number one goal of removing junipers on the landscape yeah so if you look out out through here you can see that we've left kind of a stringer more mosaic pattern which allows a lot of travel corridors for elk and deer for escape cover and hiding cover along with those kind of forage areas that go along the base of it no this is incredible the different species that are growing in here now that were like i say i wish we had taken better before pictures because there was nothing in here i'm scottie dunton with dunton ranch we've had the ranch since 1997 and we've just been trying the last five or six years to get rid of trees and make the ranch a better more profitable place for the cattle and also for the wildlife all the pictures of the ranch back in the 1800s there wasn't any junipers down these valleys are all big meadows so between overgrazing and stuff over the years it's they've taken over and the grass just gets choked out you can't do anything about it we chose to get rid of 90 of our cows because the drought and to do this so we could you know this ranch hadn't had to rest in over 100 years so give it time for this grass to grow back and this is the first season we've had since we've ground that it actually rained but i mean this is only three weeks worth of rain and it's just it's blowing up it's amazing the difference between the non you know where all the trees start and then the stuff that they ground is night and day difference it's i'd say it's what 300 percent better growth at least it's there's nothing growing around that tree and it just looks like a golf course on this side it's a it's a huge difference i mean it's not you're not having to really really look to tell the difference it's amazing but no i love it it's the best thing we ever did for as far as putting money in your in your ranch it just it's a no-brainer yeah it's a great project because it allows the department to work cooperatively with multiple landowners ranchers land management agencies and all of these are meeting a mutually beneficial goal good glad you guys made it i didn't know if i didn't know if the rain would scare you away i liked the history of arizona and i've gone back and there was a neighbor who lived next door to me and his family founded becker lake they put it in and they had the becker mercantile right and he had photos that went back to the 1890s if you look at like the escodia right not a tree inside i mean the landscape changed because of the encroachment encroachment of dj stuff right it's unbelievable this all used to be just grasslands yeah the bottom line is you know we changed the ecosystem you know we came in with livestock do you really think livestock overgrazing is what opened it up that much i mean i i think it's part of it because it disturbed it disturbs the natural fire regime yeah that allowed it to keep these junipers clean and you know that's just kind of where we're at now but now i mean the ranchers do a damn good job out here keeping water filled you know and so there's a there's a big incentive to work together the second part of this project is creating perennial water sources for for wildlife primarily that's a cooperative effort with ranchers in the area where we're either working to clean out dirt tanks install solar on old windmills and old wells and providing storage pipeline that type of stuff when you come up here and you see the mosaic that's created or you see the vastness of where all these shredded piles are it's really impressive when you look at what could be and then you look at the horizon you see thousands of acres of trees you take a look at arizona in the 1890s there were no trees it was grassland you look at it 120 years later it's built up way too much trees when the department approached the arizona deer association we invested 10 000 just in some solar panels that we put in out here the solar panels help generate the power to bring up like wells and to to make sure that they pump the water appropriately for us and i'm not the techno wizard who does that but i know that people love it because it it replaces the the diesel fuel that we always used to have for generators to run the pumps now we have solar power doing it and economically ecologically every which way you can think of it's more beneficial to do it that way and that's why we started investing in the solar panels we're committed to doing it we know that people are up here working on weekends doing these kinds of things and that's what we want to do more of but financially we're putting our money where our mouth is on this one because we believe that this holds the future for us so on these habitat improvement areas where we're removing junipers there's multiple methodologies that have been used over time and the method that we're using is a big drum grinder this drum grinder is a big bulldozer front end loader with a big drum grinder on the front of it and the advantage in my opinion to that is you're able to be more selective on how you use that tree so you can go in and create a mosaic pattern [Music] some of the projects are they're really blowing everything out and they're not leaving any of this slash stuff here so like if you look at this this has kind of created its own micro climate and that's why i'm a big proponent of leaving some of the slash on the ground i mean you've got you know your globe mallow that's coming up and you look at the size of these leaves obviously there's a huge benefit to that mike in my opinion so the whole the main point of this is trying to keep water on the landscape right we want it to slow it down get the grass cover to build up so you get more percolation into the water table and it holds that water moisture better and it's it's just a better product but the diversity in this is to in my mind the key when you're looking at deer and elk and then third what we're looking at is the connectivity issue with our pronghorn as well [Music] the problem we have in this area is we have a lot of fences that aren't wildlife friendly in arizona the antelope foundation they've come out with volunteer labor and they've removed four miles of fence and then game and fish employees along with the ranchers have removed and replaced four miles of fence with new wildlife friendly fence [Music] the key part here is we're only part of a larger map and participation and it's initiated by the arizona game and fish department working in concert with these wildlife species ngos these conservation ngos in this particular case the arizona antelope foundation is working with the arizona elk rocky mountain elk foundation arizona deer and mule deer foundation while we're working on the connectivity and the permeability part getting in and out of the pastures they're also working on waters which are a benefit to pronghorn but also to elk and then these fences are wildlife friendly and at the top the entire fence modification itself is also good for both elk and mule deer that jump the fence so when we were asked to join this project and give the two volunteer projects a year in april and september this is what we encounter and this is absolutely an impossible barrier to pronghorn antelope to the point that pronghorn that are on this side of the fence and that side of the fence can actually be genetically separated what we're after is this effect and the effect here of course is that we are 20 inches smooth a pronghorn when it's running can literally hit this and it's very easy drop for them to go under this fence then is forever and that previous fence is what we're overcoming so typically a lot of the conservation dollars that are put on the ground for habitat work are done on very small scale projects which are still important projects but they don't have that large impact for wildlife populations with this scale we're looking at treating 50 000 acres over a large large portion of the game management unit here in arizona this project is the big certainly the biggest thing i've seen to see it at this scale is just astonishing i was trying to think of a good analogy of like why landscape scale restoration is so important or sort of the snowballing effect of it and i was thinking about this like the science projects you did in high school where you would um put some solution in another solution and it had to reach a certain concentration before it like change color you know one drop or two drops isn't going to do anything but once you reach that critical mass that's when you're making the difference for you know the entire landscape and for populations which is is what we're after i've been really thinking about the long-term effects of these kind of projects and a lot of what we're learning about animal movements is that that knowledge about where to move where to forage is is transmitted culturally from doe to fawn you know these animals actually learning these areas that have been treated that are very high quality and then you'll actually start to see the demographic effects within a population like better sex and age structures across the populations better numbers of deer and so i think you know thinking about the the landscape scale i think that's tying that into demographic performance of the population that's where we can see a big difference the collaborative nature i think is really a great model the fact that like mueller foundation can work with game and fish on a shared priority i think is is very heartwarming it's a good example of how work can get done on such a large scale [Music] we do these projects because we find them very interesting and or they're they're near and dear to our heart it's something we love we love to hunt we love to fish we love to be in the outdoors we love to observe wildlife and try to figure out how these wildlife move what do they do [Music] we're all interested in different components of that but you have a project like this and it brings everybody together and 5 10 20 50 plus years down the road we'll be able to look back and say you know look at the amazing work that was done [Music] i love doing this i love building relationships between the groups and the landowners and the department i think it's it's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job other than seeing the quick effect on the ground there's nothing better than looking at a fence that's been done or coming into a treatment that you're done and you've got a green up and a grass growing and you're like man this is unbelievable [Music] you

Channel: Fresh Tracks

Views: 22,747

Keywords: Randy, Newberg, Fresh Tracks, Western, Hunting, hunter, Big, Game, DIY, public, land, hunt, talk, conservation, gear, equipment, hunting videos, hunting shows, randy newberg, outdoors

Id: qEbBiO7Z7D8

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2022