You could win the tag of a lifetime and help with the Access & Habitat Program
By Shannon Weidemann (McKone) on Friday, May 24th, 2024 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
NORTHEAST OREGON – The chance to win the hunt of a lifetime is drawing to a close, ODFW’s Big Game Raffle ends on May 28th. And while this raffle is of great interest to Oregon Hunters, the bigger reason to participate is to raise funds for the Access and Habitat Program.
Elkhorn Media Group recently had the privilege to speak with Access and Habitat Coordinator Travis Schultz to get a better understanding of the program.
(EMG) Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today Travis, can you start with some background on you and your time with ODFW?
(TS) I grew up on a family farm just north of Vale. I Grew up hunting and fishing, and spent most of my life outdoors, did a lot of horseback riding and was very big into backpacking and camping as a kid. My parents gave me a great respect for the natural world and as I got older and was in that, what am I going to do when I grow up phase, sometime in high school I kind of crystallized around the idea I wanted to be a Wildlife Biologist. So, because I was a farm kid, and not exactly the wealthiest dude, I figured out the cheapest way I could do that to get the degree I needed for the career that I wanted.
At the time, Treasure Valley Community College there in Ontario had, and I believe it still does, an agreement with the University of Idaho where you take your first two years at Treasure Valley, then you can go over to the University of Idaho to get your Bachelors.
When I got out of school, when I graduated from college, I bounced around for about four years, an average for a wildlife major is three to five years before you’re hired on permanently. It’s a very competitive line of work to get into. When I was going to the U of I, they said, I believe, that 95% of graduates will end up working somewhere else, only 5% remain in wildlife after 10 years, so if that scares you, you probably need to choose a different career, if that drives you, then this is a good field.
(EMG) What is your professional background?
(TS) I got hired on initially, as it’s pertinent, in Heppner as the Heppner District Wildlife Technician, I moved up to the assistant there, did a lot of work with the land owners and access programs because it’s Morrow County and all those Northern Counties are not unique per say, but a little different than a lot of Southeastern Oregon were we have a lot of BLM lands, they’re very privatized. And so, in order to get hunters access, you have to be able to work with landowners to get that access. So, it’s something I’ve done kind of my whole career. I was in Heppner for a little over 12 years and then I came to Salem and to the statistics position because mathematics is another one of my loves. If you’ve looked at the hunter success rates from 2016 to 2018 that was my work. And then this position came open, and was a chance to get back to working with landowners and to kind of get back to my agricultural base and continue that work. So, it was kind of a win win for me. I get to still work in wildlife, still get to play with habitat and still stay in contact with the community that I grew up in, that I am still a part of. You can get the kid off the farm, but you can’t get the farm out of the kid, I guess.
(EMG) Park of what you do is you’re the Coordinator for the Access and Habitat Program. Can you give us some background on that program and what it is?
(TS) Absolutely! The Access and Habitat Program was established by the Oregon Legislature in 1993. The program endeavors to bring hunters and landowners together for the benefit of the wildlife that they both cherish. The access and habitat programs and incentive-based program that provides public hunting access to private lands and improve wildlife habitat on private lands throughout Oregon. The program is 100% hunter-funded, from a $4.00 surcharge on hunting licenses, the sale of deer and elk auction tags, and the auction of deer and elk raffle tags, as well as a percentage of green forage and the deer programs to deal in part with habitat and also to to address wildlife damage to crops.
The program provides roughly 2.4 million acres of access to private lands and about 20,000 acres currently of habitat improvement across the state. Additionally, we applied for a NRCS grant to provide public hunting access through their voluntary public access habitat incentive program. And with those funds we’ve enrolled in additional 500,000 acres of public access. Some of that would be like the Manulife Project in Northeastern Oregon which provides about 250,000 acres, so some fairly large projects.
(EMG) Can you tell us how this program has helped the east side of the state, where most of our listeners live?
(TS) Certainly, the A&H Program provides roughly 1,000,000 acres of access across Eastern Oregon, from some very large ones such as the approximately 600,000-acre Green Diamond TMA in South Central Oregon the Manulife Project we just mentioned in Northeastern Oregon. There’s projects set up specifically for upland game birds and waterfowl, examples of which would be like Social Ridge near Heppner is set up for upland game birds predominantly, and the lawn access near Burns right adjacent to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge is set up primarily for waterfowl. So, it’s a little bit of everything. Habitat Projects address either a food need or a cover structure need for wildlife.
One major project in Northeastern Oregon in the Heppner unit, was to provide greater fire resiliency, create green fire breaks around additional habitat work that’s being funded by other sources. The other which was done more on an emergency basis is we have the emergency fire receding program, which allows the program to very rapidly respond to to wildfire and to reseed those critically important habitat areas, winter range, that type of thing, very quickly after a fire, and is kind of the first step to make sure that those grounds are secured and seeded and that wildlife still will have food. We’re not specifically providing fishing access in a lot of our areas, but where water is present in our access areas, fishing is generally allowed on those as well.
If you’re looking to find our properties, the Oregon Hunting Map provides a pretty good point of access, it does show you where the locations of the properties are and how to get to them. If you really want to do a deep dive into the program, you can also find the Access and Habitat Biennium Report to the legislature. It provides information on all of our projects as well as an overview of our funding sources and a few critical notes on our board and how it works and gives you a good summary of all that we do.
(EMG) Is there a way for landowners to get involved with the program or learn more about the Access and Habitat Program?
(TS) Yes! Landowners can contact their local ODFW Office to get additional information. They can go online and find the regional coordinator, or they can call their office and find the regional coordinator for the area that they’re working in. They can certainly contact me as well to provide information. We have information on our website that explains how the process works and the steps that are involved, as well as the application for grant funding.
I certainly highly recommend getting in contact with the local A&H Regional Coordinator for the projects. They’re the ones that will help you, help a landowner develop a good project and will shepherd it through the approval process and be able to get answers to all of their questions and push that through. A lot of these projects come in after our local staff has built a relationship, it takes a while for a landowner, generally speaking, to be comfortable or like the idea of having hunters on their property, hunters they don’t know, and so it takes that relationship building with the local staff to develop that trust that makes these possible. Our landowners are a phenomenal resource, definitely the highlight of my job and the only way that this program goes forward, and our local staff are phenomenal as well, by maintaining that credibility and building those relationships.
(EMG) Beyond just landowners, are there other ways that people can support the Access and Habitat Program?
(TS) There are a variety of ways that an individual can support the Access and Habitat Program. We are a volunteer program, so our board is who makes the ultimate decisions, our state board is all volunteers. It’s made up of the chair, who represents the public at large, three hunter representatives and three landowner representatives and we’re routinely looking for applications and interested people to serve on those. There are also five regional councils that provide local knowledge to projects that are set up in the same way, one chair for the general public, and three landowners, three hunters, to provide that local input on whether or not a project should move forward. If you’re utilizing our access areas, and this is a really big one, if you do nothing else besides buy a hunting license, just be a good hunter. Be a good guest on that property and a good steward. Pick up your litter, don’t leave trash. Be respectful. Hunting on private land is a privilege. As I said earlier, it takes years to set up one of these access areas and it takes a bad actor just a couple of seconds to destroy it. So that’s probably the biggest one. Report something you see. If someone’s driving on a road they shouldn’t be on, or if you see poaching, certainly call that into the OSP Tips Line.
Some of our projects rely on volunteers to help open gates, do clean up, some of our habitat projects rely on volunteers to do plantings that type of thing. So, some of our projects do rely on volunteers.
Every time you buy a hunting license, that’s part of what funds the A&H Program.
And certainly, an ever-increasing portion of our funds comes from the raffle entries for deer and elk raffle, about 17% of our funding comes from raffles. It’s a really easy way to donate directly to the agency and provide yourself with a phenomenal opportunity for the hunt of a lifetime.
(EMG) Those are the Big Game Hunt Raffles? Why should people participate in that?
(TS) The Big Game Raffles give you the opportunity for a long season hunt for your species. You can use any legal weapon for that species during your hunt at any time, so, if you’re lucky enough to win an elk raffle that starts August 1, you can still use a rifle during that time, even though it’s the bow season for our other hunters. You get to hunt when game is most available and with little or no competition from other hunters, because you can decide when you want to be out there.
There’s specific species, so you can hunt Deer and Elk, Bighorn Sheep, Rocky Mountain Goat, or Pronghorn. Bighorn Sheep and Rocky Mountain Goat are once in a lifetime opportunities, if you’ve already been so lucky and already drawn one of those in the controlled hunt process, you can still apply for a raffle tag. It is an additional opportunity.
You can still apply for the controlled hunts, or you can buy a general season tag for the same species that you win an auction tag for, it’s an additional opportunity so you could end up being able to go hunting with two deer, or two elk tags if you’re lucky enough. So, it certainly gives you a great deal of opportunity.
(EMG) How do people participate in that ruffle?
(TS) You can buy raffle entries online just by logging into your electronic licensing account with the State of Oregon, www.MyODFW.com, you can buy them at point-of-sale machines that are still selling, so any of the Bi-Mart’s or wherever you get your hunting license. If you are going online when you log into your online account to buy your hunting license, or if you’re specifically there for the raffle, you can also check current online sales. It’s part of that dashboard you can see. You can purchase raffle entries all the way up until the deadline of May 28th at 10:00 in the morning, and then the drawing will get started at 2:00 in the afternoon on May 28th. The drawing will be live streamed on the ODFW live stream account and that will be available so you can watch that as well. And then after the drawing, the names of the drawings winners and the two alternates will appear on the ELS system as part of the raffle sales.
(EMG) Can you go into more depth on what the funds are used for?
(TS) The funds raised from deer and elk raffles go to fund the A&H Program that we discussed earlier. The raffles provide roughly 17% of the funding for the A&H Program. Bighorn Sheep, Mountain Goat, and Pronghorn raffles can only be used for management and research for that species. So, Bighorn Sheep raffle funds can only be used on Bighorn Sheep, as an example.
The Big Horn sheep raffle has raised $3.4 million since 1992. Those funds have been used to trap and transport Bighorn Sheep, establishing new populations including herds in the Deschutes and John Day Rivers. It’s funded genetic and disease research that has pioneered management practices for Bighorn Sheep across the range, not just in Oregon, but across the United States, it was very pioneering work, and it will have ramifications for generations to come.
Pronghorn raffle funds have been used to buy GPS collars, capture and transport Pronghorn here in Oregon, Raffle revenue was used to help fund a research project that deployed hundreds of collars on Pronghorn to determine their migration routes, migration timing and any potential barriers to that migration.
The Rocky Mountain goat raffle, started fairly recently, so it hasn’t had the time to raise funds like the other two have. Those funds have been used to improve Rocky Mountain Goat herd survey capacity and the monitoring efforts, so better ways to estimate that the number of goats in the peaks. And additionally for Rocky Mountain Goats, the raffle funds have also been used to provide additional flight hours for surveys.
(EMG) Lets touch on that raffle information one more time.
(TS) Raffles give you the opportunity to win the hunt of a lifetime. It’s something that every one of us kind of dream of. You can purchase one raffle entry for as little as $4.50. Depending on how much you want to spend on it, you can improve your odds of drawing.
For example, let’s say there’s 10,000 raffle entries in a particular drawing, if you have bought one of those, you have a one in 10,000 chance, if you’ve bought two, you have a one in 5000 chance, if you bought 4 it’s one in 2500. This is especially true if you’re looking at goat tags. If you’re willing to buy a few goat tags, you can have better odds of drawing than a lot of our controlled hunts.
Whether the interest of the hunt of a lifetime was enough to grab you, or you wanted to keep mountain goats in the peaks, you wanted to provide support for Oregon’s fastest land animal, provide hunter access or just be part of the Bighorn Sheep success story, when you buy Big Game Raffle entries, all of us get the benefit from that.
(EMG) Anything else you would like to mention?
(TS) I would like to thank all of the hunters who have purchased raffle entries in the past. You’re the ones who have built upon the success for us and certainly hope you continue to do so. If you want more information on the Big Game Raffle, you can go to www.MyODFW.com, just put in the search bar Big Game Raffle and that will bring you to that article (Big game raffle and auction hunts | Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife (myodfw.com). You can look at how to specifically buy your ticket, past raffle sales, past raffle tag winners, or if you want instructions on how to purchase your tickets as well as the links to our YouTube channel that will be live streaming the drawing on May 28th, all of that information is provided there.
