A Big Game Bill with Upland Dividends

Upland sagebrush habitat

Habitat corridors built for elk and pronghorn don't stop working when the deer season closes — and quail country is often the beneficiary.

Senators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) reintroduced the Habitat Connectivity on Working Lands Act this March — a bipartisan bill directing USDA to prioritize wildlife migration corridors on private agricultural land through existing voluntary conservation programs. The legislation targets big game: pronghorn, elk, mule deer. But the habitat it would protect doesn't sort itself by species. Grassland and sagebrush shrub-steppe corridors conserved for migrating deer are the same cover that holds pheasants, quail, and sharptails through the upland season — a point Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever made explicitly in their endorsement of the bill. The legislation also pushes to make virtual fencing a funding priority, reducing the wildlife entanglement that conventional barbed wire causes across the West. For California hunters, the relevance is indirect but real: a federal Farm Bill framework that rewards private landowners for keeping habitat connected is one that benefits every bird moving through the working lands between public ground.