I appreciate our seasons in Michigan. Growing up in the northern Lower Peninsula, I experienced, expected, and anticipated the rhythms, variations, and activities unique to each. A part of me still does, but increasingly I know I can’t rely on them.

Prepping all my cross-country ski, snowshoe, winter camping, and ice fishing gear before the winter turned into a mostly wasted effort with just a few days of decent skiable snow here in Ann Arbor and no chances to ice fish; I ran a “Bad Santa 5K” trail run in December with no snow, and as of this writing I’m signed up for a snowshoe race that I have no confidence will occur. The Central Lake Ice Fishing Tournament I planned to fish in my hometown in February was cancelled for lack of ice.

Also cancelled were the Black Lake sturgeon season, the North American Vasa nordic ski and bike race, and the UP 200 dog sled race. The twin effects of climate change and El Nino wrecked Michigan’s winter outdoor recreation season and the tourism small towns across northern Michigan rely upon to supplement the summer.

I had big plans for this winter that never seemed to pan out. Adventurous excursions. I even bought a heavy-duty pulk sled to tow my gear by cross-country skiing, combining skiing, backpacking, and ice fishing. Getting back to solo winter backpacking after a few years when it just didn’t happen (I went for about ten winters in a row until my son was born) and here’s another winter when it won’t, unless we get an unexpected late snowstorm on a free weekend.

​Those free weekends are increasingly rare. I planned out a couple of weekends when I would try to go, but there was no snow or safe ice. I could have just backpacked on muddy trails, but that’s not the experience that I was after so I stayed home and worked on house projects, banking those free
weekends for the spring and summer.

That’s what most of the winter became: preparing for the next season. In the traditional fly-fishing
calendar, that’s what winter is for: tying flies in between the closing of one trout season and the opening of the next. But I’ve long tried to be a more well-rounded outdoorsman to take advantage of all the seasons, so it’s frustrating not to, other than a January Saturday volunteering to collect stoneflies for the Huron River Watershed Council’s annual stream survey and another where I found a few hours to cast streamers for northern pike out of my canoe, without a bite.

What I have been able to do this winter is prep fishing gear for the spring and summer, taking on a new hobby in building and restoring fly rods, in addition to tying flies and building leaders. This I can do late at night and has alleviated some of my angst over a lack of winter outdoor recreation and has me anticipating spring and summer fishing as much as ever.

After picking up some rod winding thread and some vintage bamboo and fiberglass fly rods at my local Trout Unlimited chapter’s holiday gear swap, I built light 2wt and 3wt fiberglass fly rods for my 5-year-old son and I for bluegill and fully restored two vintage bamboo fly rods.
I learned the process through YouTube videos (mostly by Proof Fly Fishing) and reading threads in the Classic Fly Rod Forum online, a strangely modern way to restore rods originally built in the typewriter era. To go with those vintage rods, I ordered some vintage used fly reels, some of which took some repair to reel and sound just right. And then, of course, I needed new fly lines to go with rods and reels, and then I needed to spend some time in the backyard on snowless winter weekends casting flies I’d tied on the rods I’d built and restored and the reels I’d fixed.

The spring beckons from winter’s preparation.

The trout flies I tied for my own supply over the winter mostly include classic patterns and their
variations for brook trout; Muddler Minnows, Marabou Muddlers, Royal Wulffs, Parachute Adams, Purple Haze, Elk Hair Caddis, Stimulator, Borcher’s Drake, Hare’s Ear and Pheasant Tail Nymphs, and simple wet flies like the Partridge and Orange, and Partridge and Peacock. The pike fly patterns I tied for my fly box, friends, and fly shops include Deer Hair Popper, Dahlberg Diver, Buford, Pike Bunny, and Swim Bait Deceiver.

The bamboo rods I restored include a 5-6wt South Bend 359 from the late 1940s that casts a dry fly
beautifully and a 6-7wt Abercrombie & Fitch “Yellowstone Special” from the 1910s that should serve to drift wet flies and nymphs well. I built new pike leaders with titanium wire to replace broken, frayed, and kinked leaders from last year.

The anticipation of fishing rods as you’re restoring them, flies as you’re tying them, and leaders as
you’re building them is part of the allure of the process; it simply keeps your head in the game when you can’t be on the stream or on the lake. My favorite trout waters are the little streams that usually don’t open until the traditional trout opener on the last Saturday in April, when the Lower Peninsula pike season opens, and the Upper Peninsula pike season on May 15.

There’s time yet to tie more flies, restore and build more fly rods, and build more leaders, the
anticipation growing with each thread wrap. When the fishing seasons open, I just hope that we don’t have a spring that wasn’t, too.

My deer camp mates and I have decided to move our transient camp for the third time in as many years, and the reasons for each have me reflecting on the reasons why I love to hunt. At the same time, the reasons why I’ve felt disillusioned with the dominant culture of hunting have been as prevalent lately as ever.

Deer hunting has been inseparable from deer camp for most of the three decades since I first started. My dad went to a deer camp on Beaver Island each year, and long before I was old enough to hunt (back then you had to be 14 to get a firearm deer license), I associated hunting with his annual ritual of pulling out the canvas and wood crate containing his blaze orange and red-and-black check wool hunting clothes the night before he left. When I was old enough to hunt, we received permission from a couple down the road whose lawn I mowed in the summer to hunt their 40-acre property, where he showed me how to still-hunt.

When I was 20, I went to the Beaver Island deer camp with my dad and grandpa – who’d
founded the camp and had recently moved back from Wyoming – where I shot my first deer
and was initiated into deer camp traditions like the fraternity I’d recently joined at college. My
dad and I left that deer camp a dozen years later to start our own in the Pigeon River Country
State Forest with a wall tent so that my brother, who lived in Gaylord but had young daughters
and his own excavating business to run, could join us. My cousin Scott joined us, too.

A decade later, though, my brother and his family, and my parents, moved to Tennessee and
wouldn’t be coming up for deer camp. Scott and I decided to keep it going and invited my
cousin-in-law Zach and another friend to join us. The first year, we went up to my family’s cabin
in Gogebic County and tracked – but never found – deer in the vast public land surround the
camp. That was pretty far to go for the few days we’re able to take off for it, though, so last
year we moved it back to the Pigeon River Country. However, we held it in October and
bowhunted to accommodate a scheduled medical procedure for a family member.

This year, we’re moving it again – hopefully for the last time – to Antrim County on the property
of a family member who gave us permission to hunt. Three of us have school-age children in
various sports, and Antrim County is where we’re all either from or currently live. In reflecting
on the decisions for each of the moves, in no case was the move about where we expected to
find more deer, or bigger deer, or easier deer to hunt. Each time we moved or changed camp, it
was a decision about family: bringing it closer to family so they could come to camp or moving
it to bow season to accommodate family schedules.

I’ve certainly hunted a lot on my own outside of deer camp, often camping solo and
bowhunting in the Pigeon River Country, but the highlight of the season is always deer camp
and spending time in camp with friends and family, no matter how few deer we actually shoot.
Yet, we come back year after year to continue the traditions. And if we leave with some venison
for the year, all the better, but it doesn’t make or break deer camp.

So it’s with frustration that I read the reactions to any decisions that the DNR or NRC make
about deer management in Michigan. I can’t understand the instinct to complain about deer
hunting in Michigan so much. It seems no matter which side of any proposed regulation the
NRC falls, a bevy of whining will follow it. Couple this with the proliferation of ever-increasing
gadgetry and technology to replace the last vestiges of woodsmanship in deer hunting, and a
dominant hunting media implying the promise of a trophy buck with every trip to the woods,
and it seems like we have a toxic mixture of expectations that can never be satisfied and a
desire for quick fixes in the form of regulation and technology to achieve them.

Personally, I appreciate the job the DNR professionals and NRC volunteers do to try to manage
mostly unmanageable nature for the long-term health of the deer herd, while providing us with
the opportunity for recreation and venison. All in the face of unrelenting waves of factors they
can’t control, from increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and wildlife diseases to human
population and geographic trends. There’s so much about modern hunting culture that I’m
over, so much of the complaining, the media, the industry, and the politics of it. None of that,
however, affects what made me love hunting in the first place.

None of that comes between me and how I feel when I’m packing for deer camp like my dad
used to and the anticipation of the night before. Or when I put on my great-grandpa’s wool
jacket and lace up my boots on opening morning. When I load my grandpa’s rifle and smell the
gun oil. When I take that first step into the woods and still-hunt the way my dad taught me, the
way my grandpa taught him, and the way my great-grandpa taught him. When I see a track.
When I sit against the base of a tree and watch a trail for a bit. When I return to camp and the
wall tent is lit up like a paper lantern in the dark woods and smoke is rising from the wood stove
pipe. When I’m dealt a loner and lose track of time engrossed in conversation beneath a
Coleman lantern and we make our plans for the next morning’s hunt.

There is nothing in what annoys me about modern hunting culture that can interfere with that
experience. I’m also part of that culture, that media, and that industry, and those politics, I
realize. When I strip away all that noise, though, and operate from within my own hunting
experience, it doesn’t really matter what’s outside of it; that internal bond is too strong. I
simply hunt my hunt.

After all, what worth is the freedom inherent in taking to the woods in pursuit of venison for
your pasties if anyone else’s definition of a successful hunt or some internet comment occupies
the space in your head that should be focused on your hunt?

So here’s to the stump sitters, the swamp stalkers, the snow trackers, the still hunters, the deer
drivers; to the plywood homemade ground blind on the back 40 and the makeshift brush blinds
in the state forest; to the first deers, the personal best deers, the spikes, the forkhorns, the
basket racks, the fat does, and the old swamp bucks; to pasties, tag soup, and cheap beer; to
euchre, smear, and poker under a Coleman lantern; to Jones hats, chooks, and Stormy Kromers;
to red plaid wool, discount blaze camo, and Carhartt bibs; to canvas tents, camper trailers,

converted school buses, old lumber shacks and log cabins; to iron sights and 3x9s; pumps,
lever-actions, and grandpa’s old bolt-action; to the old-timers and first-timers:
Have a great deer season, whatever that means to you.
​
Hunt your own hunt.

The doe stepped nervously around the bend of a narrow river in the Ottawa National Forest, but I had already claimed the hole. She darted into the thick vegetation, and I heard her splash upon re-entering the river a little farther upstream. After catching and releasing three beautiful native brook trout - one each on a nymph, a streamer, and a dry fly - I hiked back downstream and got back on the road.

The hole was just upstream from a Trout Unlimited project site where, working with U.S. National Forest staff, they’d removed old dam pilings blocking passage for trout. When aquatic organism passage barriers like dams and undersized culverts block trout and other aquatic organisms, it limits their ability to escape warm summer temperatures or other stressful environmental factors. When those barriers are removed, trout and other aquatic organisms can thrive, while reducing the risk of flooding when old dams fail or culverts clog up.

These projects restore watersheds to their natural function of moving and storing water by removing or replacing the artificial structures which impede them. In 2022, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Trout Unlimited (TU) agreed to a 5-year, $40 million initiative to restore watersheds flowing through National Forests across the country. It was funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and builds upon years of successful partnership between TU and the USFS, such as the dam pilings removal project.

The nationwide initiative is already having an impact in Michigan.

In the Ontonagon River watershed, TU completed two projects replacing undersized and perched
culverts that reconnected almost 10 miles of trout habitat. On Calderwood Road over Trout Creek, two undersized, perched culverts blocked trout from passage to 7.5 miles of high-quality upstream habitat. The culverts increased the velocity of water moving through them, creating a plunge pool that increased erosion and flooded the natural stream banks. Both the velocity and the height of the perch – the distance from the downstream surface up to the bottom of the culvert – prevented smaller trout from getting upstream through the culvert. Electro-shocking before the project found more brook trout downstream than upstream of the road crossing.

Sarah Topp, TU’s Upper Peninsula Stream Restoration Manager, worked with Ottawa National Forest staff, the Ontonagon County Road Commission, and Snow Country Contracting of Bessemer to replace the culverts. They created a diversion channel, removed the old culverts, and replaced them with a 16-foot wide, 9-foot-tall culvert that restored natural stream function, eliminated the plunge pool, restabilized the downstream banks, and opened 7.5 miles of upstream habitat for brook trout.

A similar aquatic organism passage (AOP) project TU conducted this summer where Spargo Creek
crosses a forest road – also within the Ontonagon watershed – opened 1.5 miles of quality upstream trout habitat in Houghton County.

Below the bridge, Jeremy Geist, TU’s Great Lakes Stream Restoration Manager, worked with Huron-Manistee National Forest staff and the Newago County Road Commission to replace perched and undersized culverts on Woody Creek, a tributary to the Pere Marquette River. In the Manistee River watershed, he led projects restoring road-stream crossings on Peterson Creek and Hinton Creek in Wexford County.

The Hinton Creek project is significant because it removed the ninth and final upstream barrier in the Hinton Creek watershed, completing a multi-year effort opening at total of 15 miles of habitat. Hinton Creek is a coldwater refuge supporting a naturally reproducing population of native brook trout identified as a priority watershed through a joint USFS and Wexford County Road Commission survey of road-stream crossings in the Huron-Manistee National Forest.
Michigan is blessed with abundant National Forest public land containing more miles of trout stream than any angler can hope to possibly explore in a single lifetime. Significantly, Michigan’s spring-fed coldwater streams and river systems provide a stronghold for temperature-sensitive native brook trout and wild brown and rainbow trout as climate change warms and dries rivers in other parts of the country.

These road-stream crossing projects in our National Forests restore the ability of these watersheds to provide a home for trout for generations to come, while leveraging federal investments into on-the-ground results employing local contractors and relieving the budgets of local county road commissions.

It’s something to appreciate when we’re standing mid-stream, appreciating the blue halos around the spots of a wild, native brook trout in the net whether caught on a nymph, a streamer, or a dry fly.

​There is no hat more synonymous with the Northwoods than the venerable Stormy Kromer. It’s not just that it’s wool and warm, that it keeps the sun out of your eyes but with a brim that doesn’t get in the way of things like binoculars or rifle sights or a bowstring, and its iconic flap that can be tightened to prevent blowing off on a windy day – its original purpose – or pulled down to cover your ears when it’s cold. It’s more than the sum of its functional parts; it’s the icon of people who do outdoor things in the Northwoods or wish they could.

If you have a Stormy Kromer cap, then you know the story of how semi-professional baseball player and railroad worker George “Stormy” Kromer asked his wife Ida to sew a flap around his cap to keep it from blowing off in the wind in 1903: the story is sewn into the inside of the cap. But the most interesting story of the Stormy Kromer isn’t this simple design feature; it’s how the hat was saved by a little sewing shop in Ironwood, Michigan, and how the Stormy Kromer brand grew from a simple cap into an icon of the Northwoods.

Last month, I sat down with Bob Jacquart, Chairman and recently-retired CEO of Stormy Kromer and its parent company, Jacquart Fabric Products, to learn about how this simple cap became the icon it is today and what lies ahead for the growing company. Just days earlier he had received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Michigan Manufacturers Association for the story he was about to tell me.

​Before we get to that story, though, I think the setting was telling.

Jacquart met me at my family’s lake cabin east of Ironwood on the day before the firearm deer season opener; my cousins and I were using it for deer camp. Another camp sits just up the hill from us and with the snowy conditions, I suggested that he park up on the road rather than risk getting stuck in our unplowed drive. On the walk down to our cabin, a member of the other deer camp greeted him – having grown up in Ironwood, they knew each other – and he showed Jacquart the canvas rucksack he still used for deer hunting that Jacquart Fabric Products had made in the 1970’s.

“I probably sewed that,” Jacquart said. “That’s No. 8 canvas duck,” he told me later during the interview, “olive drab, shade 7.” The deer camp member said that Jacquart Fabric Products also custom sewed canvas deer blinds for frames that his dad had made. Before we even began the interview, this interaction helped me understand both the deep roots that Jacquart Fabric Products had in the Ironwood community and its own legacy of manufacturing outdoor gear even before it made Stormy Kromer caps, as well as the durability and quality of the products it made.

Jacquart Fabric Products was founded in Ironwood in 1958 by Jacquart’s father, Robert, in his basement as a side project making deposit bags during his off days as a fireman. He grew it into a full-time business and moved it into a small building in Ironwood, where they took custom heavy-duty sewing orders and produced their own products: the backpacks and custom canvas hunting blinds are examples of this. Still today, Jacquart Fabric Products manufactures boat, vehicle, ATV/ORV and accessory covers, dog beds, motorcycle seats, and custom products for a variety of manufacturers like St. Croix Rods, Boss Snowplows, canopies for Rainbow Playsystems, and light-weight canvas tents for SnowTrekker, including a Stormy Kromer-branded canvas portable sauna tent.

In 2001, the Ironwood Kromer cap dealer mentioned to Jacquart that “Kromers” as they were known then, were going to be discontinued. They had been manufactured by the Kromer Cap Company in Milwaukee since their founding in 1903, coming only in black and red, but their sales were declining and the family that made Kromer caps decided to discontinue them (they also produced brightly-colored cotton welder’s caps that they would continue).

At this time, the Kromer caps might have gone the way of other distinctive outdoor hat styles of the 20th Century, like the Jones cap: visible only in black and white and faded Polaroid mid-century photos of grandpa’s old deer camp. Jacquart asked to be put in touch with the Kromer Cap Company and offered to buy the rights to manufacture the caps. In addition to loving the hat, he also saw an opportunity to provide some of his seasonal contract sewers with local full-time jobs in Ironwood.

“The problem is that 80% of the sales are in a 20-mile radius around where you’re sitting,” they told him, referring to Ironwood. “You’re never going to make anything of it.”

Jacquart was undaunted: he just wanted to make the hat. His biggest worry was doing right by the
family he was buying them from. He bought the rights to manufacture the Kromer cap, but his original agreement did not include the rights to use the Kromer name.
Something funny happened, he told me. “The lady who ran our 4-H program came up to me and asked, ‘Are Kromer hats really made in my hometown?’” She then showed him a picture of a grave marker on Isle Royale where her husband’s Kromer was buried at his favorite fishing spot.

“I started to wonder, am I missing something?” Jacquart relayed. “Is there more to this hat than I
realized?”

He went to Milwaukee to interview marketing agencies to help brand and market the new old hat,
armed with a picture of Stormy and Ida Kromer in 1914 and a picture of Jacquart’s grandpa, who worked for the same railroad as Stormy Kromer, holding a 28-inch walleye and wearing a Kromer cap.

“You don’t have a clue what you’ve got here,” they told him. From a marketing standpoint, if they made this hat new today, they could never have that history. They showed him an artist’s rendering of the hat with the story inside and the signature on the back.

“Let’s make this the hat with the story,” they told him.

But Jacquart told them that he didn’t have the rights to the name. They were incredulous “All you have is the name!”

He went back and got the naming rights. To distinguish the hats from the colorful Kromer welder’s caps, though, they decided to call them “Stormy Kromer” caps, and the brand we now associate with the caps was (re-)born.

About seven years later, Jacquart said, an older man came into the shop and said, “I used to work with Stormy Kromer, does anyone want to know where he got his name?” Apparently, George “Stormy” Kromer had a temper and when his co-workers saw him coming, they’d wonder “how bad will the storm be today?”

“There was such a learning curve for us,” Jacquart said about trying to get his hats in stores. He started calling up the stores that he really liked and asked for their favorite manufacturer sales reps, and he hired them to get his caps in the stores. Stormy Kromer also got a boost in sales when it was stocked at Cabela’s, which helped the sales of their Rancher cap, as well as when an outdoor photographer used Stormy Kromer caps in shoots for Field & Stream. But that just got the hat in front of people.

“The simple thing is that it’s just a great hat,” Jacquart said.

It wasn’t just a great hat that earned Bob Jacquart the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Michigan Manufacturers Association in November, though.

“What we have at our place are a bunch of people who are really good craftsmen. That’s who we are. We’re makers,” he said proudly, but at the same time humbly. “Then all of the sudden the U.P. adopted us. But then when they adopted us (he points to a map of the whole state of Michigan), we really blew up.”

He got very reflective for a moment.

“You know, I can tell stories all day long but when I’m riding around in my car thinking about that award, it’s probably the most special thing that I could get as a businessman.”

The goal for the future of Stormy Kromer remains simple, if not easy: keep making great caps and put them on the heads of more people.

“We have so much opportunity, so much territory where we haven’t grown, so making Stormy Kromer as well known in the upper half of the United States as it is in Michigan is the continued goal for the next 10 years,” he said, as well as building out their summer line.

Last year, Jacquart retired as the CEO of Stormy Kromer, but remains as chairman of the board. His daughter Gina Jacquart Thorsen took over formally as CEO; she has served as President of the company for the past decade.

Jacquart now spends his time advising both of his daughters who work at the company, cycling, giving factory tours, and reviving the Copper Peak Ski Jump near Ironwood. He helped secure a $20 million grant to update the ski jump so that it can host International Ski & Snowboard Federation (FIS) ski jumping competitions, bringing an international spotlight to the western Upper Peninsula.

Amidst retirement, awards, growing a nationally-recognized brand, and bringing an international ski competition to his hometown, Jacquart remains what he has always been.

“I’m the sewing guy. In fact, we had an embroidery problem today so Gina asked me to help solve it.”

In just over twenty years, Jacquart Fabric Products has turned Stormy Kromer into a household name. Even Jeff Daniels, the Michigan-born actor, was wearing one on the Detroit Lions pregame show this Thanksgiving.
​
Jacquart’s explanation for this is simple.

“We lucked out, and then did the right things with it.”

This article originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Woods-N-Water News

By Drew YoungeDyke
​
The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act is poised to pass Congress after being advanced by committees in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, with over 30 bipartisan cosponsors in the Senate and over 170 in the House. This legislation – which would provide $1.39 billion annually in wildlife restoration funding - would be the biggest conservation bill perhaps since 1937’s Pittman-Robertson Act that directed excise taxes on hunting and shooting equipment to wildlife restoration. It’s sorely needed right now as up to one-third of fish and wildlife species in America are at increased risk for extirpation or extinction, as maintained by each state’s list of Species of Greatest Conservation Need.

The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act was co-sponsored in the House by Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell (D) and Nebraska Rep. John Fortenberry (R), and in the Senate by New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich (D) and Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt (R). It has been introduced each term since 2016, but for the first time ever, it has now passed essential committees in each chamber and is ready for a floor vote in each. And it may not get another chance.

If the Pittman-Robertson Act was so successful, though, why is a bill like the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act needed now? Some brief conservation history will help to understand.
For the first couple hundred years of settler colonial history in the United States, the conservation of fish and wildlife was not a priority. Abundant fish and wildlife populations conserved by Indigenous generations for millennia flourished, but as their lands were taken the wildlife was exploited commercially and reduced to alarmingly low numbers by the early 20th century.

Conservationists responded to the wildlife crisis by establishing game laws, conservation departments and commissions, license fees and, finally, in 1937, dedicated funding to restore wildlife populations through the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act - known as the Pittman-Robertson Act – to direct the excise tax on firearms and equipment to state conservation departments for wildlife restoration. In 1950, Congress passed the Dingell-Johnson Act to apply the same concept to fishing and boating equipment to fund fish conservation.

As most hunters and anglers learn in hunter’s safety courses, this funding allowed state conservation departments to hire professional fish and wildlife biologists and fund the restoration of fish and wildlife. Most of that effort was directed at iconic game species like white-tailed deer and wild turkeys. Through a system employing professional biologists to make recommendations on actions like license quotas, bag limits, hunting and fishing regulations, and reintroductions and stocking, fish and game populations thrived, and most still do today.

However, many smaller non-game species have not thrived. Their pressures are different. For instance, overhunting was not the cause of decline for monarch butterflies, so game regulations can’t do much to restore them. The pressures on the primarily one-third of American fish and wildlife species on the state Species of Greatest Conservation Need lists are the pressures of American society itself: things like habitat loss, wetland conversion, the effects of pesticides, or invasive species. And funding for wildlife agencies to mitigate these pressures to keep these species off the endangered lists has never been adequate, and certainly not on par with the hunter- and angler- funded conservation efforts for fish and game species.

In 1973, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, but this is an emergency room measure with little to no preventative funding to recover species before they get to that point. Currently, only about $61 million annually is granted to states this purpose, whereas the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies estimates that minimally $1.3 billion is needed to match the scale of recovery needs.

For years, hunting and angling groups have called for other outdoor recreationists to foot a similar bill to the Pittman-Robertson excise taxes for non-game wildlife conservation – such as a backpack tax - as if we as hunters and anglers haven’t contributed just as much to the decline of non-game species through our daily actions as Americans resulting in habitat loss, wetland conversion, or the use of pesticides. Or that seeing nongame species like common loons or bald eagles isn’t just as valuable to our time outdoors as it is to someone not also trying to catch a fish or shoot a deer.

The current wildlife crisis is a whole society crisis, not the sole responsibility of a subset of outdoor recreation users. As such, its solution must match the magnitude of the crisis, as National Wildlife Federation President and CEO Collin O’Mara says. And that’s what the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act does.

The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act directs $1.3 billion to state wildlife agencies and $97.5 million to Tribal governments to fund wildlife restoration of species of greatest conservation need. Each state maintains a list of those species and needed recovery actions – often grouped by habitat type – in State Wildlife Action plans, updated every ten years.

This act will actually provide the funding to implement those plans, for many states matching or even exceeding what they receive each year from Pittman-Robertson funding. For instance, Michigan would receive over $27 million annually under the Senate version of the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act; this year it received about $31 million from Pittman-Robertson funds. Passage of the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would almost double Michigan’s federal funding for wildlife restoration.

I could argue that the dedicated funding for mostly non-game species will also benefit game species sharing similar habitat – which it will – or that it will mean less has to be spent out of funds raised from hunting licenses or firearms excise taxes for wildlife restoration benefitting nongame species – which it will – but I’m not going to, because that would assume that as hunters and anglers, all we care about is what we can catch or shoot. And I don’t think that’s a very accurate description of our community, and it’s a rare hunter or angler who doesn’t also participate in another form of outdoor recreation.

When I fly fish for northern pike up at my family’s Upper Peninsula cottage, seeing the bald eagles soar over the lake and hearing the loons call are as important to my outdoor experience as catching northern pike. When I surf at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, it wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t see a piping plover run along the beach or a monarch butterfly when I hike the dunes. And when I’m sitting against the base of a tree in the November deer woods in a northern Michigan state forest, a visit from a red-headed woodpecker breaks up the monotony of watching the trail below. Wildlife are the animating force of the woods and waters we haunt as outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen, and whether intended for our plate or creel or not, they give life to our experiences.

With the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, we are on the cusp of conservation history, finally dedicating the resources needed to recover America’s full diversity of wildlife, to have the impact on future generations that those legendary conservationists of past generations had on us, like National Wildlife Federation founder Ding Darling, who led the effort to pass Pittman-Robertson Act in 1937.

It’s far from a sure thing, though. While it’s the most important wildlife conservation bill in generations, the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act still has to compete with every other issue Americans consider a priority for floor time in both chambers, despite its bipartisan support and the high number of congressional co-sponsors.

Only time will tell whether our generation seizes this moment to conserve wildlife, or condemns us for letting the moment – and the wildlife - pass into history.

I hope we choose the former.