And while that’s as true today as ever, landowners and others increasingly have been using them to accomplish multiple tasks. Buffers really span the gamut in terms of their benefits.”īuffers long have been considered tools to reduce runoff and improve water quality. “Not only are they good for water quality, but also for wildlife habitat. “Buffers are probably some of the most beneficial habitats that we can put in the ground,” said Brian Pauly, a private lands biologist for South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks. 1, 2017, and around public drainage systems a year after that. Mark Dayton, buffers will be required around public waters by Nov. And in Minnesota, as a result of an initiative pushed by Gov. Dennis Daugaard that would provide tax incentives to landowners for installing buffer strips between agricultural land and waterways. South Dakota lawmakers recently approved legislation proposed by Gov. While they’ve been important conservation tools for decades, buffers have increasingly come to the forefront as some states have passed buffer-related measures. (The percentage of birds that ultimately flew away unscathed is a topic for another day.) Buffer strips can be important feeding, nesting and shelter areas for a variety of game and nongame wildlife, but they serve a variety of other purposes as well, from filtering runoff to improve water quality to providing habitat for pollinators. We just appreciated the fact that when we walked these areas, almost without fail, we would flush a rooster or two, or more, even if we didn’t have a dog traipsing ahead of us. These were buffer strips, of course, though back in 20 or so we weren’t particularly concerned about their proper names. In some instances, we followed bird dogs around large tracts of grassland enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), but just as often we hunted the relatively narrow grassy areas planted between harvested crop fields and ditches or waterways.
We searched for roosters on some of the county’s public wildlife management areas, but our primary focus was on agricultural lands where a friend of ours who lived in the area had secured permission to hunt. More than a decade ago, a group of friends and I made regular trips to Faribault County in far southern Minnesota to take advantage of high pheasant populations.
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