In 2011, the Blair Wildfire burned nearly 40,000 acres north of Glenns Ferry in south-central Idaho, wiping out abundant amounts of bitterbrush and sagebrush and leaving some 5,000 mule deer without their winter habitat.
In 2017, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation joined several other organizations in providing funds to restore in a much timelier manner what Mother Nature could not.
The funding led to the purchase of 130,500 Wyoming big sagebrush and 11,670 antelope bitterbrush seedlings planted across nearly 4,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management public lands.
The seedlings will improve age class diversity, enhance wildlife habitat quality and augment the shrubs that came from post-wildfire rehabilitation efforts.
Additionally, several other organizations carried out planting projects on nearby State Lands and BLM parcels.
This brings the total acres planted in October 2017 to nearly 6,000 and total plants sowed to 245,000 for a truly landscape approach across land ownership boundaries.
The area is also used by elk as winter habitat.
More than 95 percent of RMEF’s 227,000 members are hunters.
Funded and supported by hunters, projects like this one highlight how Hunting Is Conservation.