Seasons – March 2022

Texas has more privately owned, working land than any state – 142 million acres, according to Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute (NRI). That’s about 82% of the state dedicated to farms, ranches, and forests. These lands provide essential services for all Texans, from food and fiber, to clean water and air, and even outdoor recreation and a sense of pride. 

The growing Texas population leads to increased demand and rising land prices, which creates an incentive for landowners to sell part or all of their property. Land fragmentation is a principal concern in conservation because it typically causes habitat fragmentation. But ownership lines on a map don’t have to mean hard lines on the land.

Since all that land is privately owned, incentives are essential to encourage conservation. There are cost-share programs at the state and federal level for implementing conservation practices, but the most important incentive program in Texas is the open-space tax valuation (commonly called ag exemption or wildlife exemption). Ag, timber, and wildlife exemptions are essential for many landowners, particularly traditional rural landowners and producers, to retain ownership of their land by making it possible to simply afford the tax burden. Rising prices are great when you are selling, but when you are paying the taxes, we’d all like our property to be worth a little less.

The tax incentive is so great that special valuations like wildlife management actively encourage conservation practices like rotational grazing, brush management, deer population control, wildlife-friendly hay production, and prescribed burning. Even better is that these special tax valuations still generate more tax revenue than they cost in government services (see an explanation of that here).

Now imagine you own 1,000 acres that your family has held onto for the last 40 years because you had favorable taxes under your agricultural appraisal. Perhaps the cattle market is in the tank, or we’ve entered another decade-long drought like in the 1950s. Maybe you just don’t want to mess with livestock anymore. You do want to keep the land together for your family and your heritage. Wildlife management valuation is a tool that lets you accomplish these goals by keeping your taxes low while you practice conservation and active management to protect your piece of Texas.

What if that same property is just too valuable for you to resist selling, but you still care about the legacy of your land and how it is treated by future owners? Instead of selling off 50 to 20-acre estates to different folks that all treat their ranchette like a big yard, these new rural landowners can be incentivized to practice active wildlife management for the tax savings. This helps keep much of the habitat intact so even though the land is highly fragmented, the wildlife habitat and the essential services the land provides are still largely whole.

These are just a couple of ways that wildlife management works as an active tool for conservation. If you spend time on the NRI Texas Land Trends site, you’ll see how important it can be. While Texas has lost 2.2 million acres of working lands since 1997 (about ¼ acre for every new Texan in that time), over 5 million acres have been put under wildlife management in that same time. There’s no data to say how much of that would have been lost without the wildlife valuation law, but that’s 5 million acres of private land that is required to be actively managed for wildlife. That’s a lot of habitat protected with a pretty powerful tool. 

This article was originally published in an April 2020 edition of Seasons.

If you have questions or would like more information about appropriate Wildlife Management activities for your property, please contact us at (512) 894-3479 or [email protected].

By Kameron Bain, Landowner Account Manager

Spring is migration season for birds and monarch butterflies and breeding season for many species of wildlife, so it is a great time to get out and count.

For informal surveys, simply watch your feeders and water sources and record who is visiting. You can do this by watching in the morning or evening and keeping a log of what you see. You should do this regularly (weekly or monthly) throughout the breeding season or all year long. You can also use remote game cameras that can watch 24/7.

Download the iNaturalist app to help you identify and catalog wildlife and plants seen on your property. See Plateau’s tutorial on iNaturalist.

• Time-Area counts are structured surveys that involve sitting at representative points throughout your property for a set period of time (typically 10 minutes) and recording all wildlife seen or heard within a set area. These are typically done seasonally, but spring is a great time to start.
• Spring call counts for quail are structured surveys where independent listening stations are set up throughout your property to count individual quail calling in the early morning.
• Spring Breeding Bird Surveys are point-count surveys focused on birds that are seen and/or heard at representative stations throughout your property.

All of these surveys are most informative when conducted annually or more often to establish trends in wildlife use of your property. It’s easy to get behind on activities – we’re here to help answer questions or do the work for you! Contact us at (512) 894-3479 or [email protected] to discuss appropriate wildlife surveys for your property, or get help conducting them.

By Cassie Gresham, Braun & Gresham Attorney and Counselor