TRCP’s “In the Arena” series highlights the individual voices of hunters and anglers who, as Theodore Roosevelt so famously said, strive valiantly in the worthy cause of conservation.

Ed Contreras

Hometown: Sun Valley, California 
Occupation: Southern Oregon-Northeastern California Conservation Delivery Coordinator
Conservation Credentials: Ed Contreras is a biologist, hunter, angler and occasionally a cowboy who takes inspiration from living in the West and his family’s humble roots of living close to the land in Mexico. He works for the Intermountain West Joint Venture, a public-private conservation organization that focuses on bird habitat. He resides in Klamath Falls Oregon.

Contreras’ conservation work involves developing conservation programs and projects to assist private landowners as they steward water and land for wildlife in southern Oregon and northeastern California. He excels in connecting private landowners with a cadre of tools and people from state and federal agencies, as well as non-profits, to help meet their conservation goals and keep agricultural operations intact. Relationship building is at the heart of Contreras’ work, and he is known for his ability to bring people together to achieve conservation successes.  

Here is his story.

I did not grow up hunting, but I became obsessed with fishing in middle school and then fly fishing in high school. Fishing was a gateway for me, as it is for many adult-onset hunters, as it’s a less imposing activity for those new to hunting. My dad is from rural Mexico and hunting for subsistence was a part of his early life, but hunting for recreation within the framework employed by agencies to manage for sustainable populations was a foreign concept. The expense of hunting licenses, the myriad of rules, and living in urban southern California with no connections to other hunters, kept hunting out of my family. However, my dad’s stories of the adventure and chase of wild game in his youth instilled a passion in me for the outdoors. As a freshman at the University of Montana, I quickly made lifelong friends who grew up hunting, and I jumped into my hunting endeavors with both feet.  

My early exposure to my family’s rural and small-scale agriculture and forestry-based community in Jalisco, Mexico, fueled an incongruous interest in agriculture. My father’s family had a small herd of cows for both beef and dairy products and my grandfather, father, and uncles worked as cowboys and herdsmen for neighboring ranches. My brief visits to Mexico and my father’s childhood tales of encounters with jaguars and horse and cow wrecks when “things got western” captured my interest in rural life. This was a stark contrast from my day-to-day in the inner city of the San Fernando Valley.  

I eventually followed this trail and leveraged my limited experience but deep connection to my family’s agriculture legacy, into my first real job at 18 working for a wilderness outfitter in the Sierra Nevada’s of California. For the first summer, I was certainly the green kid from LA, but I sharpened my skills with long days in the mountains learning how to care and work with horses and mules and providing a safe and enjoyable wilderness experience for clients. Oddly enough, this job taught me just as much about working with people. After three summers, the summer gig cemented a childhood notion into a realization: that being outside and working with domestic stock and wildlife was something I could do for a paycheck and was exactly how I wanted to live my life. 

Today, my wife and I have our own horses and pack mule. We take a summer horse pack trip with our friends into a different Wilderness every year and we volunteer to pack-in trail crews and clear local trails with the U.S. Forest Service. On the weekends, we help our rancher friends move, doctor, and brand cows; we enjoy improving our stockmanship skills, and it gives our horses jobs. A newer activity in my life has been hunting with bird dogs. My first dog, a German Wirehaired Pointer, is now four years old, and despite being a novice bird dog owner/trainer, she is progressing to becoming a very useful bird dog and always-ready hunting partner. I now can’t picture myself without a bird dog in the future. 

My entry into a career in wildlife biology mirrors the other interests in my life. I combined many elements I care about to find the niche of private lands habitat conservation where I work closely with NGO’s, local watershed groups, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

When I started in this field 10 years ago, I served the role of a conservation project planner working with landowners to develop projects, execute funding agreements, and complete environmental compliance (like NEPA) required to implement habitat projects through Farm Bill programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. Today, I do some conservation project planning, but I also inform program development, secure funding for habitat programs, and help boost conservation capacity by establishing new conservation positions to implement more projects on-the-ground. This has been especially critical since the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, as the organization I work for has focused on helping make sure the pieces are in place to guide these funds into impactful projects. We do this by sharing new science and science tools with our partners to develop science-based habitat conservation strategies and monitor the ecological benefit of projects. 

I hope other hunters can join me in learning about and appreciating the value private land, agriculture, and wonky government programs have for our ability to hunt and fish.

I’d be remiss not to highlight the importance of public lands for waterbird habitat in Southern Oregon and Northeastern California, including the National Wildlife Refuges protected by President Theodore Roosevelt in the Klamath Basin. Public wetlands that hunters and birders cherish have suffered due to their low priority in water allocations. However, their importance to the overall ecologic function of the Klamath Basin and Pacific Flyway have become more apparent during recent droughts.

Collaborative discussions between agencies, irrigators, and tribes are working towards innovative solutions to water on National Wildlife Refuges.  Although irrigated agriculture also faces water security challenges, private lands often provide more stable wetland habitat in this region. Supporting Farm Bill programs that keep agricultural producers in business—and sustaining wetland habitat through flood irrigation practices—is key to sustaining waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway. Large federal funding packages like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act can be hugely helpful in leveraging Farm Bill dollars to invest in projects that bolster wildlife habitat that hunters directly benefit from. 

All of these programs can be made more successful by combining the local knowledge of landowners/managers and biologists with new spatial data tools like the Wetland Evaluation Tool, which shows where more resilient wetland habitat exists on the landscape, or the Working Wetlands Explorer, which shows where flood-irrigated grass hay practices are contributing to important wetland habitat. Strategic conservation planning using these tools better informs where American taxpayer dollars are spent on both private and public lands and ensures that we are protecting habitat that can provide the maximum benefit to wildlife. 

My most memorable hunts in the Klamath Basin are spring goose hunts for white-fronted geese. The sound of air rushing against feather and the brassy-sounding calls in the center of a vortex of hundreds of speckle bellies is an awesome experience. The bag limit of white-fronted geese in this area is 10 birds and it fills a freezer with the best meat of any waterfowl species. Large flocks of white-fronted geese make intensive use of private lands in the spring, especially in short-grazed pastures and early spring-planted crops near water. For this reason, access for hunters can be a challenge but many landowners welcome hunting as a way to deter geese depredation of forage and grain crops. 

I hope other hunters can join me in learning about and appreciating the value private land, agriculture, and wonky government programs have for our ability to hunt and fish. Water in the West is precious and there’s less and less of it to go around. That’s not going to change anytime soon so we should all try to work together to stretch every drop. 

Photo credits: Ed Contreras

The TRCP is your resource for all things conservation. In our weekly Roosevelt Report, you’ll receive the latest news on emerging habitat threats, legislation and proposals on the move, public land access solutions we’re spearheading, and opportunities for hunters and anglers to take action. Sign up now.