Guides for land and wildlife

Free guides for land and wildlife

Each guide is written in plain language, with its sources, for the people who own, manage, and care about land and wildlife. They are free to download and print.

Pride and Prescription: What makes a good habitat management plan

The fifteen parts every habitat management plan needs, from the goal to the sources behind it, in the order I taught them in my university habitat management course, with figures that show how they fit together. Use it to write your own plan or to judge one written for you; it ends with a checklist of the fifteen.

Download the guide (PDF, 4 pages)

The same work at a larger scale

I have written a plan like this myself. I was the lead author of chapter 17 of Ecology and Conservation of Lesser Prairie-Chickens (Studies in Avian Biology 48, CRC Press, 2016), a habitat and population management plan for the Lesser Prairie-Chicken in the sand shinnery oak prairie, one of the ecoregions where it lives. It covers much of what this guide asks for, at the scale of an ecoregion rather than one property. The science on the species has grown since it was published.

The first page of the guide Pride and Prescription: What Makes a Good Habitat Management Plan: its title, a short opening, a diagram of the fifteen parts in four stages with a loop from monitoring back to the objectives, the first two parts, and one goal broken into three objectives on an invented ranch. — The first of the guide’s four pages. Click to open the PDF.Tap to open the PDF.

Census and Sensibility: How to count the wildlife on the land you know

Why you will never count every animal, and how to count so one year compares with the next: what a count really measures, how to design one, which method fits which animals and when, and how to read what comes back. It goes deeper on the monitoring plan, part 13 of Guide 1, Pride and Prescription, and ends with a field datasheet to copy.

Download the guide (PDF, 4 pages)

The first page of the guide Census and Sensibility: How to Count the Wildlife on the Land You Know: its title, a short opening, a diagram of the same twenty coveys heard fourteen times on a still morning and seven times on a windy one, what a count measures, and six steps for designing a count beside a map of an example property. — The first of the guide’s four pages. Click to open the PDF.Tap to open the PDF.

Other People’s Money: What makes a grant proposal fundable

What a funder needs to see before it says yes: an objective it can measure, a program that already wants it, the registrations done before you write, a budget tied to the work, and a clean final report. Section IV is the part no study backs: what the literature and the numbers won’t teach. It goes deeper on the budget, part 14 of Guide 1, Pride and Prescription, and ends with a checklist to use before you submit.

Download the guide (PDF, 4 pages)

The first page of the guide Other People’s Money: What Makes a Grant Proposal Fundable: its title, a short opening, an objective too loose to fund beside a fundable one broken into its parts, and four questions to answer before writing. — The first of the guide’s four pages. Click to open the PDF.Tap to open the PDF.

A Tale of Two Twigs: How to tell one tree from another

How to figure out what tree you’re looking at: the twig first, then the leaves, then the fruit. The first thing to check is whether the leaves grow in pairs or one at a time. From there it narrows the choices, then shows how to tell the red oaks from the white oaks of the Delta bottomlands where I grew up, and where each one grows. It comes in two editions with the same facts: The Age of Wisdom adds the scientific names, the botanists’ terms, and more oaks; The Season of Light uses fewer words and more drawings. Each ends with a card you can copy and fill out for a tree you can’t name yet.

Know some botany? Use The Age of Wisdom. Just starting out? Use The Season of Light.

Download The Age of Wisdom (PDF, 4 pages)
Download The Season of Light (PDF, 4 pages)

The first page of the guide A Tale of Two Twigs: How to Tell One Tree from Another, The Age of Wisdom edition: its title beside a drawing of an open field notebook with two pressed twigs, three panels on how botanists name a tree, the terms used in keys drawn on a twig, on compound leaves, and on four leaf edges, and three twigs with opposite, alternate, and whorled leaves. — The first of each edition’s four pages. Click either one to open its PDF.Tap either one to open its PDF.

The first page of the guide A Tale of Two Twigs: How to Tell One Tree from Another, The Season of Light edition: its title beside the same notebook drawing, five words drawn on a twig, a leaf with leaflets, and an oak leaf, three twigs with opposite, alternate, and whorled leaves under the first question, how are the leaves arranged, and two twigs drawn meeting at the foot. — The first of each edition’s four pages. Click either one to open its PDF.Tap either one to open its PDF.

More guides: Coming soon

New guides join the series as they are finished. To ask a question about any of these guides, or to request a guide on a subject you need, write to me through the Contact page.

To discuss a project, write to me at grishamfieldandfeather@gmail.com.

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