The Chairman Plays 10 Questions With WRAL

September 2, 2009

Steve Windham, left, chairman of the Wildlife Commission and Chuck Bennett vice-chairman. / Photo NCWRC

Raleigh TV Station WRAL does a series where they pick out a leader a week and let viewers submit questions for that leader. Then that leader answers 10 questions and they post them on the website. The most recent one was North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission Chairman Steve Windham. Chairman Windham took a variety of questions with the most common theme being access for hunting and fishing in the state. It’s no secret that development continues to sprawl across the state access is lost for many outdoor activities.

As a result of continued acquisitions and cooperative agreements with other state, federal, corporate and private landowners, the game land acreage in our state has increased to more than 2 million acres.
The Wildlife Resources Commission currently owns approximately one-half million acres in fee title, and more than half of that has been acquired since 1990, largely as a result of the funding opportunities provided by the creation of the North Carolina Natural Heritage and Clean Water Management Trust Funds, along with the support of numerous conservation partners that have worked with us to identify and protect these valuable properties in conservation ownership.
Within the last couple of years, we have just completed one of the largest land acquisition projects in the agency’s history. In a deal brokered by The Nature Conservancy, we have added 66,000 acres of former International Paper Company lands to our game lands program in the Upper Tar, Roanoke and Chowan River Basins. Incidentally, this acquisition will be featured in the October 2009 issue of our Wildlife in North Carolina magazine.

Other themes he touched on were dealing with wildlife that has become problematic and destructive and of course the hunting ban on Sunday’s that continues to be a hot button issue. Overall a pretty good selection of issues to cover in this small format forum that WRAL “Ask Anything”.
While it would appear that many of the folks that they interview for this section seem hard to get up with and talk to for the average person I honestly don’t believe this is the case with Chairman Windham or any of the other wildlife commissioners. My interactions with them whether in person or through email has always been good even when we talked about issues we didn’t agree on. So I guess what I’m saying is if you have a question that wasn’t covered in the 10 Chairman Windham answered contact him or one of the commissioners and get it addressed.