WHERE HUNTING MEETS STEWARDSHIP - Reflections from Rangeland Steward, Justin Gallo

There’s a particular quality to the morning autumn light, low, gold, slanting through the oaks, sycamores, and cottonwoods that run along the fence lines and creek banks. As the days shorten, I find myself on these brisk mornings with the ranchers and landowners, walking property lines and talking through the season ahead. It’s in these conversations that I can feel my excitement growing for the coming pursuits.

I’m pulled back into memories of my own childhood in the mountains and grasslands. I can smell the campfire, the damp leather saddles, and the musk of animals in rut. I can feel the itch of the cold, damp wool coat on my neck. I was lucky to be taught to hunt by my father and grandfather. I didn’t learn it as a hobby; it was handed down, like a set of tools or a piece of land.

Through hunting, my father and grandfather taught me patience, respect, and an understanding that taking something from the land comes with an obligation to give back to it. That obligation is what license fees, excise taxes, and habitat stamps represent: a reinvestment in the resources that help ensure these open spaces and working landscapes will be here for future generations.

I can remember walking behind someone who loved the land and taught me to respect it. That inheritance is easy to take for granted until I’m standing in a rancher’s pasture, time and time again every fall, and it all comes rushing back. Being on working land, with people who know it as intimately as my family did, reminds me how fortunate I am to have this foundation and experience that most will never know.

Ranchers and landowners see the land every day, through drought, fire, calving season, and the slow changes most people never notice. Their read on wildlife is lived rather than observed through a lens: how many deer moved through, whether the elk are thinning the pasture, and how many calves were lost to predators. This is where hunting and conservation find an intersection. A well-managed hunt, done alongside the people who steward the land, helps keep wildlife in balance with what the habitat can support, protecting everything from soil health to the rancher’s own livelihood.

Ranchers and landowners are some of the most committed conservationists, even if they wouldn’t call themselves that. They have a stake in what happens season to season to ensure the land can carry their families to another generation. Visiting with them each fall reminds me that conservation isn’t policy; it’s a daily practice. None of this exists without rangelands, and most of that space stays open because of the people who work to keep it this way. Working ranches function as some of the largest privately held wildlife habitats in the country. Grazed rangelands protect elk and deer habitat, migration corridors, upland bird habitat, and riparian zones. Hunters need open ground, ranchers need working land, and wildlife needs both.

By the time the season winds down, I come away grateful for the land, the people who work it, the stories that have been shared, and a tradition that gives us the opportunity to give something back to both.