A RABBIT JUST DOESN'T HAVE A CHANCE

As far as hunting and fishing are concerned, these are the "good old days," and I know, because I'm old.

I've been hunting and fishing since the 1950s, and I can assure you that fishing opportunities for every species, especially bass, has increased by amounts we wouldn't even have dreamed of back then. The bass may be a little harder to catch these days, because along with a tremendous increase in the acres of water, and the general increase of quality fish per acre, a far greater number of knowledgeable anglers are out there educating them. But there is so much water and so many good fish. We never had it so good.

The change in hunting for species such as deer and turkey are even more dramatic. We don't really know for sure, because we never even thought to count them way back when, but most biologists suspect that we have more of these species today than at any time in our historymore, in fact, than during colonial times.

I don't know about that, but I can tell you that when I was a kid, there simply weren't any. Once when I was nine years old, I was squirrel hunting in a river bottoms and spotted a deer, and no one would believe me.

We've come a long way, and we have professional fish and wildlife biologists to thank for that. Of course, these biologists and the departments for which they work, have hunters and fishermen to thank for the financial and political support that has made it all possible. Walt Disney and overly emotional animal lovers had absolutely nothing to do with it.

It all started with Aldo Leopold during the early 1900s. Aldo is considered to be the father of wildlife management, and I wish he'd come back to straighten out our upland game problem. The good old days for these species was when I was a kid. Rabbits and quail were so plentiful back then, that even a little wipper-snapper like me, with no dogs and just a single-shot .410 could walk up a limit.

Now I ask you: how could this be? How can we be so amazingly proficient at managing so many species of fish and wildlife and fail so miserably with upland species?

The pat answer is loss of habitat, and while that was true for the period between the Soil Bank Program of the 1950s and the introduction of the Crop Reserve Program of the 1980s, it's not the whole answer.

During the past 30 years or so, millions of acres of marginal crop lands have been taken out of production each year. In addition, many other federal and state

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