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Hunting News Latest Hunting News Quail Unlimited honors T. Boone Pickens with Lifetime Sportsman Award
Hunting News Latest Hunting News Quail Unlimited honors T. Boone Pickens with Lifetime Sportsman Award 
| Quail Unlimited honors T. Boone Pickens with Lifetime Sportsman Award |
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| Written by Quail Unlimited | |
| Thursday, 20 March 2008 | |
 T. Boone Pickens (left) receives the Lifetime Sportsman Award from Bubba Wood, Honorary Chairman Park Cities Quail Unlimited. “I can’t think of anyone more deserving of this honor than T. Boone Pickens,” says Joe Crafton, chairman of the Park Cities Quail Unlimited. “He has an enduring passion for the outdoors, and has made considerable contributions to the restoration of quail habitat in West Texas.” Pickens is an excellent environmental steward, Crafton said, noting that his 68,000-acre Mesa Vista Ranch is a model for wildlife resource management. His business ventures include an alternative energy provider, the largest supplier of vehicular natural gas in North America, and plans for the world’s largest wind farm. Pickens also has stepped to the forefront of national water resource development issues with a proposal to market surplus and stranded groundwater in the Texas Panhandle to urban areas in the state facing severe water supply shortages. Prior to Pickens’ first Roberts County land purchase in 1971, the county’s rolling hills, bluffs and creek beds suffered from consistent overgrazing. The legendary entrepreneur immediately began a multi-step program to help the land recover, over time investing about $25 million in overall wildlife management strategies and facilities, installing substantial water sources, food plots and native grass replanting, and power infrastructure. Those initiatives, along with efforts to market stranded and surplus water in the region elsewhere in the state, have led to a tremendous increase in local land values. “Quail hunting is a life-long passion tracking back to my father, who always kept two bird dogs in a pen out back of our home in Holdenville, Oklahoma,” the 2006 Horatio Alger award winner explains. “That was big, open, country — pretty good quail territory. I shot my first quail when I was about 13 years old. “Today, I am driven by a desire to conserve and reclaim over-grazed land for quail habitat, and to develop long-term wildlife management plans that can be used to improve land values through an expansion of recreational opportunities.” That passion, fueled by more than three decades of extraordinary business success, has helped transform Mesa Vista into a model of conservation and habitat management for the bobwhite quail, a species under serious threat from changing agricultural practices and urban encroachment. Exclusive hunts and trips such as one to the Mesa Vista helped the PCQU set a new record for Quail Unlimited banquets. In one night the chapter raised $654,679. This amount shatters the previous record by over $400,000. The primary beneficiary of this fundraising will be the Rolling Plains Quail Research Ranch, which is operating a 4,700-acre West Texas ranch as a research and demonstration facility to foster the understanding and management of bobwhite and scaled quail in West Texas. The ranch’s vision is to sustain Texas’ wild quail hunting heritage for this and future generations. The Lifetime Sportsman Award is a specially commissioned one-of-a-kind bronze sculpture of three flushing bobwhite quail by noted sculptor Walter Matia, a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society, whose works have been selected for several national exhibitions and have toured to dozens of museums both in the United States and abroad. The group’s first Lifetime Sportsman Award recipient was Walter Kellogg. |
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