Who Pays for Gamebird Research?

How we fund science shapes which questions researchers are able to answer. Upland hunters have more power to influence that equation than we may realize.

In this episode, Dr. Lance McNew, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Montana State University, takes Gabby and AJ behind the scenes of modern game bird research. From sharp-tailed grouse and habitat management to Pittman-Robertson and the realities of securing research grants, Dr. McNew explains how science informs wildlife management—and how the way we fund that science can shape the questions researchers are able to answer.

We explore why there are no universal “best practices” for managing game bird habitat, why Western game birds often compete with big game species for limited research dollars, and why some ecological questions simply can’t be answered within a three- or five-year funding cycle. Dr. McNew also explains how hunters have historically funded wildlife conservation, why that traditional funding remains essential, and where flexible private funding can help fill gaps it wasn’t designed to address.

Those gaps can be surprisingly practical. Researchers still know relatively little about portions of the sharp-tailed grouse’s annual life cycle outside the breeding season. Research equipment and enormous datasets need to be maintained after individual grants expire. And funding graduate students doesn’t just produce research today; it helps train the wildlife professionals who will study and manage game birds for decades to come.

This episode isn’t just about funding game bird science. It’s an opportunity to support it.

Support the Science Behind Game Bird Conservation

To coincide with this episode, the Project Upland Foundation has released the 2026 Sharp-tailed Grouse Conservation Stamp, featuring original artwork by Joshua Powell.

Every dollar from the $25 stamp goes directly to Dr. Lance McNew’s sharp-tailed grouse research at Montana State University. Project Upland Magazine covers the costs of printing, shipping, postage, fulfillment, staff time, and payment processing, making this a true 100% in, 100% out initiative: every $25 purchase sends the full $25 to native grouse research.

Our goal is to raise $7,500. That flexible funding can help fill gaps traditional research grants aren’t designed to fill, from maintaining equipment and preserving research data to extending data collection and pursuing important questions that emerge during ongoing research.

Science can’t guarantee more birds. What it can do is replace assumptions with evidence, giving wildlife managers a better understanding of what works, where it works, and why. If we want better answers about the future of game birds, we have to be willing to invest in the science that can provide them.

Learn more about the Project Upland Foundation, follow the progress of the research, and purchase your stamp at projectuplandfoundation.org.

Podcast Episode Transcript

Gabby: The subject of wildlife research funding has always been kinda complicated. 

AJ: Funds can come from many places, including the federal government, state governments, non-governmental organizations, private donors, partnership programs, and more. 

Gabby: Regardless of where that funding comes from, it almost always comes with strings attached. Oftentimes, researchers have to study one topic specifically. Say you’re studying grouse reproduction and suddenly realize genetic work or stress-hormone analysis could answer an important question, but that wasn’t in the approved budget.

AJ: In that example, the researchers may need to find another funding source for the new genetics work because it wasn’t included in the original project’s objectives or budget.

Gabby: The way game bird research gets funded today serves an important purpose. Competitive grants force researchers to define clear questions, objectives, budgets, and management outcomes. But that structure has limitations, too. Researchers are largely restricted to studying the questions their funding was designed to answer, even when the data begin pointing somewhere unexpected.

AJ: And some of the questions that matter most to game birds can’t be answered within a three- or five-year funding cycle. Understanding what happens to a population over a decade, maintaining equipment after a grant ends, or pursuing a discovery made halfway through a project can require money that simply isn’t there.

Gabby: AJ and I spoke with Dr. Lance McNew, a gamebird researcher and wildlife ecology professor at Montana State University. We discussed his current research projects, how he gets funding for that research, and what receiving flexible funding through the Project Upland Foundation could look like for gamebirds, including the sharp-tailed grouse. 

“The sharp-tailed grouse is about the same size and has the general appearance of the prairie hen. Its range is wide, extending from Lake Michigan to Northeastern California, and from Northeastern New Mexico to Alaska, which includes all of Alberta except the mountainous portion. It shows much less adaptability to changed conditions than the prairie chicken and disappears more rapidly after the subjection of its range to agriculture.” S. S. Stansell, “North Alberta Birds: Sharp-tailed Grouse.” Edmonton Bulletin. June 11, 1919.

Dr. McNew: My name is Lance McNew. I’m a professor of wildlife ecology at Montana State University. My students and I conduct applied research, focusing primarily on building methods for estimating the population status and processes of game birds and understanding how land use and management—things like climate, fire, grazing, and habitat changes—affect those populations, particularly in the working landscapes here in the West.

Gabby: Dr. McNew has studied native prairie and mountain grouse. But for the last 10 years or so, most of his research has been focused on sharp-tailed grouse. 

AJ: And the type of research he does is called “applied research.” Basically, there are two different kinds of research: basic research (which is also called fundamental or pure research), and applied research. Applied research focuses on solving practical, real world problems.

Gabby: In the context of Dr. McNew’s work, applied research directly addresses a conservation challenge, which is why sharptails are such a good subject; as a bird that is tied to large, intact landscapes, they are excellent indicators of ecosystem function and health.

AJ: When asked about whether anything he’s studied has surprised him, here’s what Dr. McNew said:

Dr. McNew: One recurring surprise is how context-dependent management actions are. So the same practice may benefit birds in one area or region but have no effect in another, depending on a whole host of ecological correlates, as I mentioned, like climate, soils, the history of grazing, and the landscape configuration.

Another is not really a research surprise, I guess, but I was pretty surprised about how little we still know about game birds in the West when I moved here. So when I arrived in Montana a dozen years ago or so, for example, the state of Montana didn’t even have standardized statewide surveys for many of our game birds, with the exception of greater sage-grouse.

My lab has been working over the last decade or so to try to develop rigorous monitoring programs for populations of our game birds here.

Gabby: As we’ve learned from several Project Upland Podcast interviews now, standardized population monitoring programs are a fundamental part of gamebird research. Drumming surveys, lek counts, breeding bird counts, and more all help biologists build an understanding of how many birds exist on the landscape. When Dr. McNew arrived in Montana about a dozen years ago, the state lacked standardized statewide surveys for many of its game birds. Considering how fundamental those data are to understanding population trends, that’s pretty striking.

AJ: The reasons for that lack of monitoring aren’t particularly mysterious.

Dr. McNew: The funding is always tight, right? Timelines are short. Expectations are usually high. Long-term research is hard to support, for sure, for any species. But when it comes down to, like, the lesser investment in game bird research in Western states relative to Midwestern or Great Plains states, it has to do with public and hunter interest in those species.

So in the West, large game species like elk and deer, bighorn sheep, and pronghorn, they tend to dominate both public attention and then, as a result, agency investment. Upland game birds often receive less research funding, not because they’re unimportant, but because agencies are responding to where the demand is, where the license revenue is, and where political visibility is the highest.

Gabby: Recall our previous episode on the public trust doctrine (if you haven’t listened to it yet, we’ll link to it in the description). In the United States, wildlife is held in the public trust for all citizens, and state wildlife agencies are tasked with the duty of managing those species for us. 

AJ: If we, the wildlife-owning public, fail to communicate to our state wildlife agencies that hey, we care about upland game birds and we want standardized monitoring methods for indexing how many of them exist in our state, then time and attention won’t be spent designing and implementing those methods.

Gabby: In other words, species that generate greater public interest, license revenue, and political attention are also more likely to attract agency investment. If upland hunters want game birds to command more attention, we have to demonstrate that those birds matter to us.

“The Wildlife Restoration Program provides funds to state fish and wildlife agencies to restore, conserve, manage, and enhance wild birds and mammals and their habitats…Among other purposes, the funds may be used to…conduct research on managing wildlife and its habitat…Federal funds may be used for up to 75% of costs of implementing projects.” – The Congressional Research Service on the The Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act, October 2022.

AJ: Wildlife research, conservation, and hunting are deeply connected both because of shared values and because of the United States’ funding model. Between state hunting license sales and excise taxes collected on firearms and ammunition through Pittman-Robertson, hunters and target shooters provide substantial funding for wildlife conservation and management, including research.

Dr. McNew: So Pittman-Robertson dollars come from a federal excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and other types of hunting equipment, and they’re allocated to the states each year based on a formula that’s primarily based on land area and the number of paid hunting licenses in each state, with some caps on minimums and maximums.

And states must provide a 25% match in order to leverage those funds. Hunters are providing funding for conservation and research and management through two mechanisms now: direct license sales to the states, and then the allocation of funds through a federal excise tax on their hunting equipment that comes back to the states to help even more fully support wildlife restoration and management.

It’s been the primary funding mechanism for wildlife restoration, management, monitoring, and research, primarily has been allocated to game species, and that was the original intent. So the idea was that if hunters are footing the bill for the recovery of species, then the money should be prioritized to recovery of the species that they’re primarily interested in.

The law doesn’t specifically say that it has to be allocated to game species. It has to be limited to, I think, mammals and birds. That structure strongly influences what research gets funded, favoring applied management-oriented projects that generally align with agency missions, and that might differ between states.

Certainly, it will differ between states where there’s a lot of hunter interest in game birds versus other states where there’s mostly hunter interest in large ungulates. My research has been supported by hunter contributions, both in the form of direct license sales to the states as well as some of these PR mechanisms for funding.

My entire research program isn’t funded by those mechanisms, but a lot of it has been.

Gabby: So there’s truth behind the phrase “hunting funds conservation.” But that raises another question. Is the system hunters have traditionally funded enough to meet today’s conservation and research needs?

AJ: I want to point out that, based on a 2025 paper called Analysis of Dedicated Revenue Scale and Diversity Among U.S. State Fish and Wildlife Agencies, you can estimate the total contribution from hunters. If hunters account for roughly 42% of license sales (based on Texas data) and roughly 25% of Pittman-Robertson funding comes from hunters rather than target shooters, it works out to hunters contributing about 22% of state agency budgets.

I point this out because of the dangers of misrepresenting hunter contributions to conservation. While I would never dismiss 22% as a small number, it is a far different narrative from the claim that “hunters pay for most of conservation” that floats around the hunting community.

Dr. McNew: So hunting-generated funding has been foundational to wildlife recovery, as we’ve previously talked about. That said, hunting alone can’t shoulder the entire burden of conservation anymore, really, especially as participation in hunting declines and then as our conservation challenges grow. Certainly, hunting and the funding that hunters are contributing to conservation is still a primary pillar of our North American model of conservation, but it really needs complements from other funding sources moving forward, I would think.

“Kansas has been allotted a total of $69,728.64 since Congress passed the federal aid in wildlife restoration act in 1937…Federal aid work now underway in Kansas includes projects to restore and manage pheasants; to fence and post the Kingman county state game preserve, and improve the habitat for pheasants, quails, and waterfowl; and to acquire additional lands for Finney county state game preserve.” – Emporia Daily Gazette, April 16, 1941.

Gabby: Oftentimes, researchers get funding via grants. Grants are something that must be applied for, and the grant application and award process is lengthy, technical, and competitive.

Dr. McNew: Grants are essential for game bird research, but they’re highly competitive. So in the West, as we’ve already covered, most of the funding comes from state wildlife agencies or federal land management agencies.

Unlike the Southeast or in Texas, game bird research here hasn’t really benefited as much from private investment or NGO support. The process tends to look like this. So typically, agencies issue a competitive request for proposals or a call for proposals, and those RFPs are usually quite specific about the management questions that they want addressed.

So you can kind of think of this like building contractors bidding on a job, say putting a new roof on the local high school. You’re competing to show that your team can best deliver what the agency needs. That competitive process certainly has real benefits. So it forces you to sharpen your ideas, to be clear about objectives, and to think more carefully about how your work translates to management outcomes, and that’s important.

But it’s also, of course, very time-intensive to develop a proposal, and success rates are really low, often well under twenty percent. So in a lab like mine, where we’re entirely externally funded to do research, you have to really hustle to keep the wheels on the bus.

Also, one of the biggest limitations is the time horizon of these grant opportunities. Because of state and federal funding cycles, most awards are relatively short-term, often five years, less than five years, and that’s a challenge when you’re studying ecological processes that unfold over decades or research questions that simply require long-term data to answer. And think about the application here to game birds, which traditionally have cycles that are ten to fifteen years, perhaps.

We can’t really get at those very well due to the traditional funding cycle that occurs through state and federal granting. Another constraint is that these grants are pretty deliverable-driven, so the questions and products are often defined right up front, which can limit opportunities for researcher-led hypotheses or exploratory work.

There isn’t much room for researchers to chase their muse or to follow unexpected patterns in the data, even when the science is kind of pointing you there. That would require you to stop and try to write another grant and see if there’s a call out there that would allow you to fit that type of research into that new bidding process.

What I’ve talked about so far is more like contracts with agencies to do projects for deliverables, and that’s certainly the most common type of research. There are federal funding agencies that fund more basic types of research, so agencies like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health or the USDA, but these are rarely a good fit for game bird research.

Their priorities tend to emphasize basic science, human health, agricultural production, which really makes it hard to align your proposals on game birds or any other research on applied wildlife management to those particular calls for grant funding.

AJ: Dr. McNew also told us that securing funding consumes a substantial amount of his time. As the principal investigator of an externally funded lab, much of his job is keeping that operation moving: securing grants that support graduate students, undergraduates, postdocs, equipment, and fieldwork. That means his own opportunities to actually get into the field are limited.

Gabby: I want to reiterate that funding priorities are shaped by public and hunter interest. In this way, upland game birds don’t benefit from our existing funding model to the same degree as some popular big game species. If gamebirds were to receive more funding, what could that look like?

Dr. McNew: More funding certainly means more students, and therefore more future wildlife managers being trained, and that’s always good for game birds, right?

If we have more people out there who are trained in game bird ecology and have a passion about it, that’s gonna result in ripple effects for investment in the future, I think. It’ll also result in long-term data sets that we can’t really get right now. We have these one-off projects that hit deliverables for a three- to five-year period, and then that project’s done.

We aren’t able to really assess or test management actions at meaningfully long temporal scales, and having some sort of dedicated supplemental or tangential line of funding that would meet that need would be, man, that would be so great.

For game bird research in general, I think stable funding helps maintain that continuity, and that’s critical for species like game birds that naturally fluctuate over long periods of time.

Gabby: And there’s a surprisingly simple example of what some of that additional funding could accomplish. Dr. McNew told us that there are entire portions of a sharp-tailed grouse’s annual life cycle that researchers still know relatively little about.

AJ: Researchers know far more about sharp-tailed grouse during the breeding season than they do during the rest of the year. Part of that is because researchers generally believe reproduction is what drives these relatively fast-lived populations. But Dr. McNew pointed out that assumption hasn’t been fully tested. We know far less about things like how they use the landscape and what influences their survival outside the breeding season.

Gabby: And part of the problem is logistical. University research is often conducted by graduate students who also have classes to attend in the fall and winter. Additional funding could pay seasonal technicians to continue collecting data while those students are back on campus, helping fill in pieces of a sharp-tailed grouse’s annual life cycle that we’re currently missing.

AJ: And that’s an example of the kind of gap we’re hoping to help fill with the Project Upland Foundation, a nonprofit organization with the mission of investing in rigorous scientific research that generates practical solutions, measurable results, and lasting benefits for game birds and the landscapes they occupy. To be fully transparent, Dr. McNew’s lab will be the recipient of our first-ever fundraiser, the Sharp-tailed Grouse Conservation Stamp.

Gabby: Our goal is to raise $7,500 for sharptail research. Project Upland Magazine pays for the printing, shipping, postage, staff time, fulfillment, and credit card processing fees to make this a true 100% in, 100% out initiative. In other words, every $25 purchase remains $25, and the full amount goes directly to native grouse research.

AJ: It’s a different model for us, built around getting every dollar raised directly into game-bird science.

Dr. McNew: It would be incredibly valuable because it’s flexible and mission-driven. It lets us pilot new ideas, bridge funding gaps, and more effectively translate our work to landowners and managers.

I think dedicated and persistent funding is a game-changer. Those kinds of investments often have ripple effects that are well beyond the initial project. I suppose a better term might have been downstream effects. So this type of dedicated funding accelerates projects that would otherwise sit in a queue because we can hire students, we can buy equipment, we can get into the field at the right moment instead of waiting for a grant cycle.

I think it would also allow us to strengthen our partnerships with the landowners and NGOs and probably even agencies because we can respond to their needs in real time rather than only when a large grant allows us to do that. It might help us generate proof-of-concept ideas or results that make larger federal proposals competitive.

So a lot of grant opportunities require data to demonstrate that your ideas are good before they’ll invest in them. All right, and that, of course, creates even additional training opportunities for students who then carry those skills into agencies and conservation organizations, expanding the impact far beyond the research itself.

Gabby: Flexible funding can also pay for the unglamorous infrastructure that makes long-term science possible. A field season can generate hundreds of thousands of trail-camera images, continuous nest video, drone footage, and millions of GPS locations. When the grant that paid to collect those data ends, the cost of maintaining the equipment and preserving those datasets doesn’t disappear, and flexible funding can help with that.

AJ: And there’s another return on that investment that’s easy to overlook: people. More funding means more students being trained as wildlife professionals. Dr. McNew told us that the graduate students he’s trained have gone on to careers with state and federal wildlife and land-management agencies. Some have become game-bird coordinators. Others now incorporate game birds into land-management decisions. And some of his former PhD students are now training wildlife researchers themselves. So investing in game-bird research today can influence how game birds are studied and managed for decades.

Gabby: Ultimately, we don’t know as much about Western game birds as we should. Part of the reason why is how research priorities and funding work. 

AJ: The type and duration of funding can determine which questions scientists are able to answer. Flexible private funding isn’t a replacement for Pittman-Robertson, state wildlife agencies, or traditional grants. But it can fill gaps those funding sources aren’t designed to fill. The Project Upland Foundation also helps bring hunters back to a front seat in both promoting scientific research, funding it, and hopefully continuing to emphasize the importance of hunters in management. 

Dr. McNew: The game birds are about more than just hunting. They really represent functioning ecosystems, functional working landscapes, and a conservation model that also includes people. When we invest in game birds and game bird research, I think we’re really investing in landscapes that benefit wildlife, agricultural production, when we’re talking about prairie grouse, and also rural communities.

“Scientific research in this country has long relied on independent expert peer review to distribute funding based on scientific merit. Subject-matter experts evaluate proposals to determine whether the projects are scientifically sound, significant, and feasible. This system ensures that public funding goes towards the work that qualified experts judge most likely to advance knowledge. Requiring instead that senior political appointees personally review and approve every discretionary research grant for consistency with presidential policy priorities before it can be awarded would not improve the quality of the science funded. It would instead allow decisions regarding which research gets funded to be based on criteria unrelated to scientific merit, and it would introduce uncertainty and delay into an already lengthy grant-making process.” – The Ornithological Council, Letter to Office of Management and Budget Executive Office of the President, July, 2026. 

Gabby: Science can’t guarantee more birds. It can’t eliminate drought, stop every acre of grassland from being converted, or give wildlife managers a universal prescription for creating better habitat. In fact, one of the things Dr. McNew’s research has shown us is that those simple answers often don’t exist.

AJ: What science can do is replace assumptions with evidence. It can tell us which management practices work, where they work, and why. And when the answer changes from one landscape to another, it can help us understand that, too.

Gabby: But we can’t manage game birds with information we don’t have. And we can’t answer questions that no one is willing to fund.

AJ: Hunters have invested in wildlife conservation through our licenses, excise taxes, volunteer work, and the organizations we support. But if we want more attention paid to native game birds, we also have an opportunity to invest directly in the science behind them.

Gabby: That’s what we’re trying to do with the Project Upland Foundation and the Sharp-tailed Grouse Conservation Stamp. Our first goal is modest: $7,500 directly supporting Dr. McNew’s research at Montana State University. But what we’re really interested in is proving something much bigger.

AJ: That people are willing to invest in understanding these birds. Because if we want better answers about the future of game birds, we have to be willing to invest in the science that can provide them.

If you enjoyed this episode, consider subscribing to our patreon. There, you’ll find our full-length interview with Dr. Lance McNew, links to resources we used to create this episode, and more behind-the-scenes content. As a small business and independent storytellers, your support means everything to us. After all, these are your stories.

Gabby: This episode was produced by myself, Gabby Zaldumbide, A.J. DeRosa, and Jennifer Wapenski. The editing of this episode was done by myself and A.J. DeRosa. Special thanks to Dr. Lance McNew, game bird researcher and wildlife ecology professor at Montana State University.