Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries

Then I moved here to Louisiana.

And for the last 15, I've been working for Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

I'm the director of the game species section.

So all the stuff you can hunt basically is in my shop.

So I don't do any fish stuff.

What's fishery then?

It's the department, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

So I'm just in the wildlife section.

Oh gosh, I started with SCIF in spring of '22, so a little over four years now.

Prior to coming to SCIF, I was the program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the majority of that position being about the Louisiana black bear.

So I managed their black bear program, which included, for the bulk of my career, the recovery of federally listed subspecies of American black bear.

It's the only one that's ever been listed.

Yeah.

My first deer I ever took, as a matter of fact, was on a hunt, and the Wildlife and Fisheries of Louisiana was putting on this hunt specifically because they wanted to test the spinal column, the brain stem of these deer to see if mad cow disease had made the jump from cow to deer.

So I thought that was really interesting even back then.

And then to hear that COVID was just running rampant through the deer population.

And spotting those stacks of birds is John Wiebe, both captain of the pontoon boat I'm riding on and our interpreter for our trip more than two miles into the bay, and there's really no one better.

John manages coastal restoration work for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, his employer for 20 years, which is to say he's been out this way a few times.

John's pointing out at a sight familiar to him, but almost beyond belief for me, an extraordinary amount of birds as far as we can see, standing so close and in such large groups they have to take short flights only seconds long to get around each other.

It's almost like a, like a flowering plant.

The first one is a young woman named Madison Sheehan.

She was named Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Now, this is sportsman's paradise, Chris.

There are probably...

Okay.

I remember sitting in a committee opposing a bill on carbon capture and sequestration and eminent domain.

And you know who was sitting at the table? Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries had at the time basically extolling the virtues of carbon capture and sequestration and talking about how this is not going to have a detrimental effect on wildlife, on habitat in Louisiana, on our land.

So perhaps that was one of the reasons.

You're back.

So, Mr. LDWF Brad Kennan.

Appreciate you coming on.

Introduce yourself to us.

sometimes that's a lot easier to do.

Sometimes it can be pretty tough, depends on the group of people.

But it seems like, I don't know about everybody, but everybody that I've dealt with at LDWF, y'all are all, man, y'all are streamlined.

Y'all have it going on.

And so in working with those partners, we learned that we needed to scale and that we could scale if we were able to provide the business case for these nature-based solutions and for this restoration.

And so through, you know, a 10-year journey, we were able to up our game from these smaller projects by being able to effectively communicate, yes, this is just trees in the ground, but when you pick really critical restoration sites, and we do this with our partners in the state, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who are the biologists and land managers who really know the landscape and know where the critical restoration is needed.

And when you do it with high-quality native trees collected from seed from these regions and you plant them, and these forests start to return, that not only do you get those ecosystem benefits that a cypress forest provides, but a mature cypress tree, its root system can absorb up to 800 gallons of water per day.

So what they also provide in terms of flood protection and storm resilience is pretty impressive.

So they're happy if they can get high-quality restoration projects under easement.

That's their mission.

For the state of Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, they manage 1.6 million acres of land for recreation under their wildlife management areas.

So if they can have restored ecosystems that, you know, we pay to restore, we engage with them and work with them, what tree species, where, all of that, um, you know, their win is they get enhanced recreational opportunities and healthier ecosystems to manage.