Dan Ham began working with the Noble Research Institute (NRI) in March 2008 shortly after he purchased property in Pontotoc County, OK. NRI helped him develop a strategy to achieve his goals of managing the property for wildlife, especially white-tailed deer, puddle ducks, largemouth bass and wild turkey.
The 600-acre property, called the Ghost Buck Ranch, is mostly wooded with scattered openings. Many of these openings were once planted to bermudagrass, which Ham gradually converted to native plant communities dominated by grasses and forbs. Sericea lespedeza, an aggressive legume, was present across the property. Eastern red cedar was also widespread, ranging from less than one foot tall to mature trees taller than 15 feet. The property has significant changes in topography, being crossed by several steep ridges with plenty of exposed surface rock.
After an initial visit from a NRI agricultural consultant and attending several educational events, Ham realized he needed to open up some timbered areas, control the sericea lespedeza, and implement deer and turkey harvest restrictions. He started by securing cost-share assistance from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (ODWC) and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to help offset expenses for timber clearing and thinning, firebreak construction, and prescribed burning. He used these funds to chemically and mechanically treat timbered areas to create openings and thin some areas, leaving just the largest trees in those areas. He also created several miles of firebreaks around and through the property to facilitate the use of prescribed fire.
Ham attended several NRI prescribed burn workshops and assisted several burn bosses with conducting burns to gain practical experience before conducting the first burn on his property. He has now conducted more than a dozen prescribed burns on his property as burn boss. He recently started to conduct growing season burns with great success, which has set back woody encroachment in the openings. He has had excellent success using prescribed fire to kill most eastern red cedars shorter than six feet tall. The burns also reduced the size of encroaching winged elm in the openings.
Soon after purchasing the property, Ham began chemically controlling patches of sericea lespedeza. He took advantage of new sericea lespedeza growth in burned areas by spot-treating the patches. These patches were easy to locate and spray following a burn due to the lack of the previous year’s vegetation. With persistent effort and good timing, he has almost eliminated sericea lespedeza from the property.
Due to his strict buck and wild turkey harvest limits, liberal doe harvest quotas, and good habitat management, Ham now sees more deer and turkeys on the property. He has also noted an increase in the gross Boone and Crockett Club size of harvested bucks. Boon and Crockett is a wildlife conservation club founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell. It created the first big game scoring and data collection system to objectively measure and evaluate species and population health and habitat quality to improve state and federal wildlife polices and management
In 2012, Ham and the Ghost Buck Ranch were featured in the ODWC publication, Your Side of the Fence. He has hosted an NRI wildlife producer, as well as numerous youth deer and turkey hunts.
When the property was purchased, Ham and his wife were happy living in Dallas, TX, and never thought about living at the ranch full-time but over the years they began to spend more time at the ranch and now spend the majority of the year living at the ranch.
Every time he considers implementing a management practice, he always asks himself how it is going to make the place better for his grandkids. Everything he does on the ranch is with the goal to leave the place better than he found it. — Steven Smith, wildlife and fisheries consultant, NRI
