Fish and Wildlife Management Merit Badge

Requirement 5: four options, and one of them is a season

5(a) and 5(b) are the same shape of task, printed one after the other, and one of them takes roughly ten times as long as the other.

A nesting season is also fixed to the calendar. Boxes put up in late summer have nothing to record until the following spring. Feeders can start any week of the year.

5(d) has a hidden dependency of a different kind: ten wild birds, mammals, reptiles or amphibians, all seen from one blind. That needs a site where animals reliably come, which is why the requirement names game trails, water holes, salt licks, feeders and birdbaths.

Requirement 7: an afternoon, or sixty days

7(c) is the one to know about. The requirement adds, in its own words: It is not necessary to catch any fish for this option. Three fish from a kitchen, a market or somebody else's catch will do. It is the only option here with no access problem, no equipment and no clock.

7(b) is the one that depends on other people. A creel census estimates catch per unit effort, which means interviewing anglers as they finish. No anglers, no census.

What 7(d) asks you to do before the sixty days are up

Before completing this requirement, check local laws on releasing these organisms back into the wild, and follow your counselor's direction in disposing of these organisms humanely and safely.

Two things, and both are easy to leave until day sixty:

1. Check local laws on release. In many states returning aquarium organisms to the wild is restricted or illegal, even where they came from, because of disease and invasive species rules.
2. Ask your counselor how to dispose of them. The requirement says to follow their direction, so the conversation has to happen. You are keeping eight living things for two months. Find out what happens to them at the end before you start, not after.

Requirement 6(c) is twenty-five articles

If you choose the scrapbook route, the arithmetic is worth doing first:

• 5 articles on mammals
• 5 on birds
• 5 on reptiles
• 5 on amphibians
• 5 on fish Each animal on a separate sheet, in alphabetical order, with pictures wherever possible, and the book divided into five marked parts. That is a substantial piece of work sitting as one line beside 6(a), which is observing and recording 25 species, and 6(b), which is a list and a discussion. Internet sources are allowed with your parent or guardian's permission.

What this page is

The Fish and Wildlife Management merit badge, drawn so the cost of each option is visible where the choice is made. It is not a copy of the requirements and it identifies nothing: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.