A City Boy Finds His Wild Side
riChArD heiLBrUN hunts for a connection to nature
By Katherine Unger
Credit: John Davis
At a staff
development
workshop in san
Antonio, richard
heilbrun offers
shooting instruction
to fellow urban
biologist Lois Balin.
When he finished college in 1998, Richard Heilbrun had barely given a moment’s thought to hunting. But the next summer
he interned at the Welder Wildlife Foundation near
Sinton, Texas, and a coworker took him hunting. “I just
fell in love with it,” he says. “I had camped and hiked
all my life, but here was this pursuit that was more
involved and more connected to the resource than any
of the other outdoor recreating that I’d done.”
Since then, Heilbrun—an urban wildlife biologist for
the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD)—
has made it his duty to inspire that sense of connection
in others. Hunting “has the potential to involve people
… in the cities” with wildlife, he says.
Heilbrun himself grew up near Houston with a family that wasn’t especially outdoorsy. Yet a passion for
nature led him to major in wildlife biology at Texas
A&M University, and to spend his summers interning
for Texas Parks and Wildlife. “Here was this city kid in
the middle of a wildlife management area, on a tractor,
painting signs, doing vegetative surveys, hiking up
mountains. I loved every minute of it,” he says.
During his post-graduation internship at Welder,
Heilbrun studied bobcats using radio telemetry and
conducted scat and diet analysis. With help from su-
pervisor Terry Blankenship, he developed an idea for
a master’s thesis project, which he pursued under the
guidance of Nova Silvy, a wildlife professor at Texas
A&M. Heilbrun’s research revealed that using trail
camera photography to perform a mark-recapture
analysis of bobcats could help accurately estimate
population size (Heilbrun et al. 2006).
After completing his master’s degree in 2002,
Heilbrun got a position with TPWD. As a regulatory
biologist in Victoria, Texas, he provided technical
guidance on wildlife management, mainly to private
landowners. In a feat of “people management,” he
successfully formed three cooperatives of landowners
who voluntarily agreed to the same wildlife management advice, such as increasing doe harvest and not
shooting bucks on their properties until they reached
five and a half years.
Linking City Folks to Nature
Heilbrun found working with landowners rewarding,
but he also wanted to reach out to people who knew
very little about wildlife. So, when a position for an urban wildlife biologist opened in San Antonio in 2004,
he applied and got the job. “My new mission is that
the average citizen needs to be informed about wildlife
conservation,” he says.
In this role, Heilbrun helps municipalities do regional
land planning, advises landowners, and gives presentations to local politicians on how ordinances may
be given a conservation spin. He’s found it useful to
frame discussions about wildlife and habitat around
topics that might be higher on a policymaker’s priority
list. For example, instead of explaining how a habitat
restoration project will benefit birds, Heilbrun might
point out that replanting native vegetation will help
preserve clean drinking water in an aquifer that lies
beneath central Texas. “I can impact hundreds of
thousands of acres just talking to a couple city council
members,” he says.
His move back to the city didn’t mean Heilbrun let go of
his passion for hunting. Instead, he started a mentored
hunting program through TPWD and the Texas Chapter
of The Wildlife Society (in which Heilbrun is an active
