Scott Detrow / StateIm­pact Pennsylvania

A pro­duc­ing well pad in the Tioga State Forest

3,000 acres of state game land in Brad­ford County are being leased for nat­ural gas drilling.

Envi­ron­men­tal advo­cates have bemoaned drilling in Pennsylvania’s state forests, wor­ry­ing the clear­ings, well con­struc­tion and truck traf­fic will per­ma­nently dam­age the wildlife. But Game Com­mis­sion spokesman Jerry Feaser takes a dif­fer­ent approach in an inter­view with the Towanda Daily Review, argu­ing “well pad and pipeline con­struc­tion can actu­ally ben­e­fit wildlife in the long run” by clear­ing out space and cre­at­ing “meadow-like areas.”

The Penn­syl­va­nia Game Com­mis­sion recently announced that it would be accept­ing bids from nat­ural gas com­pa­nies to lease State Game Lands 36, which is located across Mon­roe and Over­ton Town­ships and con­sists of over 3,177 acres, for the devel­op­ment of nat­ural gas drilling.

“We’ve found that state game lands can actu­ally ben­e­fit two dif­fer­ent ways from nat­ural gas devel­op­ment,” Press Sec­re­tary Jerry Feaser said. “We’ve dis­cov­ered that well pad and pipeline con­struc­tion can actu­ally ben­e­fit wildlife in the long run. The ini­tial exca­va­tion, con­struc­tion and drilling processes are tem­po­rary habi­tat dis­place­ments. When the devel­op­ment enters the pro­duc­tion stage, we’ve actu­ally wit­nessed and pho­tographed habi­tat improve­ments because well pads in pro­duc­tion are meadow-like areas and pipelines pro­vide a lin­ear food supply.

“The other ben­e­fit is for the game com­mis­sion, itself, in the form of increased rev­enue,” Feaser said. “Through lease pay­ment and even­tual roy­alty rev­enue, we’ll be able to pro­vide more fund­ing to the game lands, hire more per­son­nel and acquire more lands.”