Meet Karl Malcolm, RGS & AWS's New VP of Conservation

From our September/October 2026 issue

Late in the summer of 2025, the Ruffed Grouse Society & American Woodcock Society announced two significant staffing additions indicative of the progress the organization is making toward growth, scalability and conservation impact. One was the appointment of Karl Malcolm as VP of Conservation, a role that did not previously exist within the organization. Malcom’s hire represents an intentional statement about how RGS & AWS is building the institutional muscle to operate at a different scale than ever before.

Malcolm is well-positioned for the role. Though he is perhaps best known in the hunting and conservation community as a contributor and collaborator within Steve Rinella’s MeatEater ecosystem, his credentials in state and federal conservation and ecology work are impeccable. He holds a PhD in wildlife ecology through a joint appointment with the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and most recently he served as assistant director of renewable resources for the US Forest Service Eastern Region. All told, Malcolm spent 15 years with the Forest Service working on exactly the kind of ecologically oriented silviculture RGS & AWS is now trying to scale, learning the mechanics of partnership agreements, federal policy and funding, and agency planning from the inside. He came away understanding that a central challenge of a large federal organization is the ability to execute on projects nimbly and efficiently. At RGS & AWS, he can leverage that experience in a very different operating environment. According to Malcolm: “The work and vision I’m helping our team deliver in this position are entirely consistent with what I was looking to get done in service to forests, wildlife and people when I was in the US Forest Service. At RGS & AWS, we’re just coming at it from a different angle, and it’s an angle with some real advantages.” 

Six months into his tenure, we spoke with Malcolm about his role, the evolution of RGS & AWS, and what he sees taking shape as the organization matures.

You’ve just stepped into a brand-new position at RGS & AWS. What does VP of Conservation actually mean, and how does it reflect the way the organization has changed?

For context, Ben Jones (RGS & AWS President & CEO) has spent the last handful of years navigating the organization away from small, localized habitat projects toward a bigger, bolder, more-collaborative approach to ecosystem stewardship, not only for ruffed grouse and woodcock, but also for whole forest systems, plant and wildlife communities, and the people who depend on them. In order to effectively address the scale of the habitat challenges we face, there was and is a need to scale up from the hand-to-mouth funding model that existed prior. In that model, localized fundraising efforts would deliver smaller habitat projects, and then a new fundraising effort would begin. A chapter might raise $5,000 and spend it on pollinator plantings, aspen shearing or a new hunter walking trail on a small parcel. These are wonderful types of activities driven by passionate and dedicated volunteers, but we needed to explore options to drive habitat outcomes at a much broader extent in order to achieve the goals we have as forest and wildlife stewards.

Today the amazing work of our chapter volunteers continues to drive mission delivery, but we are able to leverage their work to operate on a whole other level. Now, rather than simply spending that $5,000 on a small local project, we can bring a portion of it to the table as a non-federal match with our partners—a seed for funds that require exactly that kind of investment to be unlocked. Rather than a five-acre project, we might be helping execute a 1,500-acre timber sale with a focus on wildlife habitat outcomes. We are now administering roughly 75 active agreements across six RGS & AWS regions (Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Eastern Great Lakes, Western Great Lakes, Southern Appalachian, and Coastal Plain and Piedmont), with tens of millions of dollars committed to on-the-ground conservation projects benefiting ruffed grouse, American woodcock and countless other species of plants and animals.

Walk us through how RGS actually gets conservation work done on the ground. Where does the money come from, and how far does it go?

A lot of the folks in the conservation space will be familiar with the excise-tax funding that flows to conservation from the sale of firearms, ammunition and archery equipment under the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act. This is a good example for us to walk through. To spend those P-R dollars, you have to have a non-federal match. We can provide that match using chapter-raised funds, membership revenue or donor contributions, turning $5,000 into $20,000 through a state wildlife habitat grant. But our collaborative funding model is more diverse than that.

As another example, we are doing a significant amount of work with the US Forest Service under what’s called stewardship authority, where they can transfer responsibility for administering a project to a nonprofit like ours. We can administer the sale of merchantable timber from a vegetation management project, and then use that revenue to fund the conservation outcomes that we and our partners couldn’t otherwise budget for: Aspen shearing for grouse habitat, culvert replacement for aquatic connectivity, prescribed fire, reducing road sedimentation, and treatment of invasive species are all good examples. These timber assets belong to the American people, and we can help deliver direct habitat outcomes, cover the time our staff invests and in many cases have money left over to do other good work in that landscape. Across the forests of the East, there is so much potential. We’ve just barely started to scratch the surface.

None of this happens without people, and that’s where our organizational structure has become a real advantage, particularly right now, when federal conservation agencies are operating with smaller staffing levels to deliver their mandates. We can hire a forester, a silviculturist or a prescribed-fire specialist quickly and strategically with none of the bureaucratic drag of a federal agency. Our forest conservation directors and conservation delivery staff are world-class subject-matter experts in forestry, silviculture and wildlife ecology. For a state or federal agency, partnering with us can make the team bigger and stronger almost overnight. And we arrive at these partnerships not with an agenda, but with the agency’s own playbook memorized. We’re not showing up to tell agency partners what they should be doing on their forests. We’re showing up and saying, “We have read your state forest action plan and your state wildlife action plan or your federal forest plan, and we want to help you do the things you already said you want to do.” We also help deliver these types of outcomes on private lands, where we can provide expert guidance or help landowners deliver on habitat plans they already have lined out.

RGS’s mission states that “forests will play an increasingly life-sustaining role” as we face unprecedented challenges. What are those challenges, and what does that phrase mean to you?

When I consider that statement, my mind goes to a very big-picture question: What kind of world do we want to live in, or what kind of world do we want the next generation to inherit? Where I live in Wisconsin, there are miles of standing dead white and green ash, post-emerald ash borer, with an understory of buckthorn and honeysuckle filling the gap for the future. That combination of extirpated native species and encroaching invasives does not represent a healthy forest for grouse and woodcock or for any other inhabitant. I want to be a co-inhabitant of a community in as intact an ecosystem as possible. I want my kids to raise their kids in a world where we still have a species assemblage that represents where we are today: robust diversity and abundance of wildlife, interconnections among species, clean water and responsible people connected to the natural environment.

The challenges are loss of habitat to development, climate change, non-native invasive species and the absence of historic disturbance regimes. That last one is perhaps the least understood. When you look at the drivers of decline for a significant proportion of threatened and endangered species, broad-scale declines in land birds we don’t hunt, andpollinators on the threatened and endangered lists, the lack of disturbance (cutting, fire, flooding and so on)in these systems is one of the common threads. As people become increasingly disconnected from the land, they are less likely to understand why disturbance and regeneration are necessary in these ecosystems. The “life-sustaining role” language is about legacy: creating a future condition where things are better than they would have been without us taking thoughtful action. Not just for hunting, but for the overall health of the land and wildlife and our relationships with them. 

What initiatives have you most energized right now?

The American Woodcock Society’s participation in the Eastern Woodcock Migration Research Cooperative is allowing us to think about habitat at a continental scale in a way that conservation of ruffed grouse, a species with a high degree of site fidelity (reliance in a single location for nesting, mating, wintering, feeding and so-on habitat) simply doesn’t permit. Woodcock are migratory, and that means our conservation footprint has to be too: breeding grounds in the Northeast and upper Midwest, stopover habitat along the flyways, wintering grounds in the coastal plain and piedmont of the South and over the Gulf Coast. This past winter I had my first chance to band woodcock in Louisiana outside Baton Rouge. Band returns from birds captured in that location have come from hunter-killed birds within 10 miles of my camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The connective tissue between those two places is the thing we’re trying to protect.

Another thing I’m excited about is how we are framing our work and our responsibilities as hunters and conservationists here at RGS & AWS. This year every member of our staff received a letter from Ben Jones and Buddy Huffaker, CEO of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, affirming that the work being done here is exemplary of the Land Ethic as Leopold described it. Every employee received a copy of A Sand County Almanac. I see this as necessary work establishing RGS & AWS community members first and foremost as stewards of landscapes. Our organization is sometimes narrowly perceived as motivated by simply wanting to produce more birds to hunt. That is such an oversimplification of—and disservice to—who we are. Leopold’s work and the Foundation’s ongoing effort to carry it forward give us powerful and precise language for the harder conversations about the ethics of forest disturbance, active management and why the things that can look destructive from the road are often the most generative forces available for charting a brighter future for all the species that call these places home. 

For more information, visit ruffedgrousesociety.org.