C.B. Bylander: When the time is right, give the DNR an earful on management of Minnesota wildlife areas

Numbers tell tales.

And sometimes the same numbers tell very different tales depending upon how they are used.

Let’s use Minnesota’s Wildlife Management Area system as an example.

To its credit, Minnesota has about 1,500 WMAs totaling some 1.4 million acres. About 40% of this acreage – or roughly 492,000 acres – are covered by plans that guide management, work planning, accomplishment measuring and more.

The Department of Natural Resources has used this 40% number recently to impress.

However, since these 492,000 acres exist in only seven huge WMAs, the percentage of WMAs with management plans is incredibly low. A quick calculation tells you that less than one-half percent of the state’s 1,500 WMAs are under a management plan. That number doesn’t impress. Instead, it makes one wonder how this can be for a land management system that is 75 years old?

I’ll offer my thoughts on this later, but for now know this: The DNR aims to rectify this long-standing oversight, and when the time comes for you to give input, you should be ready. You should be ready because you and other Minnesotans provided the funds for purchasing these WMAs.

You did so by paying hunting license surcharge fees, paying Legacy Amendment sales taxes, purchasing various hunting stamps, buying critical habitat license plates, and making donations to conservation organizations that partner with the DNR on WMA acquisitions. The acquisition money didn’t magically appear in the DNR coffers. You put it there.

The DNR’s better-late-than-never WMA planning effort is just starting. I am not involved in it, but I do know the goal is to create a framework that will result in consistent and holistic WMA management throughout the state.

By the end of 2027, the hope is that there will be documented land management strategies for different landscape types, such as the aspen parklands in the northwest, the mixed forests in the central and northeast regions, the prairie lands in the west and south, and the forested transition zone that starts in the southeast and cuts northwesterly across the state.

The DNR already has held two public input meetings with a panel of hand-picked stakeholders, including Pheasants Forever, Minnesota Deer Hunters Association and the Minnesota Conservation Federation, just to name a few. Based on this input, plus the agency’s own interests, staff are already penning “straw dog” plans that you will be able to react to this coming autumn via the DNR’s website and tell-us-what-you-think meetings.

Part of me wishes we citizens could have been more involved before DNR staff began drafting documents. I say this because sometimes straw dogs prematurely morph into unmalleable concrete. This happens when carefully crafted sentences and rigorously reviewed paragraphs become so dear to the authors that they shudder to tweak them.

When this happens, it takes a jackhammer to carve out space for nuanced observations and keen insights that are not widely shared. Yet I also understand the need for the agency to give the public a target to shoot at, and that’s what’s happening.

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What do I think?

I think this planning effort is long-overdue.

WMA management will be increasingly complex in the future. It has been inconsistent in the past. You’d likely think there is a recipe book in each of the state’s 38 wildlife offices that directs folks how to dish up what citizens want and what species need. But there isn’t.

And because the cooks in the kitchen keep changing with every retirement, promotion, and personnel change, one recipe can be easily swapped for another.

Here’s an example

I sometimes hunt a WMA where an exceptionally smart and dedicated area wildlife supervisor took great pride in the way he enhanced and managed his new acquisition.

Former farmland, this new WMA had been in family ownership ever since the days of the Red River Ox Cart trail, whose faint tracks remained in the rolling hills. When the DNR took it over, the supervisor left a small walnut grove that had always held deer. He and local Pheasants Forever members planted a thick hedge of cedar trees that would provide winter cover for pheasants. He did strategic seedings, plantings, mowings and landscaping to benefit a multitude of wildlife.

In time, he retired. His replacement – another smart and dedicated employee – viewed the same land through a different lens. Out came the bulldozer. Down went the trees. In went a new vision, a vision akin to the way the federal government manages its Waterfowl Production Areas. The new recipe cost six figures to make, or so I was told.

It’s not up to me to judge which management approach is best. But I will deem this a travesty, and a travesty that could have been avoided had prescriptive plans had been penned years ago.

Why weren’t they?

My sense is that 75 years ago, when the Save the Wetlands program took root, the emphasis was on acquiring land, plain and simple. Planning wasn’t a priority.

Back then, the mere act of identifying and acquiring land for public ownership was a big step forward in wildlife conservation. It was a big step because even if DNR staff never set foot on these wild lands the land itself would produce huge benefits for birds, mammals, reptiles and a host of other critters. The fine tuning could come later.

In the decades that followed, WMA planning stayed on the back burner. There were many reasons for this. Tight budgets. Lack of staff. Other priorities. Pressure from partner organizations who preferred boots on the ground to butts in chairs.

Moreover, planning is hard work and not particularly enjoyable. This is especially so when staff must engage pesky citizens, contrarian county boards and persnickety professionals in your own sprawling agency, foresters for example, who may not share the same values you do. So, rather than write documents for a three-ring binder, staff continued to plow ahead by applying ever-evolving wildlife management science as their guide.

And plow they did. There’s no question that Minnesota’s wildlife staff built an amazing system of free access land for hunting and more. This accomplishment deserves to be praised during this 75th anniversary year.

Yet as often happens, your past catches up with you. And for the Section of Wildlife, the past arrived in the daunting form of the Legislative Auditor’s Office.

In 2025, this impartial oversight agency rebuked the DNR for its lack of comprehensive WMA plans. Befuddled, the Auditor’s Office couldn’t conclude if timber harvest on certain WMAs was a legal problem or not because the DNR didn’t have an accurate measuring stick for ascertaining the answer. Miffed, the Auditor’s Office directed the DNR to rectify this error. Today, WMA planning is on the front burner at last.

And since that’s where the pot sets, you should let your voice be heard when the public cooking starts this fall. The stew will be better if you do.