Did you know the Minnesota DNR 2025 pheasant action plan recently came available in draft form, and is open for public comment?
Perhaps you’ve been waiting on pins and needles for it, like I was. If not, you may wonder what is a pheasant action plan?
For clarification, I reached out to Nate Huck, DNR resident game bird specialist. He said a plan like this is for setting management objectives, moving forward to achieve them, and comparing work done to performance measures set at the beginning of the process.
“I kind of view them as gut-checks. ‘Did you do a good job? And if you didn’t, why didn’t you?’ And when those reports come out at the end, sometimes we didn’t do a good job, and we need to call ourselves out for that and say, ‘this is what happened, and this is how we’re going to fix it,’” he said.
Upon first inspection, the 2025-30 pheasant plan reads very much like the 2020-23 plan. Huck acknowledged that, saying, “When we started this one, we said, ‘that was a really good plan, but there were places we could improve, or be more intentional.’ We plopped the old plan down in front of everybody and said, ‘This is where we’re starting.’ It’s really refining where we see the most important things are, and targeting those things.”
Many parts of the 2020 pheasant plan did go well. Of particular interest to hunters is the objective to maintain an average of 4,000 acres of wildlife management area acquisitions per year. During the last four-year period, Huck said they averaged over 4,200 acres.
That is not insignificant. Over 25 years, 100,000 acres of additional WMA land in pheasant territory would be a big deal.
With rare exception, wildlife management areas are open to hunting, fishing, bird watching, foraging, and other activities. On our intensely farmed landscapes, they are islands of important habitat for grassland species like pollinators and other insects, reptiles, birds, and deer.
Many of the same WMAs also encompass ponds and marshes, which are important for surface and groundwater quality, as well as for waterfowl habitat. Many ducks also nest on adjacent grasslands, while pheasants use cattail marshes for winter cover.
Because these habitats are inextricably connected, the new pheasant plan incorporates language to that effect (and the proposed duck plan is simultaneously up for public review).
Another slight change in the new plan revolves around one added word: protected. The first of four stated goals in the plan reads, “Increase the amount of protected grassland habitat for pheasants.”
Huck said it was important to include the word “protected” because state and federal land holdings like WMAs and waterfowl production areas provide habitat continuity on the landscape across time.
By contrast, conservation reserve program lands are privately-held, and famously susceptible to cutbacks in federal programs. From 2007 to 2022, Minnesota suffered a loss of more than 800,000 acres of CRP.
As great as WMA acquisitions are, it would take 200 years at the current pace to make that up.
The other singular-word addition to the updated plan’s goals is “restore.” As in “Maintain, enhance, and restore grassland habitat for pheasants.”
Huck said that was because newly acquired habitat parcels often need restoration work like prairie planting and tree removal.
Beside that, all grasslands require work like prescribed burning in order to restore them to optimal condition for the benefit of wildlife and the environment.
Considering the fact that state wildlife managers have found it difficult to keep up with the burning needs of their grasslands in recent years, maintaining, enhancing, and restoring could prove difficult.
I asked Huck what he thought would be most challenging to achieve in the 2025 pheasant plan. He cited the renewed objective to maintain a 4,000-acre habitat acquisition rate.
“I think that’s one we’re pretty concerned about,” he said. “Right now, land availability can be hard to come by, and prices have skyrocketed. I think those are two things we’re concerned about to continue that. As things come available, if we can acquire it, we do our best to do so.”
By now you might be wondering why I’m telling you all this, especially when the proposed plan isn’t very different from the last one.
For one thing, I’m pretty well connected to the activities of the DNR and conservation groups in our state, and I didn’t know there was ever a pheasant plan until a couple months ago.
Every pheasant hunter should be interested in reading and understanding it.
At the very least, it can be enlightening as far as how pheasants and their habitat are managed in Minnesota.
Even more importantly, though, the pheasant plan reaches far beyond pheasants. Every Minnesotan should be interested in what happens to grasslands, water quality, and pollinators and other prairie species.
A public comment period is common when the DNR proposes changes to fish and wildlife management. Huck called input “vital to the process,” though it doesn’t usually result in significant changes.
“In those situations where we get many comments on a specific issue it helps us to realize we missed something, and these input opportunities allow us to capture that and react accordingly,” he said.
The draft plan is available at the pheasant management page on the Minnesota DNR website and is open for comment until Oct. 12 (opening day of pheasant season, as it happens).
And while this is a one-time chance to have a say in grassland conservation (until the next update), there are always other avenues to support our prairies and wetlands.
Duck and pheasant stamps aren’t just for hunters. They can be purchased anytime by anyone who wishes to support acquisition and management of critical habitat.
And now you know.
Roy Heilman is an outdoorsman, writer, musician, and ethnic Minnesotan. His adventures take him all over the map, but he’s always home at neveragoosechase.com.