(steady music) - [Bret] Encompassing over 33,000 acres of habitat in western Minnesota, the Lac qui Parle Wildlife Management Area, or WMA, is home to an abundance of wildlife and some of Minnesota's remaining prairie.

And now there's a new plan to keep this place special.

(steady music continues) - Lac qui Parle is the only prairie-dominated major unit in the state.

We have about 13,000 acres of prairie and grasslands on the WMA.

That's a big chunk.

So you don't see that in one area.

It's a mix of restored and also remnant prairie that was never tilled.

So that makes it really, really special.

And they had management in the past that haying and grazing, but they were never turned over by the plow.

But we have a number of areas that we manage with agriculture to provide winter food for deer, pheasants, and migrating waterfowl, and there's roughly 2,000 acres of that.

So some of that, we manage ourselves.

Some of that, we manage in cooperation with local farmers.

- [Bret] In 2023, the DNR started the process for a new master plan on how to maintain and improve the WMA to benefit both wildlife and users.

- It's to guide management activities on a major unit to inform other management and planning processes.

And it's required by state statute.

The first management plan for Lac qui Parle was prepared in 1977 and there was another one done in 1997, and they're supposed to be done every 10 years.

But obviously, we weren't keeping up.

We had our initial meeting, trying to do some scoping, decide what we felt we needed to look at, what needed to be done.

And then we had a pretty extensive public input process.

I think we received a lot of public comments, we put a lot of effort into reaching out to people.

In our case, we went out on opening days of deer, pheasant, waterfowl season, and put information on hunter's cars, let 'em know we were looking for their insights and input on this management plan.

There was, I mean a variety of comments, but I think we had a lot of positive comments, you know, some concerns about our tree removal work we do.

People commented about how we're farming on WMA, for example.

People were interested in that we continue to manage the prairies on the WMA.

Tree removal is always, seems to be controversial, but if you wanna maintain a prairie, you can't have trees in it.

And it's an ongoing process for succession.

There's always a battle between trees and prairie.

It's been going on forever.

And if you want to increase prairie and maintain prairie, I mean, you have to do it.

Prairie is one of the most most threatened ecosystems in North America.

We only have 1% left in the state from what was here originally.

So it's really important resource to maintain.

And then you throw in some of our invasive tree species, Siberian elm, European buckthorn, black locusts.

I mean, you add that to the mix, it's like forest succession on steroids.

It just, it goes nuts.

So we gotta work really hard to address that.

And it's an ongoing battle that we're gonna continue into the future.

You have to do something, or we will lose what prairies we have.

As trees become established within grassland, it starts to pull out predators into the grassland.

They'll go out into an area of prairie or grassland that has trees starting to show up.

You'll start to see little trails going to each tree.

And I think that's ground-based predators start to follow those trees out there.

And by keeping it open, not only it improves pheasant nest success and other species, waterfowl, non-game grassland nesting birds as well.

There was a number of different comments from people, comments about Marsh Lake, good and bad.

The lake has transitioned so much from where it was.

It was a wide open basin with very turbid water.

Now we have a lot more vegetation in the lake, the water's more clear, the submergent vegetation has increased.

There's a lot more aquatic life in that lake now.

So it's changed, and in some cases, it's reduced the amount of available areas that hunters can get to.

So, I mean people commented about that, and we're gonna take steps to try to open things up so people have some better access in other areas and create some more open water areas out on Marsh Lake by doing some aerial herbicide treatments on some of the cattails.

So we had issues with crowding because the amount of open water wasn't as much as it used to be, so people had to go into a small area, so it made it harder.

We have, you know, some WMA roads, a lot of parking lots.

So I think we're looking at make it easier for people who have special needs to get onto a lake, get onto a dock, those sort of things.

If there's ways we can improve access to other areas that we can't do now or we don't have the ability to, you know, for example, some of our docks have a gravel approach in the middle.

Someone who's either in a wheelchair or perhaps crutches, it's hard for them to navigate that.

Just by simply putting in a cement approach would improve that.

We're looking at one spot near Marsh Lake, we might be able to put in a handicap-accessible barn.

There's been increased population, human pressure, human use of the WMA.

We have people drive out from the Twin Cities to fish, you know, every day in the weekend and they'll drive back.

And that's kind of a new thing.

New demographics of people that we haven't had out here historically.

We're seeing people from Hispanic groups, Hmong, they all enjoy the area.

So it's a new group of people and they use it a little differently.

So we're trying to improve our signage and how we communicate with people that don't have English as their primary language.

If we stay on top of our invasive issues, that'll certainly keep the prairie in good shape.

We continue with our active prescribed burn, that's gonna help.

But if we're not able to stay on top of invasives, on top of tree encroachment, we're gonna see less prairie out here, less open landscapes.

And some people might like that, but I would disagree.

So how many places can you go where you can walk across a prairie for three miles and never been broken?

I mean, that's really, really special.

And to go out on a prairie today is one thing, and then you go a week from now, it will have changed.

I mean, prairies are so dynamic and from season to month and from year.

I mean, this year is so different from last year.

We have an abundance of porcupine grass seed production this year that we haven't seen in years.

And this year, it seems with all the rain, it just exploded.

And you know, when people just come here in the fall to hunt, they're missing a lot.

So I think it'd be important for people to come here 12 months of the year.

I think they'll gain a new appreciation for the area.

The prairie habitat is just so rare.

I mean, it's become so uncommon in Minnesota and in the Midwest.

It's just, there's been a steady reduction in this type of habitat and the species that it supports.

I mean that's really what it comes down to.