Elk habitat tour highlights collaboration on northwest Minnesota projects
Sep. 20—inn. — Elk habitat took center stage last week as a who's-who in Minnesota wildlife management converged on Thief Lake WMA near Middle River for a tour of habitat improvement projects on a variety of public lands.
Among the approximately 20 attendees were Leslie McInenly, wildlife populations and regulations manager for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in St. Paul; Barb Keller, the DNR's big game program leader; Pat Rivers, deputy director of the DNR's Division of Fish and Wildlife; Jared Mazurek, executive director of the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association; and Pat McMullen, Minnesota staff member for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation; along with other DNR personnel and representatives from Red Lake Nation and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Held on Tuesday, Sept. 10, the habitat tour preceded a
meeting on northwest Minnesota elk management
at Northwest Community and Technical College in Thief River Falls.
"We work on habitat with a lot of different partners," Kelsie LaSharr, elk coordinator for the DNR's Big Game Program, said at the start of the Thief River Falls meeting. "These include The Nature Conservancy, Ruffed Grouse Society, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association, and we work to try and keep elk off private land and onto public land. This is through things like brushland management, through food plots ... and prescribed burns."
The tour allowed wildlife managers and other participants, many of whom don't get to northwest Minnesota very often, to have a firsthand look at some of those habitat efforts.
Minnesota has three elk herds, all in the northwest part of the state: the Grygla herd in Marshall and northern Beltrami counties; the Kittson Central herd in Kittson County near Lancaster; and the Caribou-Vita herd, an international population that ranges between the Caribou Township area in northeast Kittson County and Vita, Manitoba, just across the border.
During the last winter aerial survey in 2023, DNR crews tallied 75 elk in the Kittson Central herd, 29 in the Grygla herd and 227 in the Caribou-Vita herd. And while the Minnesota Legislature last session passed legislation allowing the DNR to increase the Kittson Central herd by about 30% to 98 elk, the population Minnesota manages directly is relatively small.
Plans also are in the works to re-establish an elk herd on Fond du Lac reservation lands in northeast Minnesota, an effort that remains a work in progress but will involve capturing and transporting elk from the Kittson Central herd sometime during the winter of 2026. In advance of that transfer,
a two-year study of northwest Minnesota elk
is set to begin this coming winter.
Lack of snow, required to spot elk from the air, prevented the DNR from flying the survey during the winter of 2024.
For logistical reasons, the habitat tour focused on sites managed for elk in the Grygla herd, a population that has lagged below DNR management goals for more than a decade.
"We talked about, 'how could we do a tour of both' " Grygla and Kittson County habitat sites, said Blane Klemek, Northwest Region wildlife manager for the DNR in Bemidji. "In fact, at one point in time, there was even talk about doing a two-day deal, part of Kittson County and (Thief Lake), but it just would have been too much.
"The sites are so far apart up there in Kittson County that it would have just been a long day."
By comparison, the public lands projects visited during last week's tour all were within a few miles of each other and Thief Lake WMA headquarters. The tour included:
* A contracted brush mowing project funded by a state
Conservation Partners Legacy (CPL) Grant
on a 94-acre site in partnership with the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
* A food plot planted with corn and soybeans adjacent to a deer and elk wintering area.
* A
Ruffed Grouse Management Area
with a maintained
Hunter Walking Trail
in a forest also used by elk.
* A prairie restoration providing improved habitat for sharp-tailed grouse, deer and elk, along with other prairie-dependent species.
* An upland habitat site near Thief Lake WMA headquarters that was improved by a prescribed burn.
Regardless of the project, partnerships with groups such as MDHA and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation are crucial to funding habitat efforts on public lands, said Jason Wollin, area wildlife manager for the DNR in Karlstad, Minnesota, whose work area includes the Kittson County elk herds.
Wollin, along with Karlstad-area assistant wildlife manager Hayley Larson; Doug Franke, area DNR wildlife manager in Thief River Falls; Kyle Point, assistant Thief Lake WMA manager; and Klemek, the regional DNR wildlife manager, led the tour.
In the case of CPL grants, groups such as the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation provide the 10% match that's required for project funding and are the actual grant coordinators, Wollin said.
"At the area level, we find the areas that need some management, and then we work with (conservation partners)," he said. "They apply for the grant, (and) they put up the money for that 10% match."
Such was the case at the brushland site featured on the first stop of the tour, in which the DNR partnered both with MDHA — the grant coordinator — and RMEF to fund the work.
"It's all about partnerships doing this work," MDHA's Mazurek said. "It's great to have the CPL program and partners like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation that are willing to collaborate."
The DNR also has worked with other partners, including the Minnesota Sharp-tailed Grouse Society and the American Bird Conservancy, in addition to MDHA and RMEF, Wollin said.
"In (the Karlstad) work area, we try to do more open land management in a one-two punch where we'll do a mechanical treatment and then we'll follow that up with prescribed fire within that first three to four years — timing-wise, weather-wise," Wollin said. "If you're purely just doing open mechanical treatment, a lot of that's on funding. You can come in 10 years from now and do it again."
Project costs can vary from $150 up to $300 an acre, said Larson, the assistant Karlstad DNR manager.
"The landscape can limit the amount of acres that you're doing, but so can the funding, and the bids really vary across the board," Larson said. "You really don't know what you're going to be able to accomplish until you put those bids out there."
Franke, the Thief River Falls DNR manager, said he tries to spread funding across several smaller sites instead of one large site.
"We'll often shoot for no more than 20 acres in a location so we can maximize — you can do 100 acres in one spot or you can do 20 acres in five spots," Franke said. "There's some merit to that, so you can spread and get more habitat projects done in other areas. It's really just landscape dependent."
Food plots planted with crops such as corn and soybeans can't compete with larger offerings planted on nearby private fields, but using more diverse seed mixes featuring a variety of forbs and grasses — up to 15 species, in some cases — can help make the public lands habitat more attractive to wildlife, Larson said.
Elk are wild animals, and they're going to go where they want to go, but wildlife managers, conservation groups and even farmers, who help manage some public lands through cooperative farming agreements, are working to keep elk on public land and minimize their impact on private land.
That's the challenge, and likely always will be.
"I've had people call me and say, 'Pat, they put in this forage, and no animals have been on it — nothing, it looks like it's not used,'" the RMEF's McMullen said at the food plot site, the second stop of the day. "Believe me, (elk) know where it's at. In January, when it's colder than all get-out, they know there's corn and soybeans there that they can go and get.
"Again, it gets back to whatever species is browsing. ... Anything like this helps to try to keep everything on the public lands that we can."
* On the web:
dnr.state.mn.us/elk/index.html
