Every year at Game Fair a wide variety of companies come to sell their products to an outdoors market. Some of the same large companies are there every year, but my favorites are the folks who bring the latest invention they created in their garage. Some of these inventions get picked up by consumers and make it big. The majority of the inventions don’t quite make it on the scene for one reason or another.
           I was approached by one of these inventors a few years back and asked to make a commercial for them about their product. I was hesitant because I wasn’t sure if the world was ready for blaze orange toilet paper and if my commercial would help him turn a profit. Brian Primus was that inventor and he seemed really fired up about his product, he had a cool logo and sales booth, and was working the crowds really well.
            We talked several times about it over the six days of Game Fair and, after sketching out what the advertisement would look like, made a gentleman’s agreement to make the ad. I figured that Primus wouldn’t call, but several days later he called, we agreed on a price, and set a target date for completion.
            I wrote the script for the commercial, figured out what props I would need, and worked on finding some actors to star in the commercial. I planned on filming it during the early goose season with my hunting crew, but Mother Nature changed those plans with a end of hunt storm during the scheduled production time.
            I found myself up in Bemidji with my cousin and his now ex-wife, and told them I have to finish this commercial in a few days. They offered to be the actors and because we needed three people, I became the third. We wandered out into the woods in early September with the deer mount in my office, a roll of white toilet paper we drilled a hole into (to simulate it being shot), several roles of Rutt Wipe, and my camera gear.
            My cousin and his wife donned blaze orange while I put on not-so-safe hunting clothes including a checkered red and black hat to match the Rutt Wipe logo. We filmed it taking turns holding the camera and using a tripod. Filming took about 30 minutes and then I went to work on the production.
            I did a few post-production shots and had my cousin and his wife record some voiceovers. I found a fake gunshot sound and made my own fake fart sound (I vocalized the fart with my mouth, not my butt), stitched it all together and realized it was missing something—we didn’t have an actual deer wearing Rutt Wipe.
            No animals were harmed in the filming of the commercial because Primus and I got together to film the final shot using a deer decoy he purchased. We actually met at the Game Fair grounds and shot the scene where the deer is coyly looking at the camera with Rutt Wipe on his tail. Primus stood behind a tree holding my deer mount in his hand with the decoy behind him. It gave the look of a real deer walking behind a tree and a piece of fishing line affixed to the tail, being tugged by me as I filmed the shot, made the decoy come to life.
            All in all, it’s a campy production that was a lot of fun to create. We put it on YouTube and I figured that was the end of it. And then my middle school students found it and so did their parents—and the reception was fantastic. It never topped more than a few thousand views, however, in the first year of its release.
            The good news is that Primus was super happy with the commercial and the response. A few months later, he calls me to say that our commercial is going to air on national television.
            Apparently, the television show “World’s Dumbest” on the Tru-TV network spotlighted Rutt Wipe with a makeover of the original. Comedian Jared Logan took the commercial and made fun of some of the dumber elements within. He also made a startling confession about the effect using blaze orange toilet paper had on him. You can see that segment below!
            And then most recently, in a totally unexpected twist, a Facebook page by the name of Wide Open Spaces, edited the commercial and posted it online. I first heard about it from Ryan Bronson of Federal Cartridge and then I started hearing about it from everybody. Over the next 24 hours the video view count was increasing by the hundred thousand every time I checked it.
            It’s also resurfaced at school and I’ve had tons of middle schoolers asking for confirmation that they saw a commercial with their teacher pretending to poop in the woods. Upon confirming that speculation, the cool points soar through the roof, “I’m going to show my family this commercial.” It’s a high price to pay for fame, but somebody has to do it. 

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The author presented the following as his keynote address on Friday night, August 26, at the Minnesota DNR’s Angler and Hunter Recruitment and Retention Summit in Brooklyn Center. Outdoor News presents the speech here in its entirety. For more details about the event, see the Sept. 2 print edition of Outdoor News.

Thank you everybody for being here tonight and tomorrow for the Angler and Hunter Recruitment and Retention Summit. There are so many amazing people here who will present to you and host breakout sessions. I am honored. I am also really excited, and nervous, to speak with all of you who are even more passionate and dedicated about this than I am. While I’m still somewhat surprised that I was asked to speak to you here tonight – I definitely feel out of my league – I think that my variety of experiences over the years put me at a unique place to speak with you and get this great gathering started. There’s important work to be done, and at the forefront of my mind is my 8-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter (well, 7 a week from today). My wife and I introduced them to the outdoors before they could walk on their own and I hope they’ll take us outdoors when we’re too old to walk on our own. Thanks to the work all of you have done already, it’s been easy to get them out there and I feel good about the upcoming years. In fact, I dialed up my calendar last night for 2019 and 2020 and put a reminder in there to register both kids up for their Firearms Safety Course once they turn 11. What worries me though, is the long-range forecast for my kids and grandkids. I also worry about all the kids and adults who don’t get into the outdoors enough to know what it takes to keep these opportunities around and preserve our wild spaces.

In addition to being a father, I’m also an outdoor writer. I’ve written for many publications over the years but most of all, and happiest of all, for the Outdoor News. It’s a newspaper that I consider to be the best source of reliable news and information regarding the outdoors in the state. I’ve had the opportunity to tell numerous stories over the years highlighting people, programs and organizations that focus on recruitment and retention. I got to know Ryan Bronson quite well when he was first appointed to that charge way back when, and even took Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer out for the first Governor’s Deer Hunting Opener. I have interviewed people near the end of their life who have brought the outdoors to thousands and I have interviewed young people who are just discovering what the outdoors can bring to your life. The Outdoor News has done a great job sharing those stories, and provided other outlets for young people to share their experiences. There’s never a shortage of grip and grin photos of young people in the pages each week and I’m excited when I see other writers like Joe Albert, Rob Drieslein, Tony Peterson, and the late great Gary Clancy write about bringing their kids and other kids outdoors. Our successes, trials and tribulations with kids hopefully inspire others to try it themselves. If one person read my article about taking my four and five year old out into a hay bale goose blind, and decided that it wasn’t such a crazy idea after all, then I’m happy.

I have worked with Ron Schara to create the kid’s fishing clinics he used to host, putting my teaching skills to work at making a rigorous and enriching experience. I’ve taught fishing and hunting classes for community education in several districts. I also am a social studies teacher who brings the outdoors into his classroom as much as possible, and brings his students into the outdoors when possible. I’ve taken classes up to Mille Lacs for fishing launches, I’ve taken students and parents out together for their first hunting experiences, and every year during an exploratory learning day I teach lure making, casting and fishing skills. That trip to Mille Lacs, by the way, yielded zero fish, but all the kids who went said they had a great time. I know they did, because they were super disappointed when our school schedule wouldn’t allow it the next year. I’ve never been successful in helping a student and their parent bag a deer or turkey when I’ve been with them, but I gave them enough experience that they’ve stuck with it and been successful since. I’d guess that makes me a successful failure at guiding, but I’m sure proof that it’s not just about making a kill. I also like dragging the kids outdoors to teach them history in the setting where it was made, outdoors, not necessarily field trips. I’d go crazy otherwise, teaching in a classroom without any windows. I connect what we are learning about in the outdoors, and just to spice things up, I’ll show clips of various things I’ve done or photos I’ve taken. It always leads to great conversations, especially with those kids who were otherwise struggling in class but love the outdoors. It’s not long after that their struggles in class seem less as well. Relationships are what the outdoors build and fostering them is essential.

Something else about me that is fairly unique is that I’m a city kid. I grew up in south Minneapolis, just off Lake Street, and have been enamored with the outdoors as long as I can remember. Bike rides through the woods along the Mississippi River Boulevard down to Minnehaha Falls, collecting bugs in the vacant lot on Hiawatha Avenue and Lake Street, long bike rides to Lake Nokomis to cast a line. I found the outdoors on my own and with my friends as much as possible and encourage that with my kids and my students. There’s not a house or apartment in Minneapolis that’s further than six blocks from a park. Encourage kids to explore and find such places.

I was lucky to grow up with a father and mother who loved the outdoors. Nine months before I was born, my parents purchased a 16-foot green Crestliner that I still own and use as my duck hunting boat. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation between that boat purchase and my arrival nine months later, (and I’m not sure I want to give it much more thought than that) but apparently they were really happy to have a boat. That meant I grew up getting to fish several times a year, usually on Lake Waconia. My grandfather had a fish house, also on Lake Waconia, and I remember ice-fishing trips out there. My grandma would rent a cabin once every summer and we’d do a fair amount of fishing. In the fall, my Dad would go deer hunting. I remember that feeling when I was old enough to accompany him into the woods for the second weekend of the season. It was a definite right of passage. There was no recruitment or retention program back then, and even if there had been, I clearly didn’t need one even though I was a city kid. But even given that upbringing, I almost didn’t grow up to become the passionate hunter and angler that I am today. I’ll explain that in more detail later, but first, the main reason why I’m here.

As I mentioned, I am a father of two wonderful children who are head over heels in love with the outdoors. Two weeks ago my kids woke up with me at 4 a.m. to fish on Lake Superior using “bobsticks” in 240 feet of water. We had a tough bite that day, but they are excited to go again. They’ve both been to the Boundary Waters while still in diapers and have each had their legs baptized while ice fishing. Both sets of their grandparents are retired and moved to “the cabin” so regular visits to them means plenty of time on the water, in the marsh, and in the woods. We’ll all wake up again at 4 a.m. in another week or so to lay in a field for an early season goose hunt, something they first did three years ago. This fall they will make numerous appearances in the woods wearing camo and/or blaze orange, and when the lakes freeze over they’ll be chomping at the bit to go ice fishing. Needless to say, my kids have had a ton of experiences, more than I ever did by twice their age, and I am proud that they consider the outdoors to be an integral part of their life. They are the number one reason why I’m here and why I hope you walk out of here with great ideas of how to grow a love of the outdoors in all Minnesota kids of all ages. But something that I still lie awake at night wondering about is this—will my kids continue to love the outdoors? Will they become advocates of conservation and sound resource management? Will they always be ethical and safe and practice the philosophy of leave no trace? Will their friends? Will their peers?

Despite the best attempts of my wife and myself, there’s no guarantee. Despite your best attempts, there’s no guarantee. Societal pressures, changing attitudes, habitat loss, and more are pushing harder against us than we can bear. Remember that when you get in turf battles with each other over the scope and breadth of your different programs. Is it okay if you overlap with this group or that? Definitely, and why don’t you turn that overlap into a cross-promoting partnership? We are stronger when we are working together, and we all have such similar goals that it’s ridiculous to not be completely complementary with each other when it’s deserved. Likewise, if you are not in this for the right reasons and the long haul, either get out now or rededicate yourself to an ideal greater than you can imagine. Only when you push past your bounds, and focus on what’s truly meaningful, can you fully grow.

It’s been an honor for me, over the years, to tell the stories of people who push past their bounds. I’ve written about MinnAqua, the FIN (Fishing In the Neighborhood) program and other DNR programs. I’ve visited Forkhorn camps, written about waterfowl camps, attended tons of special events, and profiled dozens of people who dedicate a portion of their life to bringing people into the outdoors. There are many people out there doing this work, and none of them are Superman. By that, I mean, the small acts of many definitely outpace the large acts of a few. The news in recruitment and retention is mixed and the trends are scary. I just hope that we aren’t waiting for somebody to come along and lead the way, because this kind of movement is one that needs to be led by the masses. Everything that each of you is doing makes a difference, but you are here to figure out how to coordinate together better, to develop new ideas, foster new relationships, and keep hunting and angling as an essential part of the lifestyle of Minnesotans.

As you do that, I strongly encourage you to look at the largest groups of new Minnesotans, most of whom are people of color. Please continue to, and expand what you are doing, to specifically meet with them to find out what they know and would like to know about hunting, fishing and the outdoors in Minnesota. If it’s part of our state’s heritage, then it should be part of our process of folding everybody together into a symbiotic relationship. Some groups of people already have it as part of their heritage, while others do not. It wasn’t that long ago that another wave of immigrants, much larger than anything we see today, brought new folks to this place. Some of them had a hunting heritage from Europe, others did not, but for many at that time, it was essential to their survival. Tragically, the lifestyle of those already here was trampled on and almost destroyed. Minnesota’s original inhabitants are owed the best efforts to help rebuild those traditions. The name Minnesota is a Dakota word that goes back probably thousands of years. Fishing and hunting here goes back just as far, if not further, but it’s continued to be embraced by the newcomers. That includes my immigrant ancestors and it applies to the most recent immigrants. We must continually be reaching out to specific groups of people, especially those underrepresented, like women, people of color, people in the urban core, and those in rural areas where local infrastructure is diminished.
A book I read this summer, called “A Good Time for the Truth” offered up some tremendous insights and I encourage all of you to read it if you are truly serious about bringing all Minnesotans into hunting and fishing. It was edited by Sun Yung Shin, who also wrote the introduction, and I’d say it’s definitely required reading for all of you before you can seriously commit to reaching out. I’d like to read a few passages from her introduction, but these excerpts hardly do the entire piece justice.

She says, “It’s hard to talk about race across racial lines. Race is ingrained in societal systems and institutions, conferring a system of advantages upon members of the dominant group. This means that people’s realities, their lived experiences, differ. Race is often invisible to those who benefit, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. It is entirely visible to those who do not benefit.”
She continues a bit later with, “Most people of color in the United States have to think about race every day, multiple times a day. We are constantly negotiating our bodies and our selves, our identities, in a racialized society. How we look, and who our people are or are assumed to be, are relentlessly measured against a white ideal and mostly found inferior. We are nearly invisible–or painted negatively as criminals, victims, charity cases without history or agency–in the news, arts, literature, curricula, political platforms. We are the butts of jokes. We are racially profiled. We fear a backlash when anyone who looks like us or could be mistaken for us commits an infraction or crime.”

You can deny that and turn a blind eye to it, or you can realize that it’s a genuine experience and an opportunity to extend an invitation. And finally, I thought this passage was especially connected to this conference, “As residents of a state and territory that is wealthy in resources (Indigenous knowledge shared with early European traders; abundant waterways, forests, minerals, soil; hardworking immigrants in every generation) and has been an economic and quality-of-life success story in so many ways, Minnesotans cannot continue to bury the lede in the national conversation about us.”

I give Sun Yung Shin so much of my speech time because she’s an amazing author, and because she addresses something that I feel is easily overlooked. What all of you are doing is not the “Field of Dreams” for everybody. You can build it, but that doesn’t mean people will come Ray. There is a significant portion of our state population that needs an extra invitation, or two, or three, or more, because of events none of us had anything to do with. I’d argue that much of this is true for women as well. The ones who I have spent significant time afield will tell you that they are regularly mocked or degraded for being outdoors. Those who endure it do so because they have a passion for the outdoors, which is what we want, but how many never venture forth to avoid those unnecessary pressures? We will never grow this outdoor lifestyle as much as we’d like, as much as is critical for its survival, unless we lay out the red carpet every day to all people and continue to send special invitations to those who we aren’t seeing out there. I would hope that the next person you hear this from won’t be a white guy like me, but a group of people, with their own individual experiences, who can provide some examples of how you can do this. I don’t personally know, because that’s not my journey. So seek out a multitude of voices, from those in the know.

I’m a teacher, and I’m proud to say that I work hard and do a pretty good job. Somehow I’ve even managed to receive a few awards over the years, including this last week being named the Middle School Social Studies National Teacher of the Year. I keep the awards I’ve received in a trophy case at the school, because I’d never have received them without my students and colleagues. My real trophies are probably the same as yours, those letters and notes from students and parents. I keep them in a folder in my classroom during the year, and move them into a box in my house every spring. They are my personal trophy case. But everything that makes me a good educator, stems from the relationships I build with my students. The same way that you build relationships with the amazing programs all of you run. On a side note, while one day events are great, they are too flash in the pan to develop significant relationships and don’t immerse people enough to have the lasting impact we’d like to have. If you do have a one-day style event, I’m not saying you need to double your work and have it for more days, I’m suggesting that you use it as a meeting-place for people to get to know one another and then encourage and empower them to continue those relationships.
Speaking of the education world, let’s make outdoor skills part of the state physical education standards in a way that spirals them from the younger grades on up to high school. What Minnaqua has done to connect their program with elementary, middle and high school standards and benchmarks with science, math, social studies, English, is fantastic. It’s what teachers need to justify working with Minnaqua to school level and district level administrators.

Are you able to provide training and planning opportunities for teachers and coordinate with local conservation clubs and outdoor organizations to foster partnerships? Likewise, work with middle schools and high schools through subjects like math, biology, geography, history, economics, government, to serve as speakers and use real world examples from the field. It also might make sense to change the firearms safety certificate program to an “Outdoor Safety Certificate” to make it easier to get more of those programs into the schools. The Archery in the Schools program has been a tremendous success and it’s an opportunity underutilized to present bowhunting as an effective, humane, and truly organic way to obtain meat for the table. The Minnesota State High School Clay Target League has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, but is it translating into more duck and pheasant stamp sales? Are there more grouse and turkey hunters roaming the woods? I know there are people in this room with tremendous ideas of how to fold all of that together who have the tenacity to make it work even if they meet resistance at first.
We need to invite and support, rather than mandate, schools to promote the outdoors. It’s happening in small pockets, like my classroom, but it needs to be more supported and promoted, and by all the entities out there including local clubs and statewide organizations. You don’t have to do it all yourselves, but how can you start conversations between that local club and the middle school? How can volunteers at the local range work through the district’s community education program to get high school kids to learn gun safety? I know it’s not simple, but like the Little Red Book of Selling tells us, “The sale is yours for the asking; all you gotta do is ask for it in the right way.” That book is actually a really good teaching manual, because so much of what I do in class is sell my kids on working hard and enjoying learning. It really is a sales job. So much of what you do is selling people on what you need because they money isn’t otherwise there. Leave it to a teacher to assign books during a speech!

Let us continue to tie recruitment and retention to the rapidly growing farm to table movement and pull in advocates of those programs, some of whom are already coordinating with the schools. The agriculture folks have several programs in the schools, and not just rural areas. Seek out partnerships with numerous entities that work with teachers. STEM is what everybody is talking about in education these days. I teach social studies at a STEM school and have had to fight to demonstrate just how STEM-related history is…and it definitely is, especially through the process of inquiry. Hunting and fishing are part of our history and I bring that to my students, but back to STEM—hunting and fishing are about as STEM-related as you can get. There’s plenty of science, lots of use of technology and engineering, and the math is everywhere.

My point? All the talk and discussion that will happen here tonight and tomorrow are great, but you can’t walk out of here and do it all by yourself. As somebody who isn’t fortunate enough to live and breath recruitment and retention on a broad scale each day, I’m inviting you to continue to engage us and seek out those who you either weren’t sure about, assumed wouldn’t be interested, figured couldn’t possibly make it work logistically, never thought about in the first place, or who said no the last three times you asked. I’d love to help, and I’m already your number one fan. I’m doing my part big time with my two Minnesota kids and giving a smattering to a few dozen more in whatever pieces I can. Let’s put more kids and adults who are in the outdoors to work of recruiting others by continuing to give them opportunities to do so. Do you think we can build more mentoring opportunities by incentivizing it through special seasons or award programs? And does the DNR have to coordinate all of that or can we allow for local and statewide organizations to have more autonomy to do so with the support of local managers rather than a department wide initiative. I don’t know if that’s rulemaking or lawmaking but if it could work, let’s get on it. Mentoring, special hunts, even more bonus opportunities to those who actively recruit will engage those already involved because we don’t want to lose those who are already on board. I can help you with that too, just let me know how or connect me with somebody who does.

As I mentioned earlier, I almost faded from the outdoor scene when I was in high school. At South High School, nobody ever came to speak with us about hunting and fishing, but we did have somebody from PETA come and they actually made, what sounded to my 15-year-old brain, some points to ponder. Hunting and trapping are things of the past, there are more “humane” ways to get meat, do we even need meat when there are other forms of protein available? I could punch a million arguments in that today, but a lifetime ago was a different story. One thing that saved me was the relationships I’d built in the outdoors, especially my father. No amount of teen angst and rebelliousness was enough to make me want to reject the bond we had in the outdoors. The other thing was a well-timed column by Ron Schara, then the outdoors editor at the Star Tribune. Fresh off an animal rights protest in downtown Minneapolis, Mr. Schara addressed the hypocrisy of their movement. He reminded me, and I quote, “You are a predator. You can choose not to kill directly. But you do kill indirectly.”

Then he really hit me, “The animal rights people don’t seem to understand this, the oldest of laws. They shout animals rights on TV and worried people – who fear the loss of wildlife and wild places – willingly donate millions to their unnatural cause. They can rip a mink coat with razors, but they aren’t saving mink. If animal rightists really were concerned about mink, they would save the streams. If you want to save a muskrat’s hide, fill the marsh. If you want to protest the demise of wild places for wild things, that’s the right thing to do for animals.”
​
That changed my viewpoint and made me realize that I’m part of this system that’s truly protecting our natural resources. At the end of the day, that’s what all of this is about and why all of you do what you do. Like I said, preserving the outdoors for my children is my selfish lifelong priority. I can’t do it alone and neither can you. So let the conversations continue. Listen to and inspire each other here tonight and tomorrow. Then go back and keep those conversations rolling. Share them with those in your community, and ask others to help you. Send out those invitations I mentioned, and have extras handy so you can send as many as it takes. And continue being the matchmaker for all those of us searching for others to help us support you in our own little ways so that together, we can all make a big enough difference to preserve Minnesota’s heritage of hunting and fishing.

By Ron C. Hustvedt, Jr.

            For the second straight year, DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr met with interested citizens at Game Fair in the seminar tent on Waterfowler Hill to discuss new waterfowl regulations and answer questions of audience members. 

            Landwehr began with a synopsis of changes in the waterfowling regulations including the exapansion of open water hunting, the August goose season, the early date for duck opener and expanded possession limits.

            Questions from the audience covered a wide variety of issues and after the talk, Commissioner Landwehr spent some time with this Outdoor News writer answering several additional questions about waterfowl and conservation issues. 

Q: What’s your take on the possible impact on the state wood duck population as a result of this year’s early opener combined with expanded limits?  

A: The same question came up last year with the early season and the bag limit. I don’t think the possession limit is going to change anything. You know, most [waterfowlers] are hunting just a day or two days

Biologists will tell you they’ve been monitoring populations forever and harvest forever and they have never seen any impact on our population as a result of the seasons.

They are actually, as a result of the expansions we started last year, doing more leg banding of wood ducks. For instance, they were banding them in Lac qui Parle right now. We are trying to get better information over the next few years so that if there is any impact, we can find that out.

            Q: Is this largely for the purpose of getting more people involved in waterfowling?

A: It’s some of that. Part of it is that is we raise a lot of blue-wing teal and wood ducks here, and if we open the Saturday closest to October 1st they are mostly gone. We’ve all seen this. You drive around at the end of September and you see all these ducks and get fired up. And then September 29 comes around, and a cold front comes through, and they all leave and hunters shoot them all in Iowa.

We could put a lot more pressure on blue-wings, and probably wood duck too, without having a negative impact on the population. So, it was a way to take advantage of that segment of species. It was a way to lengthen the season into an easier time for people to get out.

It just seemed like we have to be a little more hunter friendly with our regulations to make sure people keep participating. If they have a bad experience on the opener, which frankly, is what we were having for a number of years, they just stop hunting.

Most people just hunt the opener or the first two weekends. The opener should be the best day of the year. We felt that, between the additional pressure the population could take, and being more friendly to people spending less time hunting, it made sense to do that.

Q: With the population cycles, if we are in a low point, some of these regulations are not sustainable correct?

A: It’s from a continental standpoint, not a state standpoint. When we have a dry period it doesn’t mean the ducks just disappear. They move into North Dakota, South Dakota or Canada. The federal framework is what we operate under and most states just take the federal government offers. They don’t tweak it like we do. Minnesota has a history of being very conservative. We always exercise more restrictions on ourselves.

So if, say if the blue-wing or wood ducks showed a long-term decline, I would assume the federal government would put restrictions in that because it’s a continental change it won’t be just a state change.

It’s really challenging from one year to the next looking at waterfowl population data in the state to make any hard and fast conclusions because it is so variable depending on the weather that year, the climate the amount of rain and just the timing. This year there was still snow on the ground. The birds might not be there and the year before we had 70 (degrees) in March.

The population information is a good indicator to monitor, but it’s most valuable over a period of years. Not just from one year to the next.

           

Q: Did you talk about being more conservative with the three-day possession limit or just take what the Federal government gave?

A: There was certainly discussion. We have a waterfowl committee and they are the ones who talk about it and make a recommendation to me.

I used to be a member of a flyway council technical committee so I’d go down to these meetings and sit for six days. You can’t believe how languished and debated those get over every single thing is, so you can bet they did that.

The thing that always strikes me too, and it’s always a little bit of a puzzler, is that pheasant populations go up and down, so do grouse populations, and you have the same season structure year in and year out.

I don’t know what it was 50 years ago that led us to believe that we have to chase duck populations. When they go up harvest goes up. Because the population is a function of weather, and we know it’s not really a function of seasons, as long as you have a reasonable season.

Part of me wishes we could just [have a] five-bird bag limit and 60-day season, and keep it the same year after year. Anytime you change regulations you create confusion.

Q: Do you see the day when we have essentially twice as many duck hunters as we do now?

A: I think the highest number we had is 140,000, and it was for a very short period of time. Last year we had around 77,000. I doubt we’ll ever double that number. I’d be quite pleased if we can get to that 120,000 range.

I think that, the resource that is out there in terms of habitat, hunting opportunity, and ducks—could certainly sustain 120,000 duck hunters. And I think there are people who say they don’t want any more duck hunters out, there’s already enough competition and that’s a legitimate perspective, but I think it’s important for the future of the sport that we have as many hunters out there as we can sustain.

Q: Is there concern about the precedent for allowing cutting and grazing on Wildlife Management Areas that are supposed to be protected?

A: I think what people have to remember is that cutting and grazing are not being done to help farmers. The primary purpose for cutting and grazing is that it helps the grass.

So we happen to have acres that need management and we can burn them and we spray them but other than that we don’t have any tools unless we have grazing and haying—both of which can accomplish some of the same objectives as fire—getting rid of woody vegetation for example, but they can also be used all summer long.

Fire can only be used by June 15 and then we are done. So a year like this, where we had three or four weeks of opportunity to burn, a lot of the places didn’t get done and you have to wait another year. 

These can grow into trees in a number of years and if you can’t get in there you lose the ability to manage it and it becomes more expensive to cut the trees and restore it.  Grazing can be done all season long, and in addition, it removes wooden vegetation and also has the feature of hooves on the ground, which is a very natural thing on the prairie because the bison used to do that.

It gives you the effect of controlling the vegetation and disturbing the ground, which is very good for prairies. So when we talk about opening land up to haying and grazing, it’s done first by what lands would benefit from that action and then lets make it available.

Q: In a DNR wetland tracking report, it estimated that overall wetland areas increased by 2,000 acres but that was mostly ponds or wet areas that are farmed during dry periods. The actual amount of true wetlands is declining. How can that be reversed?

A: We still have in Minnesota, two of the strongest wetland laws in the country. That’s the Wetland Conservation Act and the Protected Waters Inventory. We still have those two.

The Wetland Conservation Act, passed in 1991, was intended to be the safety net that caught those wetlands that fell through all the other programs. So the Federal 404 program (Clean Water Act): if it didn’t prevent a wetland from being drained, the Wetland Conservation Act would. If the Swampbuster [Act] didn’t catch a wetland, for some reason or another, the Conservation Act would. So we still have the best regulatory framework in place.

Now, there are still wetlands that are being drained, we know that. We restored 50,000 acres of wetland in the last decade. So we should have seen a bigger increase. It means we are losing wetlands elsewhere. The ones they farm in dry times that go wet again, those are totally legal. It’s when you ditch it or tile it or you do something like that and actually eliminate the wetland.

In theory there shouldn’t be a lot of that going on and BWSR website they track the wetland losses based on permitted and unpermitted activities. I think when you put those numbers together they don’t always match up very closely, so I think that the suspicion is, and I suspect that it’s right, that there is some wetland drainage going on that’s not being caught by the Wetland Preservation Act.

The federal government hasn’t really ever chosen to be aggressive in preventing wetland drainage. The one tool out there, Section 404, The Clean Water Act hits some challenges in the Supreme Court in the last decade, where isolated wetlands are not considered part of the United States. So their utility for wetlands protection has dropped off.

I think we as a society have always been reluctant to get on private landowners for what they do on their land and in the last two decades what we’ve seen is an effort to incentivize them do the right thing rather than penalize them for doing the wrong thing.

So I think, looking forward, we need to make sure that we continue to have good enforcement of the Wetland Conservation Act, but I think that incentives like wetland restorations like we are using right now are just going to have to ramp up. 

You can see a lot under CRP and this could be something that contributed to it.”  A lot of wetlands were restored on CRP when it was put into place in 1985 and after. It’s legal to drain those wetlands, because they were only restored by the farmers with the acknowledgement that they could drain them later on.

We have 1.3 million acres of CRP in this state, and I’m not sure how many acres are wetlands, but many acres that are, we could see a huge loss. We are seeing a grassland loss, we could see a wetland loss associated with that.

So it goes back to the notion of prairie planting we have to be deliberate about putting wetlands and grasslands out there and we have to give them permanent protection, because this 10-years at a time stuff is for the birds.

Or, actually, not for the birds. 

I'll let the video speak for itself, but this Minnesota boy had some big time Wisconsin fun on the state's largest body of water known as Lake Winnebago. I stayed in the Fond du Lac area and fished with Troy Peterson of Mr. Bluegill Guide Service and we had a blast. Watch for a walleye video from this day to come out in the upcoming weeks. 

I had a blast fishing on Lake Superior with my wife's uncle Dave DeLisle and his brother Rich DeLisle (my father in-law). We caught some nice lake trout and I learned a new tactic using "Bobbing Sticks." It was a blast and I made a video about it in addition to writing about it in the June edition of Minnesota Sportsman magazine. Check them out here. 

So it's not my nice Canon, but my 4S iPhone is churning out some nice pics. What is definitely helping are two apps. One is Lightbox which takes far superior first photos compared to the standard Apple app. The next is Snapspeed which allows me to feather the final product OR it lets me blow it out with colors or effects. So far those are the two most impressive apps I like and they go well together. How about you? Any recommendations? Try it and share what you shoot.

In the past months I think I've made a dozen videos for various purposes. Several were for school related events, classroom tools and education related presentations. Others were for WriteOutdoors.com related purposes. I made two videos for the DNR, two for a major fishing event, and three for Game Fair/Armstrong Ranch Kennels. I also shot this quick fishing report for Bryan "Beef" Sathre. See all my videos on the WriteOutdoors Channel at www.YouTube.com/WriteOutdoors