North Dakota's wide variety of landscapes provides a friendly home for a diverse group of wildlife. Its abundant natural resources have instilled a culture of conservation and a love for hunting and fishing that spans generations of North Dakotans. Terry Steinwand, director of the North Dakota Game & Fish Department, joins Gov. Burgum to talk about what the department does to manage these natural resources and work alongside the state's hunters and anglers. Interested in what you heard on this episode? Learn more at gf.nd.gov
North Dakota's history is full of legendary people, and today North Dakota is a place where anyone can be legendary.
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, once said, Far and away, the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
This is a show about people doing just that, for the people of the great state of North Dakota.
North Dakota is smack dab in the middle of the North American continent, with a wide variety of open prairies and rolling hills, forested valleys and mighty rivers, wetlands and bad lands, and even bigger skies than our neighbors to the west, in my opinion. and even bigger skies than our neighbors to the west, This landscape provides a friendly home for a diverse group of wildlife.
Directly in the path of the Central Flyway, with millions of migratory birds flying overhead, North Dakota is home to some of the best waterfowl habitat on the continent.
And it's not just for the birds.
Species of all kinds in the air, in the water, and on land flourish here.
In fact, North Dakota has more state and federal wildlife refuges than any other state in America.
Our abundant natural resources have instilled a culture of conservation and a love for hunting and fishing that spans generations of North Dakotans.
Hundreds of thousands of men and women apply for licenses to hunt and fish in North Dakota every single year.
This active landscape provides a vibrant and intricate backdrop for today's guest who is charged with managing these resources and working with the sportsmen who enjoy them.
Terry Steinwan, director of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, has been helping manage our state's wildlife for 40 years, starting with the department when he was still in college at the University of North Dakota.
As a biologist, he served as the chief of fisheries before taking the helm as director of the department, a position he has held for 13 years.
On this episode, we'll cover all aspects of hunting and fishing in North Dakota.
We'll learn about opportunities for big game hunting, discuss a day that many consider to be an unofficial state holiday, and hear how communities of all sizes benefit from our wildlife tourism.
Let's start with North Dakota's status as a fishing destination and the work that Game& Fish is doing to support our populations.
Here's Doug Burgum and Terry Steinwand.
Terry, great to be with you.
Thanks for joining us on the show.
You and I have some in common.
We both grew up in small Class B towns in rural North Dakota.
You grew up in the central part of the state where you developed the love of the outdoors at an early age.
But just tell us a little bit about growing up and what got you interested and what got you to spend an entire lifetime with wildlife.
Well, you know, Governor, looking at it later, 65 years later, I wouldn't have changed a thing from my childhood.
We didn't have an awful lot, but I didn't know it at the time, and I probably wouldn't be where I am now if I did know that I didn't have it.
But, yeah, I grew up in rural Garrison, North Dakota, small grains farm, cattle, hogs, chickens, geese, ducks, you name it, we had it.
And that's really where I did develop my love of the outdoors and hunting and fishing.
I know some people don't like it when I say this, but Gosh, I learned to shoot by shooting frogs in the slough behind the barn with my BB gun, going out and hunting Richardson ground squirrels in the pasture, going out with my dad deer hunting.
He didn't do an awful lot of upland bird hunting, but that's really where I loved it.
And that's what's gorgeous about North Dakota.
Even though we're becoming more urbanized, we're still a rural state and there's wide open spaces.
And I think that's really the attraction for everybody in North Dakota.
I've always said that close your eyes.
I envision being in a world without any sound out there, not a sparrow chirping without the geese flying, without any of that.
It would be pretty boring to do that.
If you grew up in North Dakota, I guarantee you'd miss it.
So, yeah, that has really, I guess I would say, fashioned my life and my passion for the outdoors in North Dakota.
Well, I can relate directly that Spark here in the outdoors, I was walking into the Capitol the other morning on one of our first nice spring days and I could hear geese honking and I couldn't see them and I couldn't see them and then suddenly behind the Capitol came this big V formation flying straight north on the east side of the Capitol building heading up and it was just fun to make that connection before you step into the building.
Absolutely.
And being, I would call us a destination for waterfowl.
We're in the prairie pothole region.
We're the number one duck producer in the United States, and we're pretty close to the producer for the North American continent.
So we have an awful lot to be proud of, and we have an awful lot to give out there for residents and non-residents.
And tell us then, for your early interest growing up on the farm, went to, kept that going through your education, and tell us a little bit about how you ended up in this lifetime career with North Dakota Game and Fish.
Right.
Well, and I went to the University of North Dakota.
Of course, I'm a typical teenager.
I don't want to be too close to home.
I want my independence.
So I went to University of North Dakota, and at that time, just a tremendous Fish and Wildlife Management program.
Not a four-year program.
Still is not a four-year program.
It's actually a five-year program, and I didn't go the John Belushi course, but I was darn close to it at times.
I finally did get my Fish and Wildlife Management Bachelor of Science.
And I figured, gee whiz, I want to go a little bit further.
And at that time, the Chief of Fisheries, Dale Henniger, said, hey, if you want a job with us, son, you better get a master's degree.
So I went and got a master's degree, and they didn't have Fish and Wildlife, so it was just general biology.
But while I was going to school, I actually worked as a temporary for the Game and Fish Department out of, at that time, Spiritwood Lake.
We don't have an office there anymore.
It's in Jamestown, about 20 miles north of Jamestown.
And other than my two years of masterwork, I basically worked for the department since 1976. I started in 1982 on a full-time basis as a Garrison Diversion Biologist, working in the Garrison Diversion Unit, Fisheries Issues, Biota Transfer, which was formative in my life also.
And in 2000, I was then appointed as a Chief of Fisheries for the North Dakota Game and Fish.
And in 2006, I was fortunate enough to be appointed by then Governor Hovind, now U.S. Senator Hovind, To the current job I'm in.
And thanks to you, Governor, I'm still in it.
Yeah, reappointed.
So you're doing a great job.
Thank you, Terry.
And tell us more about, again, for someone who loves fisheries and loves fishing, what over your career, while we've seen a change in North Dakota, because fishing in North Dakota is so fantastic right now, but tell us a little bit about when you started, how many lakes we were stocking, how many lakes actually served as places where people would fish, and where we are today.
When I started in 1982, we probably had about 140 to 150 active recreational fishing lakes.
And there were some good ones.
Lake Sakakwe has always been good, Lake Oahe, the Missouri River.
Actually, Devil's Lake wasn't that great at the time.
It was about 40 feet, well, not 40, about 30 feet lower than it is right now.
And there was a boom in the late 70s, early 80s of these jumbo perch.
It was nothing to catch a 2 1/2 pound perch out of Devil's Lake.
But there weren't many places like that.
Well, when I took over as fisheries chief in about 1990, we were in the midst of a drought.
It was really tough.
We had dropped substantially in the number of fishing waters that we were able to actively manage.
And then Mother Nature decided to open up the skies in July of 1993, and we've really been wet ever since.
But we currently manage about 450 fishing lakes across the state.
That some were actually somebody's deer hunting and pheasant hunting spots in 1990 that are now about It's an opportunity for fisheries, but certainly not an opportunity for the landowners that had some land flooded.
You feel bad for them, but in the meantime, we took advantage of an opportunity and developed into a tremendous fishery.
So think of that with 400. If a North Dakota citizen went to a different lake every day in North Dakota, it would take you a year and a half before you'd even touched every lake.
And some of these lakes are so huge, you wouldn't even have seen a corner of them in that time frame.
So...
Incredible, incredible resource we have.
And last year, we saw a record, one of the longstanding records broken with a walleye.
Tell us a little bit about that and tell us what you think about 2019. Are we going to see any more records broken this year?
Well, yeah.
I guess I'll start with the first request you had.
We had a walleye record broken last year that had stood since 1959. That record was from Wood Lake in 1959, and there was always some question about whether that was a legitimate state record.
A 15-pound, 13-ounce walleye was taken right outside the Fox Island ramp.
And the story we've heard on that is this individual and his family were getting ready to load up their boat, come back.
Well, of course, it's a pretty busy spot, so they dropped a guy off to put the pickup and back the trailer in.
And they said, well, we might as well.
We're going to wait here.
We might as well do a little fishing.
As they were waiting for the guy to back in the trailer, this guy caught the state record walleye.
And from our spring netting from last spring, we know there are bigger walleyes out there up in Lake Sakakwe and also Lake Oahe.
So just because that rick has been broken, it doesn't mean it's going to last for another 50 years.
There are some bigger fish out there.
Oh, that's exciting.
And, of course, when we have all these fish and all these great fish, that just doesn't happen by accident.
It happens because we've got an incredible stocking program and a unique partnership with U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
And tell us a little bit about all the hard work and the amazing work and the work worth doing that's going on with your team to make sure that these fisheries all stay strong and vibrant.
That is tremendous.
Of course, we don't stock every water in the state.
That's just not feasible.
At some, we work with the Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation for water level management.
But for the most part, when I first started, we had a state fish hatchery, again, at Spiritwood Lake where I started.
And we had been operating a state fish hatchery since, I won't say statehood, but since Game and Fish Department was actually created back in the 1930s.
And it wasn't necessarily all that efficient.
There's two national fish hatcheries in North Dakota, the Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery and Valley City National Fish Hatchery.
We figured, why should we both be having fish hatcheries here?
How about we collaborate?
So in 1992 or 1993, after a few years of basically negotiating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we closed down our state fish hatchery And went into agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that said, we'll go out, we'll collect the eggs for you, we'll bring them into the hatchery, you raise them up, you put them in the brewing ponds to grow them out to about two inches or so, we'll distribute them back out to state waters.
And that has worked tremendous since that time, and tremendous in terms of we're getting more walleye out there, more northern pike, sometimes bluegill crappie.
The biggest part is though, it only costs us as a state $500,000 a year to do what we do out there in gathering, distributing fish.
The next closest state And they all have state fish hatcheries, is $2 million.
So we do it for a quarter of the cost of any other state, at a minimum, and probably even less than that in some other states.
And we're pretty proud of that.
And we do some so-called horse trading with other states when it comes to muskie and stuff like that, too, that we may give them some walleye fry or walleye fingering, and we get trout or we get muskie back in return.
But again, the only cost to us, it's not a cash outlay cost, it's an operational cost, traveling to get them and then bringing them back.
So we've got a small, efficient operation, but a tremendous scale.
Maybe give listeners a sense of exactly some of the quantities that we're doing on stocking in a year.
Right.
Again, I'll give the Fish and Wildlife Service and my team an awful lot of credit for this, but As of last year, in 2018, 10 million walleye fingerlings were stocked across the state.
And the request is about the same as Israel, and I'd be willing to bet they do it.
They perform the same way.
Of course, some of that is due to Mother Nature.
Some of the failures can be attributed to Mother Nature also, because you need that water to warm up for the food production for the young fish to survive and then grow up to the size that we like to stock them out at.
But Yeah, 10 million walleye, which is always the largest request we have.
Depending on the year, it can be 400,000 to 500,000 Chinook salmon.
It's 400,000 this year.
And last year, we took 2.2 million eggs.
And of some of those, we gave to Montana because they couldn't get enough.
We gave some to South Dakota because they didn't get enough.
And again, it's a sharing.
We're sister states.
If you're running short, we're going to help you out.
If we're running short, hopefully you'll help you out.
And they have.
So it really is a great thing.
And from a wildlife biologist standpoint, you make this all sound simple, but when we're talking about gathering eggs, tell us about someone out here wrestling a 29-pound northern pike female to get some eggs.
I mean, this has got to be an interesting aspect of the job.
It is.
And typically, of course, we have nets in right now looking for northern pike.
If anybody's been out in the water, it's not 70-degree water out there.
It's extremely cold.
And you hit it exactly on the head.
You get a very slippery 20-pound northern pike female trying to what we call strip the eggs out of her.
You better have forearms like Popeye and make sure you tuck that head under your arms so they can't wiggle out.
But that's part of it.
I'm surprised we don't have more carpal tunnel syndrome than our fisheries people, because I've done all of this in my early part of my career, and it's extremely cold, so we're very, very careful.
We never put anybody in a boat by themselves, because if they'd fall overboard, we'd probably never find them again.
After a great season of ice fishing and warmer water on the way, one of North Dakota's most unique angling seasons is upon us, paddlefish snagging.
If you're not familiar with the paddlefish, I'd encourage you to find a picture.
Words don't do it justice when describing this unusual creature.
The state record paddlefish was just snagged three years ago, weighing in at 131 pounds and nearly 6 feet long.
If you want to get in on the action, the paddlefish snagging season starts May 1st.
North Dakota is also a destination for its hunting opportunities.
With deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, ducks, geese, turkeys, pheasants, and a whole host of others, people from all over apply for licenses from the Game and Fish Department for the opportunity to hunt in North Dakota.
In order for these hunters to have a successful hunting season, the department must closely monitor factors that can harm our wildlife populations.
This includes habitat management and taking steps to prevent illnesses like chronic wasting disease, or CWD, a disease that can decimate herds of deer, moose, and elk.
It's a daunting task, but Terry and his team are working hard to keep North Dakota's wildlife healthy and plentiful.
Let's flip over to hunting a little bit, because, of course, we've got small game, large game, hunters of all ages and all, you know, genders and sizes in North Dakota, and it's part of the North Dakota culture, but just give us some stats.
I mean, of course, the thing when people think hunting, they always think about hunting in the fall, and deer hunting is one of the things that comes to mind.
And tell us a little bit about the outlook, and tell us about the number of licenses, and tell us a bit about some of the challenges that we are facing as a state.
Our deer population really took a nosedive after three consecutive very, very hard winters, and we're climbing our way back.
Last year we had about a little over 55,000 deer licenses available.
I would expect at a minimum we're going to have the same amount of deer licenses we had last year.
What's really exciting for this year is our moose and elk, especially moose.
We went up by about 130 licenses this year, and this is a species that a couple groups have petitioned to list for the endangered species list, and we're going, Good lord.
This population is expanding, and there's some landowners, tolerance levels are getting pretty low.
So we want to harvest that down to a manageable level anyway.
But it sounds like we've got 470 to 480 for each, for moose and elk.
And before anybody gets their hopes really high, we had about 20,000 to 22,000 applications for each one of those.
So the competition for getting one of those licenses is still pretty high.
And of course, if everybody is like me, and I believe they are, you kind of get tired of the robocalls on your cell phone.
You don't recognize the number.
You don't answer it anymore.
I will tell everybody, if you get a call or a number you don't recognize on September 1st of this year, and you've applied for bighorn sheep, You might want to answer it because when we make a decision, which is going to be the end of August, right around September 1st, we make personal phone calls saying, you were successful in your bighorn sheep application.
Where do you want to hunt?
If you're the first one, you get your choice of any units and everything.
And we're hoping we can have up to six this year, but it's not a guarantee.
Our pneumonia has stabilized, so we think we're going to be all right, but we won't know that until the end of August.
Well, those have to be fun calls to make.
Oh, they are.
I don't get to make them.
I make enough fun calls.
I let the bighorn sheep by.
I'll just have that fun.
And we're still talking about big game and beautiful western North Dakota pronghorn antelope.
Interest in that coming up.
I've had a chance.
Terry, you know I'm a bowhunter.
I've been bowhunting since high school.
And over the course of my life, I've had a chance to harvest two pronghorns in Wyoming and one in Montana.
I've never...
I've had a tag for North Dakota, but I know it's a very exciting hunt, as we used to call them, the North American speed goat, but fastest land animal in North America, and tell some people that maybe aren't around pronghorns a little bit about the species and what the hunt's like in North Dakota and how much interest there is.
Pronghorn, and it is a correct term, they are not a true antelope.
There are none in North America.
But it is an exciting hunt.
They were, like deer and a lot of other animals, were really hit hard by the harsh winters of 2009, 10, and 11. And even as far south as Wyoming, which is really known for antelope, it affected their population.
We've continually moved.
They've come back.
We've opened up more and more units every year.
I think it was right around 11,000 Applications we had last year for antelope or pronghorn.
So it is a real popular one.
And people have asked us, well, gee, why are they so fast?
They don't need to run up here.
There's certainly a coyote catch that can't catch them.
There's nothing here fast enough.
And what I've read is there's an evolutionary perspective there that when pronghorn were on the landscape in North America in prehistoric times, that there was actually a cheetah-like animal in North America also.
So that's where they developed the speed from.
And you don't find them in mountainous terrains.
You find them in the flat plains areas.
And they have good vision.
And when they see something that's going to endanger them, they're running, like you said, like a speed goat.
That's fantastic.
And while we're, you know, talking about hunting, kind of moving across the state, the Central Flyway, you opened up talking about that.
But, you know, we got some of the greatest waterfowl hunting in North America right here in North Dakota.
And it looks like we could have another good year shaping up for that.
We will be doing our wetland surveys relatively soon here, and it's just really an index of how does it sit, and you can pretty well correlate what your duck production is going to be after that, as long as you have good nesting habitat.
So you're right, we are setting up in the prairie pothole region, the Koto, which is just east of the Missouri River.
We're setting up for a pretty good year again, and we are a destination for non-resident waterfowl hunters.
I I've made friends out as far away as Florida.
An old football coach calls me every fall and says, well, is the mallard hunting going to be good this year, Terry?
I say, well, Paul, you've got to come up and you've got to find out.
And he comes up every year.
He almost lost his life a couple years ago because he capsized a boat on Lake Juanita near Gray City.
And he swore he wasn't going to come back, but he was back last year again.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
Like I said earlier, if we're not, we should be really proud of that mantle that we are the duck-producing capital of North America.
We wouldn't have a Game and Fish show if we didn't talk about pheasant hunting.
I know one thing that you love, like many North Coastans do, is getting out in the fall and hunting over the top of a great hunting dog across corn stubble and pheasants.
But how are things shaping up for 2019 for pheasants?
I think for the most part, we're going to be all right.
The southeast portion of the...
In about a month here, we're going to be going out in our crowing counts.
We'll have a much better idea how...
How many overwintered, I guess.
A little concerned about the southeast portion of the state.
They definitely had a long winter down there.
It was only six weeks of extremely cold winter, but here in Bismarck is a whole lot different down in Ashley, Wischick, Ellendale, and some of those countries, that country.
But they had a little tougher winter.
Although I was in Ellendale the other night, I seen plenty of pheasants, roosters and hens.
But with the storm that's come across the northern plains, luckily we're missing most of it here, but they're getting hit pretty hard down there again.
So the southwest part of the state should be good.
Again, we've lost an awful lot of CRP, but we have a program we've been working on for three years with USDA now called Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program.
It's just an expansion of CRP that we finally can get off the ground this spring.
And that should mean about 20,000 acres of plots plus habitat for the birds down there.
So we're looking forward.
That probably won't affect anything other than access this year.
But it will certainly affect habitat for 2020. And we're always looking way into the future as what does this mean for our kids?
What does this mean for our grandkids?
That's cool.
And tell us a little bit, we've got one of the challenges that's recently come into our state is chronic wasting disease.
And I know you and your team have been busy this spring trying to scientifically assess how big the threat is in different parts of the state, whether it's up in the northwest where we found a case.
But tell us a little bit about the challenge and the potential threats from CWD. That's an excellent question, Governor.
CWD, it's not a new disease.
About 50, 60 years ago, it showed up on the landscape in Wyoming and Colorado, and they've been dealing with it for that long.
Our first case was actually about 10 years ago in the south-central part of the state, Grant and Sioux County.
And of course, we immediately went into management action, tried to Not necessarily eliminate the herd, but keep that age structure of that herd down and baiting restrictions so you can limit that potential spread of that disease.
That has been pretty successful down in that part of the country.
In 2018, we had a CWE-positive mule deer way in the northwest part of the state, which wasn't totally unexpected because it was moving south from Saskatchewan and east from Montana along that highline portion of Montana.
We're surprised on that particular issue, but we did get a surprise in about late February, early March.
We had a landowner just still within north of the Missouri River, but within the extraterritorial portion of Williston.
Let's say they have a dead deer laying out here.
It was only about a half mile from our Williston office, so we went down and picked it up right away, and they thought it was a fawn.
It was so thin, emaciated, and small.
Well, it didn't look quite right, so they gave it to our veterinarian, and it came out as a chronic wasting disease positive deer.
It was a four-and-a-half-year-old white-tailed doe, and the maximum amount of time it took was probably 18 months.
The literature and the science tells us from the first time it's infected to where it would probably die.
It was the first confirmed mortality we've had of a deer in North Dakota.
I say confirmed because there probably has been other ones, but we've never confirmed that.
So we worked with USDA Wildlife Services to get a better sample up in that area, which we did immediately after we had the verification there was a CWD. And I'm happy to report that all of those samples came back negative.
None had CWD. I would ask you to allow me to fire my lift division chief because on April 1st he came in and said, they all tested positive.
Of course we're hanging our head and then he says, April Fooled.
He says, okay, we still got a legislature going on.
We can get your position eliminated, you know.
But it was good news in the end.
But what we do know, it's there, but it's in a very, very low prevalence rate, which is a good, good situation.
But we're going to take the necessary management actions to try to limit it to that.
So it's good news that it hasn't spread very far.
It's bad news.
We have it here.
And CWD is one of those where when it's on a landscape, you can't ever get rid of it.
And when a deer or a moose or an elk catch it, it's always fatal.
Conservation of our fish and wildlife isn't just important for its own sake.
This industry has a large influence on the economy, education, and well-being.
Thankfully, advances in technology have allowed the Game and Fish Department to deploy new devices and systems to help monitor populations and gather data that's essential for smart management.
But we also know that conservation cannot come from just a few biologists at the Game and Fish Department.
It must come from the people of North Dakota.
That's why Terry and his team have been so engaged with young people by hosting educational programs and going directly into schools to make the outdoors more accessible for all.
Sustaining and expanding the hunting and fishing industry is essential for many North Dakota towns.
Wildlife tourism has a huge economic impact on communities all around the state.
Whether you're in Garrison, which stakes a claim as the walleye capital of North Dakota, or Allendale, the pheasant capital, this influx of hunters and anglers can provide a huge boost to local economies.
So many of these small communities benefit from hunting, both from in-state, out-of-state hunters, but talk a little bit about the economic impact of hunting in North Dakota.
Right, and that's a great question, and I'm glad you asked it, because just last year, about every five years we try to do an economic study through NDSU Agriculture Economics.
What is the economic value of hunting and fishing in North Dakota?
And just last year, it was actually from 2017, but in December of 2018, we received the final report that the total economic value of hunting and fishing in North Dakota is $2.1 billion a year, and that's with...
Rollover and gross business volume and everything, but the direct expenditures were approaching a billion dollars.
And of that, about 60% of those expenditures occur in rural populations of less than 2,500.
So there is definitely an economic impact for hunting and fishing in North Dakota.
I will admit, hunting with the pheasant populations and deer populations coming down the last few years has dropped.
But that's more than been made up with fishing.
So it does happen.
Around 3,300 jobs created and about $48 million in state sales tax are created as a result of funding in fishing.
A lot of great programs going on in our high school programs, and I know some of those that you've been involved with include the archery program in schools and the new programs where we've got co-ed trap and skeet shooting coming up the high school level, but tell us about the exciting future for all these young future hunters.
Yeah, we've been doing that for quite a while.
Not the National Archery in the Schools program.
That's been about 10 years.
But as an example, where we can, we actually have fishing rods and fishing poles and equipment in libraries for somebody to check out if they want to go fishing.
We get that in every library we can.
What you were talking about in the National Archery in the Schools program is We've been doing that for about 10, 12 years now, I suppose.
And it started out, it was popular, and it's gone beyond our wildest imagination of how popular it could be.
I think we had about 130 youth between ages 8 and 17 or 18 in the first year.
We held it here in Bismarck at a local archery center.
Since then, we've actually had to move it up to Minot at the state fairgrounds.
Just this past year, I think last year we had right around 830 participants.
This year it was over 900. And I want to say 937 or 938, but unbelievable.
Again, you had mentioned the Class B atmosphere.
It's a lot of these smaller schools that come to these things.
But when I walked into that area, I went, wow, wow.
You think a Class B basketball tournament is exciting?
Come and watch this.
And there were about that many people in that building also.
It was absolutely crowded.
And these kids are good.
A perfect score is 300. I gave away the 10th place position, and this young man had a score of 290, and he had this dejected look on his face when he walked up.
And I says, well, congratulations.
He said, Gee, everybody must have shot good.
I got a 290. Well, I checked.
He had a 290. The highest score was 296, meaning he only missed by, with four arrows out of 30, once he went from the 10 ring to the 9 ring, only four times.
So just phenomenal.
And we're seeing the same kind of expansion on a clay target league.
I wish we could say we started it in North Dakota, but we didn't.
It actually started in, I believe, in Minnesota, but That has grown tremendously too.
They have it at Horace.
The state shoot at Horace in June.
And there's over a thousand students that do that.
And, you know, a similar story right there.
A perfect score is 100. I've watched a student shoot 100. Physically, you may be able to do it.
Anybody could be able to do that.
Mentally, when you hit that 99th target, you wonder, am I going to hit the 100th target?
And they just keep their focus.
So it's a great sport.
And I've been to a number of smaller schools where they say, and I say, well, how many of you hunt or fish?
They all hunt and fish.
In fact, a couple of them quit track so they could shoot in a clay target league.
That's how engrossed they are.
And these are all run by volunteer instructors.
We don't pay any of them.
It has to be sanctioned by the school.
So a lot of these schools are buying into it.
We wish the larger schools would buy into it a little bit more.
They haven't yet, but we're not going to quit on it.
Well, it's fantastic, and kudos to all those volunteers and volunteer coaches and parents and Everybody that's supporting all these youth programs in both archery and skeet because it's important to the future of the industry and future of the state of North Dakota.
One of the interesting things I've always enjoyed hearing about you, Terry, with all of the great biologists you have is how technology is coming into place and whether you guys are putting a collar on a mountain lion or an elk or a bighorn sheep or We're tracking even much smaller birds and animals, but tell us a little bit about the science that you do outside of the pure hunting and fishing and how that technology is adding to the knowledge base that we have in North Dakota.
We're constantly curious, trying to find out, again, how can we better manage these wildlife populations for landowners, for the public in North Dakota, for hunting opportunities, you name it, we're trying to find out.
Of course, we tag fish, and that technology hasn't really changed an awful lot in the last 50 years.
We're constantly changing.
As an example, we're tagging, for the third year now, a 40-plus-inch pike in Lake Sakakui and Lake Hawaii to say, how many trophy pike are out there?
Are we seeing a decline in the population?
To me, that's exciting, having a fisheries background, just seeing that information.
But what's really exciting, we radio collar an awful lot of animals, and it can be mule deer, it can be white-tailed deer, it can be moose, it can be elk, it can be mountain lions, it can be antelope, almost anything out there.
We do it with birds, with sage-grouse most recently.
The technology there has really changed.
About five, six years ago, everybody thinks of radio telemetry as you're out there with the antenna and saying, okay, can I find this animal?
We still use some of those because they're cheaper, but we've largely gone to global positioning systems, GPS collars, because we found they cost us a little bit more, well, quite a bit more, actually, but we can save 45% of the operational cost by going to those because you don't have to go out in the field as often to find it.
Most recently, about two months ago, we radio collared 90 elk in western North Dakota.
And we're starting to get some information back on that already.
What we found is some of those cows have actually moved into eastern Montana.
So we're really anxious to see when do they come back to North Dakota or do they come back?
We're almost positive they do, but we can't.
We can't be sure at this point in time.
But again, everyone is going to tell us what kind of mortality you have, what kind of survival, where do they move to, where are they going during hunting season, are they in protected areas, just a whole bunch of different things.
Again, to make it, I won't say easier, but for us to better manage that population to make sure the future in North Dakota continues to be bright.
Well, that's fantastic.
And also, I know that there's some deadlines coming up on licenses, and if people want to apply for a license online, tell us about where they go and where do they need to find the information about proclamations and all the seasons that are coming up.
Just go to our website, gf.nd.gov.
I believe we have the best licensing system in the nation.
It's extremely easy.
You go on there.
If you've been on there before, you type in your first name, your last name, your birth date, and the last four-year social security number.
It'll take you to whatever you have with Game and Fish and actually beyond that in some cases.
If you haven't gone, of course, you're going to have to register and it'll take you to those.
The application process or buying a license process is extremely easy anymore.
And the state legislature about four years ago changed it.
You don't even have to print anything out.
You can display it on your cell phone.
You can display it electronically.
I'm not technologically adept enough, so I print it out and then I take a picture of it, which is a real silly way of doing things, but it works for me.
Actually, the next application deadline is going to be for deer, and that'll be the first Wednesday in June.
I don't know what that date is off the top of my head, but we'll hopefully have that proclamation out soon, and as soon as we get that proclamation signed, it's going to go out, and you can do it all online.
That's one thing nice about having everything online.
We're constantly evaluating what's the age structure of our hunters and anglers out there.
So we can tell you that, well gee, most of our license buyers are between 20 or 40, or this is the amount between 60. It's a real-time information.
One thing we found out, and it's just a little tidbit of information, is we've seen it this year again on the Moose, Elk, and Bighorn applications.
We have it open for three to four weeks, and the first day or two is pretty heavy on applications.
It just kind of idles along.
We had 10,000 applications the deadline day for moose, elk, and bighorn.
And again, I think part of that, it's so easy to do it online.
Just hopefully something doesn't crash.
Technology isn't perfect, and it can slow down when you get that kind of load on it, but we got them all through.
That's great.
But I do sense in there a little encouragement that if you're interested in applying, don't wait until the last day.
As we wrap here, one of the things that we know is that we don't have all this, you know, the way we have great hunting and fishing in our state is because we've got great landowners.
And landowners, private landowners provide the bulk of the habitat in our state.
There's, of course, some public land and public habitat, but I think in our state it's 93% of the land in North Dakota is privately held, which is a higher percentage in private hands than many other western states.
And so, again, shout out to all those private landowners for the work that they do in terms of both providing hunting access and also, you know, maintaining the right kind of conservation practices to do that.
And then for our hunters and fishermen, I mean, through their work, the licenses that they buy and the contributions they make, they're the most generous donors to supporting conservation organizations and wildlife organizations and, you know, whatever those might be that are trying to, you know, promote practices whatever those might be that are trying to, you know, promote practices that support habitat and support
So it all works when we all are working together and you've had a chance to see that for all these years and you've had a chance to see it work and maybe you just want to close on some reflections on a 40-year career in wildlife management and what that means and what the public, your interaction with the public, what that's meant to you.
That's part of the beauty of the job.
They never taught me when I got out of college that, hey, a lot of your job is going to be working with the public.
Management of the wildlife is easy.
Management of the people is sometimes going to be a little bit more difficult, but you hit it on the head.
We don't always have the best relationship with landowners, but we absolutely appreciate and understand where they're coming from the majority of the time.
And to give you an example, on an annual basis, we sign about 2,000 private land open and sportsmen contracts, 2,000 separate landowners out there.
That want to work with us.
And then there are some that they want to work with us, but they don't want any pay for it.
Hey, just, we love doing this.
There's an awful lot of that, too.
So, yeah, you always hear about this rub between sportsmen and landowners, and it does occur at times, but it's really minor.
It's not nearly as big as you hear on the big stage that, oh, there's this big friction point between hunters and landowners, and there are in some cases, but For the most part, there has to be an absolute appreciation and thankfulness to the sportsman for the landowner, whether it be the access and the resource, because I've always said there's two things needed to have a successful hunt or a successful fishing trip.
One is a resource, which is our job.
The second is access, which is really, like you said, 93% of the time up to that private landowner, and please respect them and their land.
And Terry, thank you for the great career and maybe just a parting thought on what's been the most rewarding part of this career for you.
Wow.
That's a really good question.
I've thought about, I'll say at the twilight of my career, but I've said, you know, the most enjoyable part of my career, and again, probably the curiosity, the stuff I've learned, I've been that way since I can remember that.
I want to learn how nature works.
But probably the most enjoyable is working with the public, working with the people.
And somebody asks, what's the side of your job you don't like so well?
And I'd probably have to think back and say, probably working with the public and working with the people.
Because there can be some people that are really, really difficult.
But all joking aside, I'd have to say, working with the team members that I have, I might be director, I have to make the calls.
It's kind of like the old buck stops here type thing.
But without them, we wouldn't bear it at.
So Terry Steinwald or whoever else is sitting in this chair, We might get a lot of the accolades and we might get a lot of the blame, but I tell you what, all the accolades go to the team members of North Dakota Game and Fish and a lot of the public and the landowners that they work with.
Because without them, why would we be here?
I agree with you on that.
So thanks to you, thanks to your great team for all the work they do.
A small team having a big impact in a big state, doing great things and creating an opportunity for hundreds of thousands of people to get out and enjoy the great outdoors in North Dakota.
So thank you, Terry.
Thanks for staying curious.
That's one of our five cultural aspirations in the state of North Dakota because when times are changing, curiosity is the thing that keeps us learning and making better decisions tomorrow than we made yesterday.
And thanks for being such a role model for curiosity and thanks for all your service.
Well, thank you, Governor.
I appreciate it.
With management programs and staffing needs all over the state, the Game and Fish Department hires about 50 to 60 seasonal aides.
But Terry told us that these positions are so sought after that they often fill up by the middle of winter.
If you're interested in being part of the Game and Fish team or want to learn more about what was discussed on today's episode, go to gf.nd.gov.
And there are more ways to stay involved aside from hunting and fishing.
The Game and Fish Advisory Board is one of more than 150 boards and commissions in North Dakota partnering with state agencies, industry representatives, and citizens.
The Game and Fish Advisory Board has upcoming vacancies, and if you or someone you know is interested in serving on one of these boards, you can check out our website, governor.nd.gov slash boards.
Tune in next time when we'll dig into one of Governor Burgum's five strategic initiatives, tribal partnerships.
Scott Davis, Executive Director of the North Dakota Indian Affairs Commission, will join us to talk about the exciting progress being made as we work to strengthen government-to-government relationships for the benefit of all North Dakotans.
