North Dakota Outdoors: your guide to exploring wildlife management areas

BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) – The North Dakota Recreation and Fish Division manages 235 wildlife administration areas statewide, which embody round 220,000 acres.

“The principle function of a wildlife administration areas is to handle for wildlife. We attempt to have the best populations we will on these areas and the very best habitat. We do produce other actions that go on in a few of these administration areas, akin to shore-fishing and boat ramps and gun ranges, however our primary goal is wildlife administration,” mentioned Levi Jacobson, ND Recreation and Fish wildlife useful resource administration supervisor.

Jacobson says spring and summers are busy with seeding grasses, prescribed burning, planting bushes and meals plots, establishing grazing rotations and normal upkeep to make sure wholesome habitats for wildlife and wildlife manufacturing.

“We now have numerous various kinds of habitat. We now have grasslands, we’ve woodlands, we’ve wetlands. We attempt to handle for every kind of various species, whether or not it’s deer, turkey, pheasants, waterfowl and grouse. We preserve the very best habitat we will to maintain populations for public looking,” mentioned Jacobson.

There are guidelines and rules folks have to observe on wildlife administration areas.

“One of many huge ones is not any canine coaching on the WMAs, we don’t need to disturb these ground-nesting birds. And there’s no fireworks, they’re prohibited year-round. For a full listing of the foundations and rules you may go to our web site and discover that,” mentioned Jacobson.

Tenting is allowed on most WMAs.

“Most of them it’s restricted to 10 days at a time. Nevertheless, in some WMAs out west, there’s no tenting on Tuesday and Wednesdays. Campfires are allowed, however we simply ask folks to be cautious and observe the county guidelines so far as burn bans,” mentioned Jacobson.

There are capturing ranges on WMAs, too.

“There’s two right here within the Bismarck-Mandan space, one in Wilton, one in Riverdale, and in addition one in Williston. And these ranges are offered by us and so they’re free, open one year a yr. And the first objective of these is to maintain folks from goal capturing off of these capturing ranges on different areas of the WMAs,” mentioned Jacobson.

For extra data on wildlife administration areas, go to the Recreation and Fish Division’s web site at gf.nd.gov.

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