Prairie Sportsman

(geese quacking) (lighthearted guitar music) Carol Henderson, the Minnesota DNR's first non-game wildlife supervisor, is chiefly responsible for bringing back native species, that have vanished from our state. Like Trumpeter Swans, Paragon Falcons, and Bluebirds. Human intervention, reeked havoc on many of our creatures, including otters in the Minnesota River Valley. (bouncy piano music) Otter was distributed pretty much statewide originally, when in settlement times. And obviously, the habitat was better in Northern Minnesota, with more wetlands, more beaver ponds, and lakes, rivers. But they also were present out on the prairie, along the smaller rivers. Well, the Minnesota river and all the tributaries. During the 18 hundreds, there was incredible pressure for trapping, and virtually no regulations or restrictions, for seasons, or bag limits. And even a modest amount of trapping pressure apparently, caused the local population of otters, to become extirpated, by the mid to late 18 hundreds in Southwestern, Minnesota. Carol first noticed, that otters were missing from the Minnesota river in the mid 1970s, when he was assistant manager of the Lac Qui Parle Wildlife Refuge. And I met local conservationists like Ben Toma, at the Wilmer Sportsman's club. Then they were an inspiration because they had initiated lots of conservation projects. One of their themes was "Let's Put Something Back", and I thought, wow, that's a really nice conservation message for anybody. And as I got more involved with my work at Lac Qui Parle, you know, I realized what animals were present, and which ones apparently were missing, that the Otter was missing. And then when I was selected to join the DNR, as the non-game wildlife program supervisor in 1977, that changed my whole perspective in terms of the potential for making a difference in bringing back wildlife species that we may have lost, or that species that had been greatly decimated in the past. Carol's new duties at the DNR St. Paul headquarters included tracking furbearer species like, Otters, Bobcats, and Martins, and then reporting to the federal government on the number of pelts sold by Minnesota trappers. And that's when I learned about a wonderful PhD dissertation from the university of Minnesota, by Evadene Burris Swanson about "The Use and Conservation of Minnesota Game from 1850 to 1900. And it gave a history of what happened to the Bison, to the Elk, to the Caribou, to the Beaver, to the Otter. Even it had information about the disappearance of passenger pigeons from Minnesota. From that dissertation, I've obtained records, fur buyers from Southwest Minnesota, who had actually been buying otters from local trappers, during the middle to later 1860s and seventies. So I knew they were originally from that region. And that's where I thought maybe what we should do, is try a restoration project for otters, as one of our first efforts. Because I was on a statewide budget of no more than 25 or $30,000 per year, including my salary. I didn't have much money to work with. So if I wanted to do something, I had to do a low budget approach. So I came up with a strategy of how to get some otters, using my knowledge of who the otter trappers were in Northern Minnesota, because they had to report to me every year. So I sent a note out to the successful otter trappers, and just introduced myself and said, I have a background in and trapping. I grew up trapping as a farm boy in Iowa, and I was familiar with what needed to be done and what, in terms of what kinds of traps could be used. And we ended up suggesting a small coil spring mink trap, which wouldn't necessarily hurt their feet when they got caught. We got 11 people approved to get permits, to catch otters for us. And so they were gonna get $150 a piece. I still needed the money to pay for that. So the Wilmer Sportsman's club offered $600 to cover four otters. And then I had friends in St. Paul Ottoman Society who were interested in this. So they offered $600. And then I went to the Minnesota Archery Association, and they had donated $600. So now I had $1,800 to bring back 11 or 12 otters that following year. (lighthearted guitar music) In November of 1980, a conservation officer who knew of the Otter restoration project, called Carol about an Otter in the officer's custody. There was a family that lived up on the Northwest angle, who had had a young Otter stay around their fishing camp all summer. They called him crazy, because he would jump in the boat, running around, and try to find minnows or fish that were lying around in the boat, then jump out. And he just totally lost his fear of people. When fall came, the owners of the resort were worried that the Otter was gonna get in trouble and get taken as a pelt. And so they tried to smuggle the Otter through customs. Well, they got caught and they confiscated this Otter. So they called me wanted to know if I could use the Otter. I said, sure. I'll take the Otter. We'll release him out at Lac Qui Parle. I got the Otter. And then I had to figure out how do you babysit an Otter overnight before I could get out to Lac Qui Parle? So I went down to the local Vados bait shop here in the twin cities, and got an ice cream bucket full of lots of minnows. So I thought, well, what should I do? Well, how about if I just fill the bathtub, put the minnows in and just see if he's hungry? Well, I took him out of the cage, took him into the bathroom, shut the door. He went running around, and around, checking out everything, just incredibly curious. He was looking for doors. He pushed open the door to the towel closet, and I had to shut that. And then he tried to, he pushed open the door for the close shoot. So he could dive to the basement, but I had to slam that shut. Well, then he tried to push up the lid on the toilet, and that was the point where I had to shut that down. So anyway, at that point, he finally looked in the tub and saw all the minnows and he just floop. They move like they don't have a joint in their whole body. They're just fluid in their movement, just so graceful, incredible. And so aware of their surroundings. Well, he was just inhaling one minnow after the other, until there was only one left. The next day, Carol took Oscar to Lac Qui Parle. Let him there off by the water. He runs out in the water, he's there about, not hardly 30 seconds. And he comes back up to my feet with a bull head in his mouth, and proceeds to crunch down the bull head. I think they're so successful in their foraging for fish, that they don't have to spend a whole lot of time hunting for fish. So they have a lot of, what you might call play time. (upbeat music) Oscar was the first Otter released in the Minnesota River Valley. Over the next two years, 22 more otters were released to Lac Qui Parle in the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge. And we didn't need to release very many, because otters have a unique reproductive strategy called delayed implantation. They have their pups in the Spring, and then within a month or so they immediately re-mate, and get pregnant. But the eggs do not develop until the following Spring. So, you could say that a female Otter is either always pregnant or about to get pregnant. By having that kind of a bias toward catching the pregnant females. We knew that we weren't just releasing 22 otters. We were releasing a whole lot of otters through the following year, with the pups that the females would be having. In other states, they were putting radio transmitters inside the otters, and tracking their movements afterwards. Well, I didn't have money for that. I just trusted the otters to be smart enough to figure out how to make up on the Minnesota River, at Lac Qui Parle. The thing that was amazing about otters is that they're very doglike in their intelligence. They learn quickly, they're they're wonderful, brilliant animals. Of course, we didn't have radio telemetry to use for finding where the otters went, but we had subsequent sightings of people seeing otters playing out on the ice at Lac Qui Parle lake or on the Minnesota River. Someone who was spearing Northern's on Lac Qui Parle lake, and he was just bent over his hole in the ice, waiting for Northern to come by. And an Otter just exploded out of the open water, and looked at him a little bit. And then we it back down again and shocked, both him and the Otter, I think. People who still work out there have done Otter surveys, and found that the otters have basically moved up and down the river all the way down to Mankato, and up and down the various tributaries of the Minnesota. So that they're back where they once were over a hundred years ago. With two years of effort, and with the money I raised the first year, and then we scratched up enough money for about $1,300. The next year out of the non-game program from checkoff donations. For under $4,000, we did the entire reintroduction project to bring back otters in Southwest Minnesota. The most important thing about restoring some of these lost species is that, they may have been missing from our scene, from our state, for over a hundred years. We don't know what we're missing? We don't know what role those animals are playing in the ecological chain of things? in terms of the balance of nature or how they fill a role as a predator or pray species, and how they can just energize our lives and inspire us to do more good things for nature? (lighthearted guitar music)