📸’s from Rooster Road Trip Ep. 2: PLOTS Produces Pheasants! Check out the full photo gallery and watch Episode 2 at the link below!
Roosterroadtrip.org
Day two of our annual Rooster Road Trip found us putting eyes on a fresh horizon in western North Dakota as we linked up with North Dakota Game and Fish Department’s Upland Game Management Supervisor, Jesse Kolar.
If Jesse’s name sounds familiar, you’ve probably read some of his work within our Prairie Grouse and Pheasant Hunting forecasts. The guy knows his stuff and we were thrilled to be able to spend a day focusing on PLOTS properties while getting educated on all things upland birds.
To create public access and healthy habitat at a large scale in a state like North Dakota, where roughly 39.6 million acres of the total 44 million acres are comprised of private farms and ranches, you need willing landowners and effective programs that incentivize habitat conservation while also providing access. This is where North Dakota’s PLOTS comes into play.
Private Land Open To Sportsmen, better known as PLOTS, is a component of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department’s Private Land Initiative and represents more than 830,000 acres open to walk-in hunting access on private land. Since more than 93 percent of land in North Dakota is held in private ownership, working with landowners to manage wildlife, habitat, and access is incredibly important.
Pheasants Forever recognizes this and also sees the potential to help increase the total number of acres available. That’s why we have a team of private lands biologists in partnership with the Game and Fish Department who work to enroll not only high numbers of acres into PLOTS, but high-quality acres.
A huge thanks to our Rooster Road Trip sponsors: Federal Premium, SoundGear, Ruff Land Performance Kennels, Irish Setter Boots, Garmin Fish & Hunt, YETI, Orvis, Browning
