Thousands of Acres Added to PLOTS

Ron Wilson

The North Dakota Game and Fish Department’s Private Land Open To Sportsmen program has been around for nearly three decades.

Marked on the state’s rural landscape by familiar triangular signs turned upside down, the program, in its simplest form, is an agreement between the Department and private landowners to allow walk-in access to hunters willing to venture beyond roadside ditches.

For the last handful of years, Game and Fish featured about 800,000 PLOTS acres around the state.

With an agency goal of boosting that total by 20,000 acres for 2024, the Department’s private land initiative staff did just that … and kept going.

“Our field staff worked hard with great and willing landowners to increase the total by about 36,000 acres this year,” said Kevin Kading, Department private land coordinator.

“So, heading into fall we’ll have about 836,000 acres on the landscape.

“We’ve got a lot of great landowners who work with us every year.

We’ve had landowners in the program for 20 years or more, and we get new ones every year,” he added.

“The goal is to keep growing, try to find as many opportunities as we can for hunting access and additional habitat on the landscape.”

With habitat conditions not where wildlife managers would like to see them over much of the state, adding several thousand acres of habitat to the mix is certainly a plus.

“We’re always looking for ways to incentivize more habitat on the landscape and we do that by working with different partners to help landowners find the right programs, cost-share assistance, or whatever it might be, to put more habitat on the ground.

That’s been a big push for us the last few years,” Kading said.

“The PLOTS program is not just for pheasants.

With some of these new acres, there’s new habitat that will be great for other upland birds, big game hunting and some really good waterfowl hunting opportunities with the small wetlands in crop fields and grasslands.”

Kading said the PLOTS program features about 25,000 acres of access for waterfowlers, which allows hunters to drive into fields to set up their decoys and unload their gear.

These tracts are identified with a special green “Attention Waterfowl Hunters” sign, allowing driving access.

One thing hunters will notice this fall, starting with the new PLOTS acres, is fewer PLOTS signs.

“Every PLOTS tract is still going to have signs on them, but there might not be a sign on every little zig and zag and every little corner because a lot of people are identifying these areas and their boundaries on their phones and phone apps,” Kading said.

“But the thing to keep in mind is the time and cost savings that goes along with that, which will be redirected toward increasing hunting access and adding more acres of wildlife habitat.”

While the Game and Fish has for 27 years printed a PLOTS Guide and did so again this year, that may come to an end sooner than later, considering the ability to access the guide electronically has increased over time, while the demand for a printed guide has not.

“I compare this to going on a family vacation back in the day to now.

When was the last time you drove on a family vacation and someone is holding a big map giving directions?” Kading said.

“Today, people are using their phones or navigation systems in their vehicle.

That’s kind of the way things are going with this as well.

There just isn’t a high demand for the PLOTS Guide in the printed version anymore.”

While change is likely in how hunters find PLOTS tracts locations down the road, what remains the same, Kading said, is the respect that needs to be shown to these private lands made available to hunters.

“We don’t want to see the type of behavior that would influence landowners in the program to not want to be in it anymore,” Kading said.

“We ask hunters to pick up their empty shells, pick up their trash and other trash they see, keep gates the way you found them, those types of things.

And if you see some activity that doesn’t look right, just let us know and we’ll do our best to try to find out what’s going on.”