With the good numbers of birds being reported, our area is set to welcome many hunters to our public land again this fall!  Our group did some work on our local WMA’s during the summer.  Most recently a group of our members put new border signs on a new property off County Road 20 southwest of Leavenworth and northeast of Comfrey.  This will be called "Middle Creek-Addition.  It was donated to Pheasants Forever by the Frederick Family and is said to be ‘virgin ground’ which has never been tilled.  We hope to still have time to remove some barbed wire on the Bashaw WMA before hunting dogs are running through it this fall as well.  If anyone is willing to help, please let us know.  

During the summer we submitted proposals for a program called ‘Enhanced Public Lands Grassland Program."  The proposals were projects on our local public lands which we thought could use help with maintenance and enhancement of the land tracts.  We submitted multiple projects for consideration and have initially been told the projects will be accepted into the program.  The projects we submitted mostly focused on securing funding for removal of invasive trees to help reclaim grasslands that have been overgrown with brush and trees.   One tract in particular, that we hope gets taken care of asap, is the Verona WMA off County Road 22, South of Sleepy Eye.  This tract is a good example of how fast grassland can be overtaken by invasive trees, like the Siberian Elm.  If you know of other public lands which could use maintenance, please let us know so we can do our best to apply the projects to programs like this in the future.