In this episode of NDO Podcast we’re at Raab Wildlife Management Area visiting with Judd Jasmer, wildlife resource management supervisor, about the acquisition of this WMA, the rewarding work of transforming it and some of the other unique WMAs in his district.
Cayla: Welcome to episode 103. When did we get passed a 100? I guess.
Casey: That was Blake. Blake was 100.
Cayla: District seven. Yeah. So we're going around to the wildlife districts with some other episodes in between, but we're at district seven today with Judd Jasmer, the resource management supervisor for this district. You guys all have long titles?
Judd: Yeah.
Casey: Makes them sound important that way.
Judd: Yeah, exactly. It's just easier to say district supervisor.
Casey: Yeah. We're sitting on a trailer for SBS. Casey. Yeah.
Casey: Short, but sweet, side by side.
Cayla: Yeah. Outside at Rabb WMA, which we just took a nice little tour of. So we'll get the story on that. It's also the day that the president is supposed to be flying in, so maybe a short, brief interruption by a helicopter, we'll see and some chickens as well that you got here.
Judd: Hopefully he doesn't fly over and say we missed a spot of leafy spurge out there somewhere so.
Cayla: Well, yeah, thanks for being on Judd. Yeah, you can just start with a little bit of background and then like kind of how you got to this role and then what your role is now for the department.
Judd: Okay. So I started with the department in 2010. I was hired as an assistant biologist in Dickinson, actually under district six. District six was the only district with two offices, one in Williston, one in Dickinson. Kent, who recently retired, was the supervisor at the time. So we had 13 counties in district six. Basically, Kent would take the northern half and then I took a lot of the southwest. And then two years ago they kind of did redistricting, created district seven. And so now I became the district supervisor down here in Dickinson. And we manage eight counties in southwestern North Dakota. Basically, we have a little bit smaller district than other places. We only have 13 WMAs in those eight counties for just under 13,000 acres. But we are really spread out. We got one that's 20 miles away, which we're here today from Dickinson. And then we have some that are as far as like 220 miles down by Lemmon, South Dakota. They're in North Dakota, but by South Dakota. So really spread out.
Casey: Yeah. And part of the reason that we created another district is we had gotten this WMA that we're on Rabb and, and it was just got to be time. We had an opportunity with a position in the department that came open. We were able to move some stuff around and, and to get you a little help out here. And so we didn't add any new positions to create this district. We hired Judd as the supervisor, and then we're able to move a position to give him a biologist. So worked out pretty good.
Cayla: So it's just you and a biologist, and then probably some technicians.
Judd: Nope, we don't have technician though. We have two seasonals summer seasonals. Yep. So yeah, when I started here in 2010, it was basically me down here. So a lot of the weed spraying I started, I had a pickup and a four-wheeler and that's all the equipment I had. So did a lot of weed spraying a lot of oil and gas work up at Killdeer. But yeah, the addition of the, the second biologist really helped out with job duties and responsibilities. And I think we're doing a lot more things on the ground, being able to increase habitat and just get more things done with a couple more hands and personnel out here. So it's been good.
Cayla: I was just I know it makes sense, but I was just whining that like all we have wildlife districts and then we have fisheries districts, and then we have enforcement districts and like, can we just.
Casey: Make them all the same boundary?
Cayla: We can't. But I know.
Casey: Get's a little tough.
Judd: That's what they do in Montana, isn't it basically?
Casey: Kind of. Yeah, regions and stuff. They have more of a region and then yeah, but so maybe let's hit on this WMA the Raab Adam and Teresa Raab WMA. That was the people who originally owned and homesteaded this but were sitting in the yard of the WMA.
Judd: Yeah. So this was donated by Regina Roth in 2016 just under 1,200 acres. She donated it to the North Dakota Game and Fish Department. And the one ask she had was that it was named after her parents, Adam and Theresa Raab.
Casey: Two asks, to name it after them and keep up the yard and the house.
Judd: Yep. So there, there's a residence on the WMA and probably, oh, I would say seven outbuildings, two that are we use for equipment out here, which is kind of nice. And then some other miscellaneous outbuildings that we put a few things in, but so. But extremely nice yard trees that are 80-90 years old, really long. Nice driveway. One of those places that everybody comes to and wishes that they owned it themselves. So, but yeah, so.
Casey: And we do have a staff member that lives out here. They pay rent to live out here, but when you're going to keep up a house and a yard and, and then like you said, we've got some stuff stored out here. So it's yeah, it's nice to have a staff member that's, that's out here living on the place and kind of kind of just keeps an eye on especially the buildings and the equipment that are stored out here. But.
Judd: Yep. And then while the house was in really good shape, because when we obtained it, it had new siding, new windows, new roof on it. And actually, the inside was fairly nice as well. We did some remodeling, but it's in pretty good shape now. So it should, it should last a long time, depending on how much hail we get here. We've already had to replace the roof a couple times, I know.
Casey: Well, it's hard to write like that. This was a amazing gift that somebody gave the sportsmen and women in North Dakota, and that was part of part of the gift was to kind of try to keep up the yard and the and the house there. They had homesteaded on. And so, so it's hard not to oblige by that.
Judd: Yep.
Casey: And turn down and turn down 1,200 acres of a or 1,100 acres of WMA that people can now enjoy.
Judd: Absolutely. Yep. And being close to Dickinson, it's nice. Like I said, this is the closest one we have to Dickinson.
Casey: Yeah, the only one we have in Stark County.
Judd: Correct. Yep.
Casey: Yep. Yeah. Maybe hit on this WMA and what you've got going on since it first came about.
Judd: Okay. So we originally had about 500 acres of cropland out here that Regina had rented to one of the neighbors out here. And then it's nice because we also have about 400 acres of natives out here. Never been tilled, never been farmed. It's you know, we don't have a lot of natives left in North Dakota, so it's pretty important. And when we get 400 acres, that's a pretty good-sized chunk to manage.
Casey: And the interesting thing while we were going around it this morning, it's, it's not just unbroken, it's got some pretty good native components in it yet. Wildflowers and, and native grasses.
Cayla: Has Elisha been out here doing the survey of the natives.
Casey: I don't know.
Judd: So they came out here one year, I can't remember when it was. They didn't get out here till later in the summer and I think it was pretty dry that summer. And so they, they were out here for a day and then kind of gave up and said, yeah, we'll come back next year in the spring or something.
Casey: And okay.
Judd: So but I think they did come back out here the following year.
Casey: You got an inventory of it? Yep.
Judd: Yep. So but yeah, so we started out with about 500 acres of cropland. We've been picking away at that. In 2019 we seeded 110 acres of grass DNC mix.
Cayla: Never again.
Judd: Yeah. Never again. 120, 120 acres at 8.5ft at a time. So I was that was when I was by myself. So that was about three weeks’ worth of tractor time. But it was worth it in the end. So, but yeah. And since then, we're down to about 282 acres of active cropland. So far we've added 200 acres of new grass and planted around 24,000 trees out here. First tree planting went in 2019. It was about five acres. And then 22, 23 was the big push. We probably put, I suppose, 20,000 in that year. So that was a that was a week long process. We had the whole Dickinson office out here planting trees and so. But yeah, putting some valuable habitat back on the ground. We do some haying out here. We'd like to do some burning. We haven't yet out here. Southwest North Dakota is a little more difficult to do prescribed burns our weather window is really short. We don't get a lot of moisture. We are dealing with burn bands and stuff like that too. So but we do have some grazing. We're grazing the east side of the management area about 300 acres. We do a rotational grazing out there and we're still working on doing some water improvements to the WMA to have some cows on the west side of the management area. We did a big project in 2021, we worked with North Dakota Natural Resource Trust and Fish and Fish and Wildlife Service and added ten wetlands out here basically to get water in places that we've never had water out here and move cows around and get a little more rotations out there and get some hoof action on some of those natives that haven't seen ungulates in probably 50 years.
Casey: Yeah, yeah, we've got a pretty good chunk that hasn't been grazed for quite a while. And one thing about native grasses is you always need to kind of keep them, keep them reinvigorated, or keep some sort of management on them at some level or they, they late succession out.
Judd: Yep. And actually, I'm pretty surprised at this piece that we're sitting on now that, you know, there hasn't been management done to it for a long time and it, it hasn't reverted, you know. So it's, it's interesting, but it definitely needs some management on it.
Casey: So what, what's the next step? So when you say we've got some crop fields on here, how are those being handled.
Judd: So the way we do that is we have been doing 70/30 crop share in the past. We're getting down to, you know, 300 acres. And so, what we've been doing is renting those out using county rental rates. Eventually I would probably like to get down to 150 acres of cropland. Put the rest of those acres back into grass and habitat and then manage them with haying, grazing and burning, if we can.
Casey: Yeah. Because, I mean, this is an area that's big enough to have kind of everything on it. Yeah. Right. So like wildlife, you know, if you have 100 acres, it's probably not worth it to do half crop half in grass. You maximize production by putting it all into grass and then utilizing neighbor, you know, neighboring crop fields when they're harvested and things like that. But an area this big, you can incorporate some cropland and some food plots and really kind of bolster the wildlife capabilities of it.
Judd: Yeah. And basically, we're surrounded by ag fields, you know, so there's, there is food for wildlife elsewhere rather than on our wildlife management area. But we do like to sometimes leave food plots on the management area. Of course, we keep those critters there rather than in the neighbor's haystacks or, you know, causing problems elsewhere. But this one seems to be we're kind of secluded. We are we don't have too many neighbors real close by and, and so we don't have too many issues off the management area out here.
Casey: Yeah.
Cayla: You said this one was kind of fun because it was like starting from scratch.
Judd: Yes.
Cayla: Especially kind of times with your career. Like you get to just come on and yeah.
Judd: Yeah so this was actually the first, this would have been the first wildlife management area that during my career, we got basically brand new. The rest of them, you know, they've been managed for 30, 40, 50, 70 years. And then so this one was fun because basically it's going to be what you make it. Yeah, you're going to go through failures. You're going to go through, you know, like we went and looked at the one grass planting and I learned there that, you know, sometimes it works great, sometimes it doesn't. And then you go look at another one of the tree plantings. And that one, six, seven years old and trees are eight feet tall. And so that's kind of cool. And it's also cool to think about, we’ll come back here in 40 years and take a look at this place. And yeah, you know how it transforms. Over the years.
Casey: The blackcurrants were starting to ripen up.
Judd: Yeah.
Casey: In the tree planting.
Judd: So it's one of those things that it's kind of what you make it. And it's, it's fun to see your successes on the ground from all the hard work you've done. And that's kind of what I've told the summer kids or, you know, the new biologists, you know, just remember what you're doing it for. You know, it gets to be kind of a mundane task. I got to get it done. But remember what you're doing it for. So.
Casey: And as far as critters that are out this way, I mean, we got pheasants, sharp-tails, Huns, deer, I mean, the occasional pronghorn that's out on this piece.
Judd: Yep. We've had a few elk out here.
Casey: Yeah.
Judd: Yep. So we had a moose just north last year. So I always get those text messages right away. There's a moose in our yard. Oh that's good. I hope he doesn't stay there.
Casey: Yeah, moose are that critter that they're neat to see. And then they're, they hang around too long sometimes.
Judd: Yeah. They can be destructive at times.
Casey: You're just the sheer size of them if they're in your yard. It gets a little intimidating sometimes, but yeah. So this oh, any other big plans for this WMA as far as you mentioned, maybe a little more grass seeding.
Judd: Yep.
Casey: Incorporate some more management, but you're getting to the point now where you're kind of getting it to the wait and see mode, see how things turn out.
Judd: Yep. We're slowly transitioning out of the development stage and into the maintaining stage. Yeah. So we'll see what happens. But I mean, we've seen a pretty good response from the wildlife out here.
Casey: So yeah, this so this WMA was, like we said, a donation. But we've got you've got kind of a mix of WMAs in your stuff you've got, I mean, maybe just go through the we've got some, we lease some, we own, a couple we've purchased, now we had a gentleman that was in PLOTS for 20 plus years and had wanted to sell that property to the department, and we acquired that here in the last couple of years.
Judd: Yep. And that one became the farthest WMA from Dickinson. That's Schotzko WMA. We bought that from Stanley Schotzko like you mentioned. It was in PLOTS tracts for many years. And that is three quarters down in Adams County. You actually have to drive to South Dakota into South Dakota and then back into North Dakota to get to it. Yep.
Casey: Yeah.
Judd: So that one, we've been working on some fence projects down there. There's a lot of old sheep fence down there that we rolled up. There's an old farmstead on it that we've kind of been trying to clean up. But it's also in CRP until 2030 or 2031. So that one will be kind of maintaining it. And then at some point we will probably farm that farm some of that for a couple years and then seed that back to grass as well.
Casey: Maybe explain, you know, like we do that a lot. It seems like, you know, we're gonna farm it for a couple of years, especially like old CRP and things like that that have a cropping history, obviously.
Judd: Yep.
Casey: What's your goal? Like maybe just let everybody know kind of.
Judd: Yeah. So what happens, I guess, when it becomes stagnant or idle for many years is it tends, like you said, reverting back to brome grass or Kentucky bluegrass. And so basically, a lot of times what we'll do is we'll go back in and a lot of times hay it and then spray it. And then farm it 3 to 5 years and then go back into that seedbed. And normally seed DNC dense nesting cover mix of forbes cool seasons, warm seasons. And then once you do that, try to manage it and keep those invasives as smooth brome or Kentucky bluegrass out of there to create best habitat possible as you can.
Casey: Yeah. And a lot of times, I mean, we hardly ever do it the farming ourselves. We work with a neighbor cooperator or something. They can, they can get a little crop out of it for a few years. And then, and then it kind of cleans it up so that we got a good seed bed to put stuff in and not much competition.
Judd: Yeah. Yep. And that's just it. I mean, we could try to do it ourselves, but doing 120 acres at a time with a 8.5ft drill, is a lot easier to get somebody.
Casey: You only had to do it once.
Judd: Yeah, exactly.
Casey: If you did it every year to do wheat and canola and beans, yeah, that that would get to be, you know, all the songs on the radio by the end of.
Judd: Oh yeah. Yep. It would it would be similar to flying in a super cub for three weeks, although a little bit more comfortable seat, I guess.
Casey: Well, that that is one good point. You bring up, like you as a district manager out here, and you've always kind of been involved as a biologist. But we have kind of our big game. A lot of our big game staff, some of our upland game staff out in Dickinson as well. So you get an opportunity to go fly some wildlife surveys if that's a possibility. And then, of course, run around in the badlands. I don't know if you go with Brett much on sheep stuff anymore, but you've probably done it a couple times.
Judd: Yeah, it's Dickinson's a good place to work because we're exposed to, like you said, all those upland game. I've done a lot of big game surveys, antelope surveys, mule deer surveys, and then I've also been on two bighorn sheep transplants. So that's fun.
Casey: Yeah. Those are the things that I went to school for that I never got to be involved in.
Judd: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Casey: Yeah. So now you've got maybe what would you say is your well, your most intensive may is probably Killdeer, I mean, it's your biggest one, right.
Judd: And that's one of those ones I think that's probably in the top five North Dakota as far as our wildlife management areas. It's a very unique place, over 7,000 acres. I like to refer to it as western North Dakota and eastern North Dakota all in one management area. You got the county road gap road that goes through the middle of it. And in the west you have basically badlands got bighorn sheep got elk, we got mountain lions, we got mule deer, we got whitetails basically everything out there. And then the eastern side of it is a lot of Aspen's more like northeastern North Dakota. So but that one also has proven to be the biggest challenge as well. I mean, it's right in the heart of the Bakken oil field. And so, my first couple years here in Dickinson, I spent a lot of my time in the summer working with oil and gas entities and easements and pipelines. And that was a pretty big learning curve for me. I didn't know much about oil and gas industry when I started.
Casey: Yeah.
Judd: But luckily, I had Kent Luttschwager helping me. But when he retired here, he was on the phone last week and he said, congratulations, you're the oil and gas expert now in North Dakota. What?
Casey: That just flipped a switch.
Judd: Yeah.
Casey: But so you're right though I don't I don't know if people realize like how much time that takes because it I, you know, for, for us, it's how do we maintain the management area, the productivity of the management area and still, you know, have easements and, and allow stuff to go through. And so I know for some of the oil and gas companies, it's probably a little more of a pain than going on just private land, but we do work it out and try to maintain what the sportsmen and women are paying for on that management area while we yeah, while we work with industry to try to get stuff moving through.
Judd: But being the district managers were responsible for mitigating as much of those impacts as we can. And I'd like to say we did the best we could, you know, and but at the same time, we live in North Dakota and there's a lot of oil and gas and everyone drives a vehicle.
Casey: Right, yeah.
Judd: You've got to balance both.
Casey: And things have come a long ways from when they first started, like their ability to bore and things like that. For easements, we've gotten a lot more into being able to avoid ripping the surface open on, on, especially untilled or.
Judd: Correct.
Casey: Or native sod, you know, and so that's helped a lot.
Judd: Yeah, basically the last two pipelines that I worked on. We bored the entire wildlife management area. Yeah. Came out in one spot and one of the crop fields and backed down and came out the other side.
Casey: It's crazy. They can hit that mark.
Judd: Yep.
Casey: So you go from Killdeer, which we have food plots and things up there and grazing that goes on.
Judd: Yep.
Casey: Are we doing the food plots up there now or.
Judd: No. No. So what do we do? We use a cooperator up there basically to do the grazing, haying and farming. We, we put about 100 acres of food plots in there, and then there's another hundred acres or so of cropland that that cooperator uses for basically for themselves. It usually ends up being oats or cover crop, something like that. And then we do graze, we rotational graze the basically the entire management area each year. Try to do a twice over rotation, but again, that's 7000 acres and it's a lot of Western badlands stuff, so it takes the right rancher to basically be able to do that and to get what we want out of it as well. So but it's been working good for quite a while now.
Casey: Yeah, that was one that we needed some to do some water improvements and stuff on too, to improve our grazing. That's usually our limiting factor when we got grasslands to manage. But.
Judd: Yep. And that's where, you know, a lot of those, the oil and gas work that has gone on out there, we've been able to mitigate and get a lot of other things that we probably wouldn't be able to out of that, you know, like water projects, fence projects, those, those sort of things. So we have benefited from it.
Casey: Yeah, yeah. Because fencing in the Killdeer Mountains, if you, if you've ever fenced, you should go out Killdeer mountains and walk the fence line. I remember carrying rolls of barbed wire for a mile and a half just to get to where we were fencing. That was that, was quite an adventure.
Judd: Yeah. And actually, we're working on a project right now on the western boundary. Three miles. We're redoing the entire western boundary, putting in wildlife friendly fence. So we got smooth wire on top and bottom, two strand in the middle. And then I worked with Bruce Stillings, our big game supervisor, we got basically when they did an elk project where they had collared a bunch of elk out there. And so we had a bunch of GPS coordinates and data from that. And basically, we put that up on a map and basically took two or 3 or 4 areas that those elk were frequently moving between the management area and private land. And basically, we're building big game crossings in there now as well to alleviate some of that fence destruction, as well as make it safer for wildlife to move back and forth through there. We completed the first mile and a half last year. He's going to finish up the next mile and a half here in the next month or so. But we've had trail cameras out there on a couple of those crossings. And so that's actually what I was looking at before you guys got here. Got some pretty cool videos of deer and elk moving across those crossings and using them frequently. So it's, it's cool project. We worked with North Dakota Natural Resource Trust again. They had some Bakken money available. And so that's a pretty big project we're working on out there. And it's a cool project. It’s similar to like the highway 85 crossings. You know, we don't have a highway in there, but we're using the big game crossings.
Casey: Yeah. Cool.
Judd: Yeah. That's a, that's a pretty cool project that we're working on right now.
Casey: Then another one of your bigger ones is Bowman-Haley, which is a lease.
Judd: Yep. That is owned by the Corps of Engineers.
Casey: Down in Bowman County, obviously.
Judd: Yep. And then there's two of them basically across the road from each other Spring Creek and Alkali Creek. Big pheasant hunting destination down there. Good pheasant hunting habitat and deer as well.
Casey: Can be some good fishing too, actually. Yep. Bowman-Haley Dam.
Judd: Yep.
Judd: Sounds like it's kind of getting green right now, of course, but I actually didn't used to fish that until August, where it looked like you could almost walk across the water.
Casey: Yeah.
Judd: Then it was time to fish.
Casey: And then the water gets warm and they get really hungry because they can't eat enough food.
Judd: Yep.
Casey: Keep their energy up.
Judd: Well, and I always thought I asked our fisheries supervisors like, you know, do they is it better fishing then because they think it's at night because there's no light getting in? I mean, we're talking it looked like you could walk across a green carpet.
Casey: How do you keep your lure clean in there?
Judd: Yeah. You don't it's kind of nasty.
Casey: Hope they bite it before it gets covered. Yeah.
Judd: So. But yeah.
Casey: So yeah. What's that like? Like now you're working with a government entity of the Corps of Engineers and we have to it's totally different than one we own.
Judd: Yep. So we submit a management plan that has to be approved by the Corps of Engineers every year. Basically we, we submit that get approval. And then if there's any developments besides just periodic maintenance, it has to be approved from Corps of Engineers. I worked with Bob Martin, used to be the manager down there. He was down there for like 30 years. And Bob was really good to work with. Been through a couple different managers now. Jeremy Thury’s managing it now and we've had a good working relationship. And so it's, it's good. You need to have partners to get things done. Like you said, you can't get everything done by yourself. So having good government entity and partnerships like that go a long ways. So and that's actually managed the Corps of Engineers that's managed out of Jamestown.
Casey: Yeah. That was.
Judd: Yeah.
Cayla: That's where were we talking about that? Because then some other ones managed out of Pierre, I don't know, it was like these three, these three go out of. Yeah.
Casey: Oahe. Yeah. And there was one south of Bismarck they are managed out of a different office than the Lake Sakakawea ones. And then that one's out Jamestown.
Judd: Yeah. So like for us driving down the Schotzko and then you think about that, it's like, oh, it's not too far. I guess it could be worse. Could be Jamestown. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of times he'll call and he'll need something. We'll help him out or you know, vice versa.
Casey: Yeah.
Judd: So but it's been good working with them.
Casey: So those are kind of the those are kind of the big three Raab Killdeer and Bowman-Haley how about your other you got some smaller ones. That's only four. We've only talked about four out of the 13.
Judd: Yeah. So we have one of the interesting ones is south of Belfield, Bull Creek down there. That's a 160 acres. And that's actually an old molybdenum mine. They used to mine uranium out of there.
Casey: And we those where you can shoot the pheasants and they glow.
Judd: Glow in the dark.
Cayla: Yeah, that'd be cool.
Judd: Yeah. So that one is, that one came about from the NOMO mitigation from DOT. So that's a NOMO tract. And then actually I learned the other day that Lost Bridge was also a NOMO mitigation track.
Casey: Yeah.
Judd: So and then I guess moving south from there, we have Davis Dam, which is basically a fishing WMA, that's down in Slope County over west of Amidon, 160 acres. Not a real big one, but, you know, a lot of folks like to go down there and fish. It's a nice one to go camping. Yeah, because there's not usually a lot of folks down there.
Casey: And you're kind of in the badlands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In some rough stuff.
Judd: Yep. And then going east of there, south of New England Cedar Lake Wildlife Management Area. That's probably one of my favorite pheasant hunting spots as far as management areas. And then Indian Creek is another one.
Casey: Indian Creek is one that gets a lot of pheasant hunting.
Judd: Yes, a lot.
Casey: I don't know how there's still pheasants in there sometimes, but they are.
Judd: Yep. And actually, that one's got a pretty good walleye fishery on it as well.
Casey: Yeah. So you can do a cast and blast there.
Judd: Yep, yep. I remember one of my first years down here, Levi Jacobson and I went, I think it was opening weekend. We went down to Indian Creek, we hauled the camper down there and we were going to hunt it opening day. And I remember we had some pretty good fun the night before, and I would just get up at ten and go hunting. And I think right at legal shooting time, it sounded like World War Two down there. I remember Levi's like, what time do people get up to go pheasant hunting down here? But it was good because by the time we actually went out at 10:00, everyone else was gone. We had the whole place to ourselves.
Casey: Yeah, it's a quick blast down there.
Judd: Yeah.
Casey: And guys are usually getting their pheasants too. That's yep, yep. Yeah.
Judd: And that's one that's, you know, it's a piece of public land that's surrounded by a lot of posted fee hunting down there. You know, it's an area that gets pheasant hunted pretty hard, that Mott, Regent area. So it's a destination for a lot of folks to at least have a public area to go hunt. And then one of the ones I inherited, that Indian Creek was the one, one of the management areas. They moved over basically from the Bismarck district when they made this in the district seven. And then another one called Dogtown WMA, that's 40 acres.
Casey: Yeah. Does it still have prairie dogs on it?
Judd: No, it does not. That one, I was actually just reading about it because we acquired that one. I think because we were trying to preserve the prairie dog town. Was that it?
Casey: Yeah. I just a postage stamp out there. That was all that's left. Yeah. They fizzled out.
Judd: Yep. So and then North Lemmon Lake down south, that's close to Schotzko down there in that Lemmon country. Again, another pretty good fishery for walleyes. But there's not a whole lot down there.
Casey: Right. And then you'd have what? Camels Hump.
Judd: Camels Hump along the interstate.
Casey: Yeah. Fishing. Kind of a fishing. WMA and the interesting thing is, is like a lot of those fishing WMAs are old reservoirs, actually, they're just small reservoirs that were built in the 50s. And there's a lot of like those dams, the dams, embankments or whatever you want to call them that are holding that water back are starting to age quite a bit. And so we're looking at how do these things look in the future? Because as you can imagine, those were built. I don't even know who paid to build them. But maintenance is coming up. Yeah. You kind of look at them and go, okay, what is, is the juice worth the squeeze on, on repairing it or what do you do? You know, and so we got to go through that probably in the next 10 to 20 years on a lot of these. And so we've kind of been taking little bites of them. We get little help from water commission.
Judd: Yep.
Casey: On some of that stuff State Water Commission, but.
Judd: On Camels Hump is an interesting one because it's up against the interstate.
Casey: Yeah, it is the interstate. The embankment is the interstate. Yeah. We've got a couple of those Sweet Briar, Camels Hump.
Cayla: What's on the Dogtown one? On the 40 acres?
Casey: Grass. Just grass.
Cayla: Okay.
Judd: Yep. And if you blink when you're driving by, you miss it.
Casey: Yep. Yeah. It is kind of a strange one.
Judd: Yeah.
Casey: Maybe. What's one of your biggest challenges in this part of the state?
Judd: Well, you know, it used to be just the workload. You know, like I mentioned, it was me by myself down here. And so you want to get a lot of things done, but you also have to realize that the only one person. And so one of the biggest challenges basically was trying to use your time to the best of your ability and get done what you could get done. And that has changed now since, you know, we've added some personnel. And so, I think now at this point, we'll be able to impact a lot more acres with the addition of the biologist. But that was one of the biggest challenges. And then I guess one of my biggest challenges, not so much anymore, but was the oil and gas work that was, that was tough to learn as you go, but and try to mitigate the best you can for the resource, you know?
Casey: Yeah, yeah. So far, so far we've been getting some moisture. So things are looking good.
Judd: But we also get the wind. Yeah, I would say.
Cayla: Not today though.
Judd: I would say, no you guys, we ordered it for you. I would say biggest challenge in 2026 so far has been the wind.
Cayla: Yeah. It's been windy every day. Yeah. I feel like yeah.
Judd: And you talk to some of the locals and it's there's guys that yeah, we, I saw this back in 84 or something like that, but not. I mean, it's windy, but never like six, seven days in a row.
Cayla: Yeah.
Casey: It has been. It has been nice to get all my fencing done without mosquitoes though. The wind's blowing.
Cayla: I just don't think it's a bad mosquito year. It feels like they haven't been.
Casey: It can be.
Cayla: Around.
Judd: They're coming yet. Yeah.
Casey: I was gonna say they've been coming out the last couple of weeks pretty good.
Cayla: Maybe, don't tell me the government can't control the weather. It's because the president's coming.
Casey: Yeah, right. Yeah, maybe. Maybe he turned the dial down.
Judd: Yeah. We'll see, because it's probably gonna be windy tomorrow. Yeah.
Casey: Yeah. Well, we'll see I don't know. Thunderstorms on Friday, so see what happens.
Cayla: All right, thanks for being on. Thanks for giving us a tour.
Judd: Absolutely.
Cayla: We'll get into the department droppings. So it feels weird. We're already talking about whatever pronghorn and early goose season, but pronghorn apps will be due, I think, the night that this airs. So.
Casey: So if you're listening to this, just get on and get your pronghorn in.
Cayla: Unless you're listening to it afterwards, then you missed it.
Casey: August 5th. August 5th. And then we have the Fish Challenge open through August 15th and you gotta catch 100 fish. I don't know if I've caught a hundred fish in a year in my life, but.
Cayla: Go to Bowman-Haley and.
Judd: There you go.
Cayla: Yeah.
Casey: How do they prove the 100 fish? You gotta take a picture of every one of them. You want 100 pictures from each?
Cayla: Just one picture. But you have to say what the hundred fish were. So like 20 bluegills, whatever 25. And then yeah, early goose season opens August 15th as well. Make sure you have your waterfowl habitat restoration e-stamp.
Casey: You are, long names, we need an acronym for that.
Cayla: Yeah.
Casey: All right. Now that we've dropped the droppings, you can get off the pot and get outdoors.