2009 MNDNR Pheasant Prospect Map

The Minnesota DNR now has available on their site the 2009 Pheasant Prospect Map in the pheasant hunting section of their site. This map is based off of the 2009 Pheasant hunting prospects map which can also be found at the Minnesota DNR Pheasant hunting section of their website. From looking at the 2009 map compared to the 2008 map (which can be found here at the MN DNR site) it looks like this years prospects will be worse than last year in large portions of the state. The looks to be especially true in the south west portion of the state where last year it was almost all in the good range (>49 pheasants per square miles) where as this year it looks like the fair and poor ranges have expanded. Also it looks like there is a large new area that is now only fair that use to be good. In the more norther part of their range things also appear to have gotten worse as there use to be some areas that were labeled as good but this year it looks like the best rating was fair.

Note: the above links are to PDF files. If you need I PDF viewer you can get a viewer from the Adobe site here, or from Foxit site here (you will want to get the free Foxit reader). I am in no way associated with either Adobe or Foxit.

Minnesota Public Land Map

If you are not lucky enough to have your own private land to hunt in the state of Minnesota or your land isn't ideal for all the game you would like to hunt there are plenty of potential public lands that one can hunt. Some of these lands are easy to find like major state forests or large WMAs that are shown on most other maps. Unfortunately these maps don't ever seem to show all of the public land that is available to hunt. Below is a map that I created of the state of Minnesota that shows all of the public land that might be open to hunting plus a few areas that are not (Indian reservations for instance).
To view a higher resolution image of the map click on it. This file is a .gif file and has a resolution of 3000x3545
Dark green areas are land that is more than likley open to public hunting. These include:

• WMAs
• state forests
• state forestry land
• state land that is county administered
• federal land that is part of the GAP stewardship program
• state land that is part of the GAP stewardship program
• county land that is part of the GAP stewardship program

The light green area is the BWCA
Red areas are Minnesota state parks
Pinkish areas are Native American reservations

If you are wondering what the GAP stewardship program is you can read about it here at it officaial web site. The National Biological Information Infrastructure (www.nbii.gov) website is part of the United States Geological Survey. To findout what this program was took a large amount of digging when I first ran across GAP stewardship land so hopefully the above links will help others out when searching for what this program is. There are also private lands which are part of the GAP stewardship program that I chose not to include on this map as I do not know if they are open to hunting or not.

As always know where you are hunting as not all public land is open to hunting or to hunting of specific species. The above map is meant to provide you with additional information on areas that may be possible hunting locations.

A minnesota Map with WMAs

Here is an interesting online map from the site openstreetmap.org. It is a map of Minnesota, but when you zoom in it appears to show a bunch of the Minnesota WMAs. When zoomed in on an area with more detail like this view near Tyler Minnesota (south western Minnesota) you can see the WMAs in the area. OpenStreetMap is a project similar to Wikipedia in that anyone can edit the map and upload features. So if you know of some public hunting land that isn't already included on the map you can add it.