While Minnesota's remaining wild elk in the Northwestern reaches of the state destroy crops, the species once ranged across the state, including less agrarian places like northeastern Minnesota.
On Tuesday, we watched the Minnesota House Environment and Natural Resources Finance and Policy Committee examine a proposal by the Fond du Lac Band's effort to bring elk back to northeastern Minnesota.
Here's the Minnesota House Information Services YouTube of the discussion:
As the Duluth News Tribune, John Myers reoorts in Minnesota House committee hears Fond du Lac Band elk plan:
A Minnesota House committee on Tuesday heard testimony on a bill that throws the state’s official support, along with $1 million in state money, behind the Fond du Lac Band’s effort to restore elk to eastern Minnesota.
The bill earmarks $1 million from the state’s general fund to go to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, made available July 1, to plan for and relocate elk from northwestern Minnesota and release them in the Fond du Lac State Forest just west of Cloquet.
Officials from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources also said Tuesday that they support the bill, the strongest word yet on the elk reintroduction from the state agency.
The bill, HF 4482, is sponsored by Rep. Mike Sundin, DFL-Esko, and Rep. Jamie Becker-Finn, DFL-Roseville. The Environment and Natural Resources Finance and Policy Committee voted to lay the bill over for possible inclusion in a larger omnibus bill dealing with multiple wildlife issues, keeping the potential alive for the proposal to pass the full Legislature in coming weeks.
The bill essentially orders the DNR to support the elk reintroduction if key obstacles like chronic wasting disease can be hurdled. . .
Fond du Lac officials sent the DNR their formal elk proposal last June but, until Tuesday, hadn’t heard any formal response from the state. Wildlife staff from both the band’s resource department and the DNR worked on the project before it was forwarded and met again recently to talk more about the proposal. including ways to make sure any elk moved are disease-free. . . .
Fond du Lac Band wildlife managers have been working on the elk effort since 2014. Under their proposal, the band would start transplanting elk into northern Carlton County and southern St. Louis County in 2025, with animals taken from a wild herd in Kittson County in northwestern Minnesota where the herd, and the DNR, have come under fire from cash-crop farmers who say the big animals wander onto their fields and damage their crops. Supporters of the Fond du Lac Band plan note there is very little row-crop farming in the proposed relocation area. . . .
Known as "omashkooz" in Ojibwe, elk were important to the diet and culture of Native Americans across much of Minnesota — including eastern Minnesota — until the animals were hunted out by European settlers by the 1870s. . . .
Read the entire article at the News Tribune.
Photo: Five bull elk rest in a Michigan woods, part of that state's elk wild elk herd that was restored decades ago. Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
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