Wednesday on these pages, outdoors writer Tony Kennedy interviewed Department of Natural Resources big game coordinator Adam Murkowski. Discussed was the deer management plan the DNR will develop over the next couple of years and, part and parcel to it, membership on the advisory committee, now being formed, that will aid the agency in that effort.
In the interview, Murkowski confirmed that DNR leadership has not in the first round of committee designees selected Minnesota Bowhunters Inc. President Brooks Johnson to serve on the deer-plan advisory panel.
Johnson, as is widely known, isn't a favorite of the DNR, because in recent years he has repeatedly questioned the direction, or lack thereof, of Minnesota deer management.
Yet Johnson's needling ultimately served a greater good, for which most state deer hunters are thankful: It helped prompt the Legislature to review DNR deer management, and a report issued earlier this year said whitetail governance in the state should transpire according to a well-devised plan.
Whether such a plan would have forestalled the dramatic downturn in recent years of deer numbers across much of the state is unknown. Perhaps even with such a blueprint in hand, the DNR would have distributed antlerless permits too liberally, as it did in some recent years, allowing individual hunters in certain areas to kill as many as five deer, and not only in the metro.
In fairness, back-to-back inclement winters also prompted deer declines in some parts of the state. But population regressions caused by extreme cold and deep snow generally were limited to portions of the far north, laying bare the fib that bad weather alone left some hunters, including DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr, without venison on the table for three or more years running.
Yet the broader point is less about deer management than about the DNR's antipathy toward rabble-rousers in general — an attitude that serves the DNR poorly, and undercuts its own best interests.
The agency and its staff, after all, and its initiatives have to a large degree been underwritten over many years by the efforts of Minnesotans who, like Johnson, base their opinions not at all on who might be offended by their passion-fueled comments but by what resource policies they believe are correct, based oftentimes on their firsthand experiences in the field.