(gentle music) Polaris or the North Star has long served as a guiding light in the world of wildlife conservation, the North Star state has often served as a beacon in its own right, especially since the founding of Minnesota's Nongame Wildlife Program in 1977.

- The fact that Minnesota was one of the first nongame wildlife programs and set the tone for many other states to follow is a real point of pride.

Nongame is all the species you do not hunt or fish.

It turns out that it's quite a few.

- [Bret] Minnesota's nongame program works to protect more than 500 wildlife species.

- It actually started with an assistant wildlife manager at one of our wildlife management areas in the state.

His name's Carrol Henderson.

(lively music) And the legacy of Carrol Henderson and work that he's done, engagement that he brought with that is really a legacy, a true legacy.

- Well, I have a few of the yarns to share with you tonight.

And basically a 50 year history of conservation.

(lively music continues) When the Nongame Wildlife Program was created, I was literally overnight involved with creating a brand new program for Minnesota.

It had never been done before in that level, throughout the United States.

Our program started very modestly.

For the first year or so, I had Conservation Corps volunteer.

One person.

- [Bret] That first volunteer was Diane Vosick, who would eventually become a lobbyist for the Minnesota Audubon Council.

In that role, she was approached by then state Senator Collin Peterson to advise on language for legislation that would have a dramatic impact on Minnesota's wildlife.

A tax checkoff to fund the Nongame Program.

- I literally woke up in the morning and read about the new tax checkoff law in the Star Trib.

And I just about fell out of my chair.

My budget had been about $30,000 per year.

About half of that was my salary.

And all of a sudden, the next year we went over a million dollars.

- [Bret] While the new funding source allowed Carrol to expand his staff, his program was still small enough that he had a good deal of freedom granted from his supervisors.

- They said, you just do what you need to do.

And you know, that was like turning me loose in a candy store.

(upbeat music) - [Bret] Under Carrol's guidance the non-game program worked with partners to help save Peregrine falcons and bald eagles, reintroduced river otters to the Minnesota River, and perhaps most famously brought trumpeter swans back to the state.

- One of the reasons that the trumpeter caught my attention is that it was quote, an extirpated species from Minnesota.

We used to have them in significant numbers.

So I went to Alaska three times.

I brought back eggs, we hatched them, reared them for two years.

We turned loose a total of about 370 trumpeter swans over the course of those restoration efforts.

And as of two years ago, the total population estimate in Minnesota was over 50,000.

- [Bret] In addition to increasing the population of numerous species, the Nongame Program also helped grow the ranks of a relatively rare position, that of the conservation biologist.

- That's one of the things that I get most excited about is that it expanded this career field beyond the game manager to the wildlife manager and the nongame specialist who became excited about that as a lifetime career.

- [Bret] One person to discover this career path is the Nongame Program's current supervisor, Kristin Hall.

- I lived on a farm, so always working with animals and really aspired to be a vet 'cause that was the only job I knew that existed with animals.

Boy, and I went to school, college for pre-med.

I was at the University of Montana and I ended up taking a course called Intro to Wildlife Biology.

And I will credit that course with changing my trajectory in my life.

Like that's a job?

Yes, it really is a job.

Wildlife biology is a job.

Don't let anyone tell you different.

And conservation biology is an important one.

- [Bret] Minnesota's conservation biologists have been critical in helping some of the state's most iconic species.

But the non-game program has evolved to concentrate on less photogenic creatures as well.

- At first I took on projects that you might have considered like the low hanging fruit, the ones that were more obvious, like bringing back peregrine falcons or introducing trumpeter swans.

But now we have all the other creatures that have not been adequately addressed within conservation circles.

And Kristin has an opportunity to work with specialists now who are looking at everything from butterflies and moths to all kinds of other invertebrates that are all parts of the food web out there.

- So one of the areas of interest for the Nongame Wildlife Program currently is our state's bats.

White nose syndrome, which is a fungus, a disease that's heavily impacting our hibernating bats.

Those bat species are soon to be considered for listing.

And one of our main goals is to keep species off that's threatened and endangered species list some great research that's being done out of our Minnesota Biological Survey and with the University of Minnesota is working on what bat houses work and how that can provide maybe a temporary habitat for those bats to take refuge in while these environmental impacts kind of play out, allow them to persist and succeed so we don't lose them all together.

(gentle music) - [Bret] Minnesota's bats face a tough road ahead, but there is hope.

Other species that were once in danger of being lost are now thriving in the state and even serving as online wildlife ambassadors.

- So our eagle cam and our falcon cam, they're an opportunity for people to witness a conservation success story to peer into an eagle's nest or a Peregrine falcon's nest.

And they get to see something really incredible and powerful that they can relate to because it's parents and babies.

And so that's a really human experience as well that people can understand.

- Once you have done one of these projects, you get citizens telling you about the swans that are nesting on their personal lake or what their experiences were.

Seeing the loons up close, it gives them a personal point of contact with species where it's not just something that the DNR should be doing.

This is something that we all have a stake in.

We can all be involved, we can all put out nest boxes for wildlife.

All of those types of activities create a connectivity not only with the adults but with the kids.

We need to keep the kids involved and engaged.

That's how you keep this whole thing moving.

- [Bret] It was exposure to the outdoors at a young age that inspired Jessica Ruthenberg the non-game program's wildlife engagement supervisor, - My parents, they would take me on camping and hiking trips.

And I have these really memorable experiences of getting outdoors.

I understand how that can stick when someone's doing something hands-on interactive and they're immersed in the outdoors and it creates that sort of passion for the outdoors and wildlife.

We have a program called Bird by Bird, which is for elementary school students.

And through that program we're able to provide classrooms with bird feeders, with field guides, with binoculars.

We have volunteers who visit the classrooms and take the kids outdoors, birding just around their school yard or in their neighborhood.

And the whole program culminates with the kids getting to go on a field trip to a local nature center.

Another educational program we have is for young adults.

It's called EPIC, that gets kids outdoors with biologists in the field.

And this really immersive experience, we hope that it sparks interest in a career in wildlife conservation.

- [Bret] While the program works to inspire conservationists for tomorrow.

Today's Nongame Program staff consists of 25 people at various sites throughout Minnesota, but according to Kristin Hall, that core group is supported by a much larger team.

- Nongame Wildlife Program in Minnesota is Minnesotans because we're donation based.

That's what Minnesotans have invested in.

- [Bret] In addition to their financial contributions, Minnesotans have assisted the Nongame Wildlife Program to the donation of their time, namely as citizen scientists.

- People outdoors in the field collecting data and things like frogs and toads, chimney swifts and loons.

And we hope that it, you know, connects people with nature, but they're also really contributing to conservation and real research that we need done on vulnerable species.

- [Bret] These volunteers supplement the work of the program staff to help get a better understanding of wildlife populations.

- In order to tell if a species is rare or declining, you need to know where your starting point was and you need to know if changes are going on in their trends.

So that monitoring piece that we do, that base level monitoring is telling that story.

We're also doing monitoring with respect to the management that goes on out in the landscape.

We wanna find out what the response of wildlife is to that management.

Are we doing what we think we're doing out there on the landscape?

We didn't monitor, we wouldn't be able to have that science-based information in order to base our actions on.

(lively music) - [Bret] Since its start in 1977 with one dedicated employee, Minnesota's Nongame Program has made a tremendous impact on the state's wildlife.

Its future is still being written.

- I think the future of this program is based on its foundation, but also moving forward in a direction that really relies on strengths and partnerships.

The job is insurmountable to do alone.

- One of the things that became most apparent to me as I wrote my book and put it all together, I went back through my chapters and I counted up and I had relied upon nearly 200 people as the local experts on different species.

And out of those 200 people, about 50 of them are no longer with us.

So I think probably the best thing I can think of is that this is a way of remembering their legacy.

It it wasn't just me sharing my passion, it was sharing their passion.

And since they're not here anymore, - Having been selected for the role of supervising this program into the future has is a huge honor for me.

I do know the legacy of the program and it is hard to be in the conservation field.

It can seem hopeless at times, but then you sit back for a second, you realize we actually have a ton of information that we can put to bare on these big challenges and we can work with a lot of dedicated people to make incremental change.

And if you focus on those incremental things that you can make better or move forward on, that is fulfilling.

- [Bret] For these dedicated conservationists.

The rewards of the job sometimes appear years after their efforts.

- I was on the banks of the Mississippi River, it was in January, pretty cold, and I was watching swans out on the river and one of the swans separated from the flock and started swimming towards me.

I thought, oh, that's really unusual.

And it got closer and closer and I started snapping pictures and I could see his leg band.

And so I took a closeup of the leg band so I could get the number.

And it turns out that I had brought that bird back as an egg from Alaska in 1988, and now it was 1997.

And the swan just stood there.

So I started talking to the swan, just having a little conversation about the weather or whatever.

And so I just kept talking for maybe five minutes or so.

And then finally the swan turned and just swam back out to his flock.

And the only thing I could figure out is that he just stopped by to say, hi, Dad.

And thanks.