Private land, public hunting: How Washington’s private lands biologists fill the gap between hunters and landowners

ST. JOHN, Wash. – It was 9 a.m. on a hot Thursday in August and Dean Nizer was on the phone.

A hunter from Seattle had drawn a moose tag for a unit near Spokane. He did not know the area, did not know where he might find his moose. So he called Nizer, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s private lands biologist for Spokane and Whitman counties.

Nizer told the hunter what he knew about a few spots in that unit. He answered a question about e-bike access. Then he hung up and went back to his computer.

His morning had started three hours earlier, when he met with a couple of landowners in town to renew their hunting access contracts. When he got back to his desk, there was a missed call. Probably another hunter, but the moose hunter rang before Nizer got to it.

He had not checked his email yet, but he had an idea of what awaited him there.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if I have like five emails from hunters,” Nizer said.

It is a busy time of year for Nizer, who is one of 10 private lands biologists around the state. Hunters come to them with questions. Usually, they have answers. In their respective territories, they know where hunters can find what they are looking for, whether it is elk, deer, pheasants or a secret turkey flock.

More importantly, they also know where hunters can get access.

WDFW’s private lands biologists are the gatekeepers of Washington’s private lands hunting access program, which provides varying levels of public hunting access to more than 1.5 million acres of private land statewide.

It is a big deal in a state with a lot of people and a limited amount of public land. WDFW’s private lands access program gives people more places to hunt, and in some cases secures access to the sort of habitat that could never be found on public land – such as the fabulous upland bird habitat spread throughout the Palouse.

Hunters have mixed feelings about the program. Not all of the properties in Washington’s program allow hunters to come and go as they please, instead requiring reservations or written permission from a landowner. Reservations and permission slips can be tough to impossible to get.

But hunters would never choose to live without it.

“It’s by far better than nothing,” said Mike Collier, an avid bird hunter who lives in Suncrest.

Nizer and his colleagues are the faces of the program, the ones who work directly with landowners and relay information to hunters.

Their phone numbers are easy to find, and they give freely. Nizer is a hunter himself and he has a few secret spots of his own, but he likes helping other hunters find success – even if they happen to have beat him in a tag drawing.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “That’s part of the job, just telling people what properties are looking good or where to focus on.”

Biologist in the middle

Washington’s private lands access program began in 1948. Joey McCanna, WDFW’s private lands section manager, said it was a response to landowners shifting to pay-to-play hunting or closing their lands off entirely. The agency wanted to help.

In the decades that followed, the agency was able to secure public hunting access to thousands of acres of private land. In exchange, landowners got liability coverage and help dealing with hunters. They also got assistance with land or habitat improvement projects that might help them qualify for the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners for conserving habitat.

“The help with us doing habitat work was a huge incentive for them,” McCanna said.

In the 1990s, a federal grant allowed WDFW to hire “habitat development specialists” – the first iteration of the agency’s private lands biologist. McCanna became one of them in 1994, working out of the St. John office that Nizer now occupies. He helped plant millions of trees and shrubs in the Palouse and oversaw many of the access contracts that remain in place today.

More than a third of the land enrolled in the access program is in WDFW’s Region 1, the 10-county administrative region headquartered in Spokane. Four private lands biologists work split up the counties – in addition to Nizer, there’s one for Lincoln, Ferry, Stevens and Pend Oreille counties, one for Asotin and Garfield counties and one for Walla Walla and Columbia counties.

Nizer is 29. He’s from Oregon. He came this direction when he went to college at the University of Idaho. His first job for WDFW was as a technician with the chronic wasting disease program. Now he is in his third year as the private lands biologist in Spokane and Whitman counties.

He works with roughly 100 landowners and has about 117,000 acres enrolled in the access program across the two counties. Some of those contracts have been in place for decades, but he has drummed up a few new ones. One of them was finalized this month. He said the newer contracts tend to come about through word of mouth.

“They hear about the program from a neighbor,” he said.

Negotiations with landowners are straightforward. They settle on the number of acres and type of access, and then they generate a map that can be posted online. Once signs are posted on the property, it is ready for hunters.

Properties are enrolled at one of four levels of access. Feel Free to Hunt is the least restrictive – hunters come and go as they please. Register to Hunt is similar, though hunters have to sign in at a designated spot.

The other two categories require more of hunters. Hunt by Reservation properties are available through an online reservation system. Specific hunt days are set in advance, and hunters can vie for a spot starting at 8 a.m. exactly two weeks before the date. Hunt by Written Permission requires hunters to contact a landowner directly to get a permission slip.

In certain cases, landowners get paid for enrolling in the program, though it is not much. Statewide, the program has paid about $319,000 to landowners in each of the past five years. Nizer said in his area, only landowners enrolled in the reservation and feel free categories get paid, and their payment is $1 an acre annually.

Most of Nizer’s properties are available by reservation or written permission. He said landowners prefer having more control, especially when they are close to a college town or within an hour of the state’s second largest city.

“Landowners like more monitored programs where they can make sure the (wildlife) population is still being taken care of while allowing hunting access,” he said.

The online reservation system is a little more than a decade old. McCanna said officials had seen it work in other states, and they were worried that some properties enrolled as Feel Free to Hunt were being overrun.

There was also a thought that reservations could have upsides for everyone involved – controlled access for a landowner, and assurances for hunters that they’d be the only ones stirring game up on that property that day.

But Collier, the Suncrest bird hunter, said it ended up consuming properties he could once visit without planning far ahead. He has been hunting fields in Whitman County for decades, and he has seen places come and go from the private lands program. These days, he has four or five properties he tries to reserve throughout the season.

It can be challenging, with plenty of misses. But he still manages to pin down a few reservations a year.

More irking to him are the written permission properties.

“It’s tough to find the person that owns the property, and they don’t necessarily want to give you written permission,” Collier said.

That is a criticism the state hears often – that landowners in the program are only giving permission to friends and family. WDFW requires landowners enrolled in the program to keep track of who they give permission to and report the information back to the agency.

That lets the agency ensure permission is granted to more than just a couple people a year.

Nizer said he had to talk to one landowner in the program a year or so ago who was not letting enough people onto his property. It seemed to work.

“This year, the numbers and the slips went up, and it was different folks,” Nizer said.

Palouse skyline

Nizer sounds like he has lived here forever when he drives the roads west of St. John, Washington. He has stories about fields packed with pheasants, spots where deer always turn up, a few hunting stories. He seems to know most of the landowners, usually because he has worked with them.

Building relationships with landowners is a key part of the job. Relationships lead to access contracts. They also lead to habitat projects – plantings of trees and shrubs that boost forage and cover for species like deer and upland birds.

Projects of the past are visible throughout the Palouse, and they are obvious when you know what to look for. They are called eyebrows – spots on the rolling hills with pines and shrubs.

A lot of them are there because of projects led by Nizer’s predecessors. McCanna put a lot of plants in the ground in the 1990s. He said there was a stretch of a few years when his crews planted more than a million plants.

Now Nizer looks for places where he can add to that legacy.

“You just have to have an eye for it when you’re driving around,” Nizer said. “If (I) see a good fit, I just reach out to the landowner and pitch it to them.”

He has a handful of projects going already, each one logged in his phone. There is work on the Revere Wildlife Area that Pheasants Forever helped with, and another on a private parcel that Ducks Unlimited pitched in on. On one of his Hunt by Written Permission properties this spring, he put in grass and more than 2,300 plants to form a perimeter around a field.

In August, the shrubs and pines were poking through the black mesh he had stretched over them. His grass seeding did not take, leaving a clumpy patch between the shrubs and the edge of the grain field. Still, he was happy with how it looked.

Knowing landowners well enough to pitch them habitat projects is a side of the job Nizer doesn’t think people understand. It is more than an annual meeting to sign an access contract – it is “having actual relationships with landowners and knowing them on a personal basis,” he said.

The same happens with hunters. He gets to know some of them well. He has gone hunting with people who have called in looking for help in the past.

Other callers just have a quick question – like whether there is decent pheasant cover on a specific property, or where they can find a moose.

“I’m glad to tell them,” Nizer said.