Program will help improve both access and habitat across the state

Pheasants Forever is proud to announce the Public Access to Habitat (PATH) Program has expanded to North Dakota. PATH represents the organization’s primary mechanism to increase public hunting access on private lands – a key strategy identified in Pheasants Forever’s National Strategic Plan. Pilot programs initiated in South Dakota and Nebraska have been extremely successful, securing public hunting access to over 100,000 acres of high-quality habitat on private lands. The PATH program now moves to North Dakota, where it will be used to restore and maintain grassland habitat and expand public hunting opportunities in one of the nation’s top upland destinations.

“We’re incredibly excited to bring PATH to our state,” said Emily Spolyar, Pheasants Forever’s North Dakota state coordinator. “And we look forward to strengthening our partnership with the North Dakota Game and Fish Department (NDGF). Collectively, we aim to restore 15,000 acres of high-quality grassland cover through PATH that will be maintained as wildlife habitat and open to public hunting for a minimum of ten years.”

In North Dakota, PATH will bolster the existing Private Lands Open to Sportsmen (PLOTS) program. PLOTS is a voluntary program administered by the NDGF that provides a financial incentive to ranchers, farmers and landowners for allowing public hunting access — while also increasing the quality and quantity of habitat on the ground. The PATH program will complement PLOTS by providing an additional incentive to landowners willing to create new habitat on marginal cropland acres. 

Pheasants Forever was recently awarded a $1M grant from the Outdoor Heritage Fund (OHF) to support this new initiative. Those funds will be further leveraged by financial contributions from onX Hunt through onX's Adventure Forever Grants Program, as well as from local Pheasants Forever chapters and donors, the North Dakota Natural Resources Trust and other conservation partners. This will allow North Dakota PATH to build upon the recent success of a pilot program initiated by the “MonDak” Pheasants Forever Chapter, which provides similar incentives to landowners in Williams and Divide Counties.

“The MonDak program has been pretty successful, and now we’ll have the PATH program available in 38 counties across our main historic pheasant range,” said Andrew Dinges, NDGF’s west region supervisor. “It’s hard to do this work on your own, and that’s where a partnership like we have here between Game and Fish and Pheasants Forever can really move the needle in delivering habitat and increasing access.”

For more information on PATH in North Dakota, please contact Emily Spolyar at (517)250-2440 or espolyar@pheasantsforever.org, or your local NDGF biologist at https://gf.nd.gov/contact-us