According to Dave Garshelis, the DNR's top bear biologist, it all began in 1971, when Minnesota held its first hunting season for the black bear, which had just been designated a big-game animal. The state's bear population began to rise rapidly after 1982, when the DNR began restricting harvest with a quota system. The system awards a limited number of licenses from a lottery. And they can restrict harvest where bear numbers have declined. Much of what Garshelis and his DNR colleagues Karen Noyce and Pam Coy know about bears comes from an ongoing DNR study that began in 1981.
Researchers study bear mortality, reproductive rates, and population density.
With this information they have built a computer model that predicts bear numbers based on factors such as hunter harvest and cub production. So successful has been the restoration of locally breeding Canada geese over the past 30 years that today they are a nuisance in some cities and farming communities. In the 1930s, local Canada geese had all but disappeared from Minnesota and most other states. Several thousand migrants still flew through the state each fall and spring, but the combination of egg gathering, unregulated hunting, and prairie marsh drainage had eliminated local flocks. Migrant goose populations, which also had declined, recovered by the 1960s, thanks to hunting restrictions and the establishment of Thief Lake and other state and federal refuges where the waterfowl could feed and rest during migration.