Frank Pratt (Hayward DNR) Retires, 15 years of Frustration w/ DNR

[kenais]

Published 1/19/2011, Sawyer County Record

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources senior fisheries biologist Frank Pratt can look back on a 37-year career that produced some success stories on area lakes and rivers but which, in recent years, also engendered frustrations with the state’s management style.

Pratt retired from the DNR on Jan. 13 after spending his entire career at the Hayward DNR Service Center. He was the fisheries biologist for waters in Sawyer and Rusk counties.

Growing up in western Massachusetts, Pratt says he “fished 24-7. That was my passion. When I was 12 or so, I decided I wanted to be a fisheries biologist, and I’ve never wavered from that.”

He went on to earn an undergraduate degree in biology from Holy Cross College in Worcester and a master’s degree in fisheries at the University of Masschusetts-Amherst. When some jobs opened up in Wisconsin, he took the test and was hired.

“At that time, the Wisconsin DNR was like the number-one resource agency on the planet,” Pratt said. “Within two years, I was lucky enough to get a position in Hayward (in 1974). I was blessed to come to the world-class fisheries I’d read about all my life.”

Pratt divides his career and the history of the Wisconsin DNR into two epochs: 1974 to 1995, prior to the DNR secretary being a cabinet member appointed by the governor; and 1995 to the present.

“In the last 15 years, I worked just as hard as I had previously, but accomplished way less because the system did not value progress,” Pratt said. “It was set up specifically to do nothing. Prior to that, I had a ball trying all sorts of cutting-edge management things, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. But it was all important.”

Pratt cited some of the things that the Hayward fisheries team accomplished during his tenure:

• Completely reconstructing two brook trout streams at the headwaters of Hatchery Creek east of Hayward and Cap Creek near Cable. Both streams are tributaries of the Namekagon River.

A state cold-water fish hatchery was operated at Hatchery Creek for more than 40 years before it was closed and the land was transferred to Sawyer County for a park in the early 1980s. In conjunction with the Wisconsin National Guard and Trout Unlimited, raceways and buildings were removed and the stream was rebuilt into a meandering, spring-fed creek with native plants on its banks and half-logs for trout to hide.

• “Take A Kid Fishing” and other angler-education programs, which are “the most important thing we can be and should be doing. We started all that stuff two decades ago right here. It will take a lot of effort to provide opportunities for kids to fish. Once they get into it, it’s well-documented that it’s a life sport they will stay with.”

Each year, natural resources staffers take kids out to a stream to scoop up small creatures and learn about them and water chemistry. That started at Hatchery Creek years ago, was moved to the Cable Natural History Museum for their River Rats program and became the template for Project Wet and Wild Adopt A Stream.

“It’s spread world-wide,” Pratt says. “We invented that here. I’m probably more proud of that than anything else.”

• The Namekagon River is “a world-class fishery. It’s the best wild inland non-tailwater brown trout fishery in North America and we built it.”

Contrary to this achievement, however, the “National Park Service wants to tear it down,” Pratt added. “They want us to eliminate the brown trout from the stream and try to re-manage for brook trout. But in this day and age with climate change/global warming and the fact that 95 percent of the Namekagon cannot support brook trout, that (idea) is absolute insanity.

“Even without climate change, our brook trout are in big trouble,” Pratt adds. “We’ve lost 15 to 20 percent of our brook trout habitat in Sawyer County over the past two decades, due basically to beaver activity” and overzealous management for aspen, which is the beaver’s main food resource.”

After 20 years of planning, the Park Service has rejected Pratt’s “Big Wood” proposal to cut and place large trees in the Namekagon River south of Seeley. The idea is to recreate the valuable fish habitat and ecology which existed prior to the large timber harvest of the late 1800s.

“We used to have 300 to 500 pieces of big wood per mile; it’s now 100 or less,” Pratt said.

“It’s the same philosophy” as the ‘Fish Sticks’ project proposed for Nelson Lake, Pratt added. “That has my full support.”

Walleyes ‘usurped’

With climate change, “our walleye populations are severely threatened,” Pratt said. “In many lakes, largemouth bass are usurping the niche of the walleye.

“Largemouth bass and walleye have always been in direct competition with each other. They eat one another. For the last 50 years or so, walleye have had the upper hand. Now our one-to-two-month longer growing season allows small bass to get bigger in their first year of life and bass have the upper hand.

“We’re down to a handful of good walleye lakes” which probably wouldn’t be a problem, but 60 percent of anglers in Wisconsin say the number-one species they prefer to pursue and catch is the walleye.”

In the past two decades, fishing regulations “have done way too much to protect largemouth bass,” he said. “Largemouth bass basically now are not harvested, but virtually every legal-size walleye that’s caught hits the frying pan.”

He said that “largemouth bass are great table fare if they’re medium-size and if they’re caught in the first couple months of the season. Our later bass opener (third Saturday in June) works contrary to having people catch and eat bass when they’re the most palatable.”

The current bass regulations work against quality bass, walleye and panfish angling, he added. Adding to the problem is that the system for making and changing rules is “so complex and lengthy that the ultimate result is do-nothing most of the time. Managers cannot make timely changes.”

Among the changes he would make is having the bass season open on the first Saturday in May on all waters, having no minimum size for largemouth bass to be kept, and having different regulations for smallmouth and largemouth bass.

Panfish

“The horse has left the barn many years ago” for anglers wanting to catch big bluegills and crappies, Pratt said.

“All our panfish lakes up here are severely overharvested. You can catch lots of bluegills the size of potato chips. If anglers want to catch larger bluegills and crappies, they’re going to have to accept considerably more restrictive regulations.”

Muskellunge

On the other hand, muskellunge “have been an astounding success story, mostly due to voluntary catch and release,” he said. “Our musky fishery has never been in better shape relative to the demand that’s out there. I’m not even convinced that we need to stock muskies any more.”

When he arrived here in the mid 1970s, “If you caught a 30-inch musky, you conked it on the head. You’d never see a musky over 40 inches. We overexploited musky to the point where they almost went away. Now we’ve come full circle; we have musky populations that are dominated by big old fish that are reproducing just fine.

“The only problem I see with our musky program relative to producing trophy-size fish 50 inches and bigger is we still need to do something with late-season mortality with live-bait rigs. We lose way too many fish that swallow suckers. Even though they’re caught and released, they’re basically dead fish.”

The most recent study of muskies in Lac Courte Oreilles “shows they have the same genetic signature as in 1955,” he said. “There’s no way that could be the case unless there’s a lot of natural reproduction out there.”

A warmer climate will work to the advantage of muskies and to the disadvantage of northern pike, Pratt added.

“Everything is looking rosy for muskies. There is a weak interaction between muskies and northerns; if anything, medium-size northerns will provide a food resource that will grow very large muskies.”

An experimental stocking of brown trout in Round Lake in the past decade resulted in abundant 25- to 30-inch trout, but “nobody fished for them. Very few people were interested in managing for cold-water species” there, Pratt said. “It didn’t turn their crank, even though they would drive 60 to 70 miles to Lake Superior for trout half the size of what we had here. So we abandoned the program.”

Agency problems

The retiring Pratt said the Department of Natural Resources currently has “a structure and management style that is totally unproductive.” He blames that on the “cabinet-style form of government. The No. 1 objective of any program was to make the governor look good, or at least not do anything that would be harmful to the governor’s image.”

That results in a do-nothing approach to make as few enemies as possible, he says.

“We’ve done one good thing in the last 15 years, and that’s the Stewardship Program,” he said. “We’ve purchased a lot of land for our children and children’s children.”

Pratt said he did “50 times more in my first 20 years with the department than I was allowed in my last 15 years,” he said. “That’s been an extreme frustration. I spent most of my time trying to hot-wire over a morally bankrupt system.

“And we have no leadership anymore. Their management theory is top-down central control, which doesn’t ever produce anything. The best ideas come from below and bubble up through the system; they don’t come from on high.”

Pratt said the agency has had “real leaders” in the past, mentioning Lee Kernen, Jim Addis, Buzz Besadny, Chuck Johnson and Dave Jacobson. But the current system “selects against leaders,” he said.

He said one reason he’s retiring from the DNR at age 62 is that “frustration has burned me out. I’m done beating my head against the wall, spending so much of my God-given ability trying to hot-wire around a system to do one out of 10 things that need to be done.”

Pratt said he plans to continue speaking out, and to continue living in the Hayward area.

“I would have loved to work for this Department for 50 years,” he said. “I’d settle for saying 20 years from now that I worked for the people and the resources of this state for 35 years with the DNR and 15 years outside the DNR.”

[DonBo]

Wow, wonder how he really feels? It's always been a problem when legislators try to do the job of the DNR. He'll be missed.