CROOKSTON, Minn. -- Growing up in the southwest Minnesota town of Jackson, Ross Hier said he knew from the time he was 6 or 7 years old that he wanted to work in wildlife management.
Tuesday, he’ll walk out the door for the last time as area wildlife manager for the Department of Natural Resources in Crookston.
“How lucky can a guy be?” Hier, 60, said. “I knew I wanted to work in this field, and the fact that it happened is the greatest gift to me other than my marriage.”
Hier and his wife, Leela, plan to continue living in Crookston, close to the prairie landscape for which his passion still burns strong as ever.
His love of the job, Hier says, boiled down to two things:
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“It’s the land we get to manage, and we’re lucky to have some of the most beautiful tallgrass prairie units left on the planet in our work area,” he said. “Secondly, the communities I get to work with, the people.”
Saturday night, friends, family and colleagues gathered at the Crookston Inn to pay tribute to Hier and wish him well in his retirement.
“He’s one of the treasured resources we have in the region,” said John Williams, regional DNR wildlife supervisor in Bemidji. “He’s very well founded in terms of his knowledge of wildlife and physical knowledge of the Crookston work area.”
Career path Hier’s road to Crookston started with undergraduate school at the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus, where he graduated in 1978. That was followed by stints in Bemidji, graduate school in New Mexico and a full-time DNR position in 1983 working on waterfowl research out of the Bemidji office.
Then, in what Hier calls a “stroke of luck,” assistant wildlife manager positions opened up in 1988 at several northwest Minnesota offices.
“A whole little wave of young biologists got jobs, and I was one of them,” Hier said. “It was kind of funny because we all interviewed at the same time. I’m not sure how the managers picked who they wanted, but I ended up in Crookston.”
Hier was assistant wildlife manager in Crookston until 2012, when he took over as acting manager from the retiring Terry Wolfe. The DNR named him Crookston area manager in January 2013.
As wildlife manager, he’s rescued deer, shooed moose out of town and spent countless hours becoming intimately familiar with the prairie. Satellite imagery and GIS technology are great tools for land and wildlife managers, but there’s no substitute for being “out there” on the ground, Hier says.
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Learning the land. Talking to people.
“It is fun to be able to go into a little town like Plummer or Oklee and have someone yell your name from across the street in a positive way,” Hier said. “That’s the neater part of bigger work areas with a lot of little towns. I get in on a lot of traditional activities the average worker doesn’t get to see.
“Being from a small town in southwest Minnesota, it brings a smile to my face.”
Catching Hier in the office hasn’t been easy over the years. That was by design, he says.
“We have these public lands we’re lucky enough to work on. You can’t be intimate with a piece of land unless you walk it a lot, do whatever it takes to get to know it,” Hier said. “That’s the love affair -- to have that is a gift to those of us who live in rural areas and have access to wild places.
“To get to know a piece of land is just an absolute gift to a human being. So yes, we try to spend a lot of time outside.”
Frustrations Hier says the ongoing battle with noxious weeds and nonnative plants and the sense of entitlement Minnesotans sometimes feel toward public lands rank among his biggest frustrations with the job.
The demand on the resource is greater than ever, but the support doesn’t always follow suit -- not only in Minnesota, but nationwide, Hier says.
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As an example, Hier said, tight budgets mean there are no immediate plans to fill the vacancy created by his retirement.
“Americans and Minnesotans have come to expect a lot from government, but they don’t want government,” Hier said. “It’s a paradox what’s happening. This idea of us being able to get a lot of things done that people expect us to do isn’t going to happen.”
Hier says retirement will offer more time for travel, working on his watercolor paintings -- an accomplished artist, he has a backlog of commissions -- and getting back into the swing of decoy carving.
“Just to think I can watercolor paint on my own schedule will be a joy,” Hier said. “A little writing and traveling with Leela. Mostly, it feels pretty good. It’s emotional, a person will be somewhat cut off from your comrades you’ve worked with for 30-plus years.
“That’s one beautiful thing about the Section of Wildlife -- turnover is pretty low. You work with people 20-30 years.”
Hier says he’ll probably have a few tears in his eyes when he walks out of the office for the last time as a DNR employee, but he plans to stay involved in prairie conservation and will continue to serve on the board of the Minnesota Prairie Chicken Society.
“I can’t imagine life without being involved in natural resources,” he said.
