Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge

"Public-use minded," is how Ralph Lloyd describes himself, and there is much at Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge to show for it. Lloyd is manager of this refuge in east central Minnesota, where visitors were required by a previous manager to sign in before being allowed in.

Visitors are now made to feel more welcome, beginning with a new headquarters and visitor-contact building in full view of passing traffic. This visible location, Lloyd thinks, will help lure people who might never have seen and learned about the 4,500-acre lake and surrounding bogs and marshes that make up this 18,000-acre refuge.

To further accommodate refuge visitors, Lloyd joined the five hiking trails into a seven-mile interconnected network through a variety of refuge habitats. His latest plan is to build a new trail that can be walked directly from the headquarters.

Visitors are also permitted to hike the 7-mile North Bog Road and 3-mile South Trail Road, the latter being partially closed from April through July during the season when a pair of bald eagles nests on the refuge.

A new trail brochure is available at headquarters as are loaner binoculars and field guides for those who need them.

The 9.5-mile refuge auto tour includes a stop at an observation deck overlooking the expanse of Rice Lake. Depending on season and time of day, any of the recorded 200 species of birds and 36 species of mammals may be seen. Spring and fall and late afternoon are best.

Soon after his arrival as manager, Lloyd also ordered the removal of the post barriers in public areas. They were a vestige, he thought, of an unwelcome sign to visitors and, moreover, they interfered with mowing.

Reaching out to the community is also stressed, and monthly talks by the refuge staff to the 6th grade classes at nearby McGregor elementary school is now a 16-year tradition.

The refuge gets its name from Rice Lake, a prominent feature of the refuge where prolific wild rice crops have supported both wildlife and humans for millennia. Waterfowl feed on the seed sprouts, shoots, and ripe grain of wild rice and use its dense cover for protection.

A record year in 1994 of one million waterfowl at Rice Lake is still talked about. Assistant manager, John Francis, says the mallards were so profuse that a duckling landed in his lap and stayed with him for most of the survey that he was conducting by air-boat!

The grain was a staple food for Native Americans, some of whom fought in the past for control over wild rice fields. The Chippewa Indians continue to harvest the fall crop at Rice Lake using the historical method of tapping the ripe grain into their pole-propelled canoes. They are the only people who are permitted by the refuge to do so.

Rice Lake was established in 1935 and partially acquired with funds from the $6 million appropriation instigated by J.N. "Ding" Darling for refuges.

The funds also paid for the acquisition of the Sandstone unit, a 2,100-acre wooded wetland 40 miles southeast, where seven male short-tailed grouse were recently recorded in a refuge survey. Sandstone is administered by Rice Lake NWR and is open to small game and archery deer hunting, but has no visitor accommodations.

Soon after its establishment, Rice Lake NWR was the site of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The 24 camp buildings are gone, but the clearing where they stood is visible from the tour route. CCC workers built roads and dikes and the structures on Rice River to control critical water levels in refuge lakes, still in use today.

Major facility improvements were made in the 1970s with money from the $180 million Bicentennial Land Heritage Program for refuges.

But without the thrust of programs like these, the new interpretive trail at headquarters envisioned by Lloyd will likely remain only on paper for some time to come—another reminder of the nearly half billion dollar refuge system maintenance backlog.

Under the administration of Rice Lake NWR also are the islands of the Mille Lacs NWR, set aside by Presidential orders in 1915 and 1920. It is the smallest refuge in the national system consisting of 0.24-acre Spirit Island and 0.33-acre Hennepin Island in the middle of Mille Lacs Lake. The 207-square mile lake is 30 air miles southwest of Rice Lake NWR.

Birds at the refuge include loons, great blue and green backed herons, sora, white pelicans, American bitterns, black terns, yellowlegs, killdeer, and snipe. Mallards, teal, ring-necked ducks, and Canada geese are common waterfowl.

Recent new sightings include Harris' sparrow, Lapland longspur, red breasted nuthatch, and Philadelphia vireo. A field trip of the Minnesota Ornithological Union produced a tally of 70 species on one day in May.

Whitetail deer are the most common refuge mammal, but to see a less-common black bear is possible and, in the words of the refuge brochure, a "memorable experience."

Damaged tops of red pines are not diseased but rather the work of the porcupines that climb there to sleep and to eat the bark they strip, too. Moose and gray wolves are only occasional.

Fishing is a popular sport on the Rice River at an area provided for fishers along the auto tour route. Northern pike dominate the catch. Accessibility for disabled fishers is provided with a floating pier on Mandy Lake. It was designed, constructed, and installed by refuge maintenance worker Dean Huhta.

Small-game and archery hunting of deer is permitted in designated areas of the refuge. Firearm hunting of deer requires a special permit. No duck, goose, or migratory-bird hunting for anything other than American woodcock and Common snipe is allowed.

Manager Lloyd is targeting his management toward reducing habitat fragmentation on the refuge. To do that requires the arduous task of inventorying the entire refuge habitat. More than 1,400 acres have been inventoried thus far.

Conducting the surveys by snowshoe in the winter is far easier than negotiating the boggy terrain in the summer, when Lloyd says you can't see your clipboard for the mosquitoes and deer flies anyway.

Forest and grassland/brushland management areas have been designated, and cropland has been relocated.

The 199 acres of open areas are maintained by cooperative farmers to provide food and protection for waterfowl and songbirds like bobolinks. Woody vegetation is controlled through burning, haying, and mechanical means (hydroaxing), perpetuating the important bog, marsh, and brush habitats as did wild fires in pre-settlement days.

Other wildlife inventories are planned now that Rice Lake has gained its first staff biologist ever. With his background in American bittern research, biologist Wayne Brininger is well suited for the marsh bird surveys Lloyd wants at Rice Lake.

In his new role, Brininger also inventories the common tern nests at Mille Lacs NWR, which is also under Rice Lake NWR administration. The coarse gravel beach of the 0.33-acre Hennepin Island was host to 125 nesting pairs in 1996. Jumbled rocks on the 0.24-acre Spirit Island, however, were impediments to successful nesting, and only 11 pairs were seen attempting it in 1996.

The terns are rated a threatened species by Minnesota and are under consideration as endangered. Public access on the islands is not permitted.

Like each one of the national wildlife refuges, Rice Lake is invaluable wildlife habitat, well worth our investment—and well worth a visit.

Refuge Traveling
Tom McFadden, public use specialist at Great Swamp NWR (NJ), wrote a lengthy account of his travel to and five-week stay on Midway Atoll NWR. The following are excerpts from that account. Rob Shallenberger is Midway's new manager.

Last August, I had the opportunity to be detailed for five weeks to Midway Atoll NWR to assist in the setting up of the new refuge as the Navy closed its base. The first-class flight to Hawaii with my retired-from-United-Airlines father was fabulous, quite unlike the next day's flight to Midway I with 40 others boarded a military C-130 transport where the temperature in the cargo hold must have been 100 degrees and the engine noise would have muted any gun shot.

On landing, I was greeted by refuge staff who whisked me by newly renovated military barracks to "Ghetto Barracks," which hadn't been touched since the Battle of Midway.

My job was to set up interpretive programs for visitors to include not only the natural history but the history of the battle as well. The World War II history was incredible with original gun emplacements, bunkers, buildings, and other artifacts all over the island. I would explore every nook and cranny in the coming weeks and love every minute of it.

My job also included conducting the very popular evening bike tours. The island is only 1,200 acres and can be easily traveled by bike. After four days of high winds and rain, I was given a new assignment: feeding 12 young terns that had been blown out of their nests. They ate several small fish three times a day, and before they fledged they ate two five-gallon buckets of fish caught with a seining net.

I also assisted with restoration of cleanup sites that had been contaminated by buried fuel tanks during World War II. We rooted cuttings of a native plant, Napaka, planted them on the sites, and watered them with an elaborate irrigation system we devised.

Bird life was incredible, and every bird was new to me: red-tailed tropic birds, great frigatebirds, and, at night, bonin petrels and wedge-tailed shearwaters. Layson albatross take over the island at certain times of the year and make it impossible even to ride a bike.

Five weeks without a radio, newspapers, or telephone were great, but it was finally time to return to the modern conveniences one takes for granted. I never knew a place like Midway existed—a place where time almost stands still.

Before It Was a Refuge
The road into the refuge is straight as an arrow and very smooth. That is because it is on the bed of a branch of the Soo Line Railroad, constructed in 1910 and abandoned in the 1920s, when iron-ore mining and commercial timbering in the area ceased.

Loggers also hauled and unloaded logs on ice-covered Rice Lake. They were then towed in the spring to Rice River and driven 20 miles to the Mississippi River.

Rice Lake, like many other area water bodies, was also a target for drainage. Wanting to harvest marsh hay, a livestock rancher tried unsuccessfully to de-water the lake in 1900.

Prior to this century, the natural condition of the lake and its surroundings changed very little, although evidence indicates that the area was occupied by humans since prehistoric times. These Native Americans were sustained by the wild rice, maple syrup, game animals, and other resources that were renewed year after year. Burial mounds on the refuge are dated by archaeologists as 1,300 years old.

Estimated to have been formed by a glacier 10,000 years ago, Rice Lake is trapped by ridges or moraines on all but one side, which is open to the Rice River. Glacial movement left a series of horseshoe-shaped moraines in this otherwise flat terrain, all open toward the northeast, forcing the land to drain in that direction rather than to the south.

The areas between the moraines, including Rice Lake, stay wet and are also filling in with decomposed vegetation and sediments, building a floating mat of boggy, organic material known as peat. The higher ridges support trees and other upland plants. The bogs and marshes contain wetland flora including grasses and flowering plants. The diverse habitat is a haven for animal life.

Although it will take a long time, eventually the very slow and unending natural cycles occurring at Rice Lake NWR will convert Rice Lake itself into a lowland forest.

Wild Yes—But Is It Rice?
Native to the northern United States and southern Canada, wild rice is reported to have been named 60 different ways. The Chippewa Indians call it manomin meaning good berry or grain. Others called it wild oats.

Like common white and brown rice (Oryza sativa), this tall plant (Zinzania aquatica) is aquatic and a member of the grass family, although classified in a different genus. The cultivation of wild rice is a recent phenomenon, but common rice has always been cultivated and is unknown in the wild state.

Concentrated in Minnesota, wild rice flourishes where lake or stream conditions are right. Water must be less than four feet deep, must not rise sharply, and must remain high during summers. Seeds from this annual will lie on mucky bottoms during winter and sprout in late May and early June. If conditions are not right, they will remain dormant for as many as ten years as a guarantee of species survival. The long leaves of the plant are floating by late June and, barring a sudden rise of water, stalks will grow up to ten feet by mid-August. The grain ripens by September.

On public waters, wild rice can only be harvested by the traditional method used by early Native Americans, thus ensuring enough seed to share with wildlife and to perpetuate the species. One person will stand and navigate a canoe with a long pole while another sits to bend the long stalks with a ricing stick and tap them with another to drop the grain into the craft. Later processing either manually or mechanically involves drying, curing with heat, and threshing to remove the hulls.

The Chippewas have exclusive rights to wild rice on Rice Lake NWR as well as on about 10,000 acres of Tribal lands. Although it has long been a chief part of the diet of Native Americans in this region, wild rice is now much in demand throughout the country.

Additional Information

Directions: From I-35, west on MN-220 at exit 235 to MN-65 at McGregor. South (left) on MN-65 five miles to refuge headquarters on right.

For more information please contact:

Rice Lake NWR
Route 2 Box 67
McGregor, MN 55760
218-768-2402

From Refuge Reporter, an independent quarterly journal to increase recognition and support of the National Wildlife Refuge System