After 45 years of looking after deer and bears and sharp-tailed grouse, Dave Dickey has retired.
Dickey, 67, retired Friday as area wildlife manager for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources at Aitkin. He spent the first four years of his career at the DNR in St. Paul and the past 41 at Aitkin as area wildlife manager.
Dickey was known as an early proponent of deer population modeling and for his leadership in restoring sharp-tailed grouse habitat.
"He really did the first (deer) population modeling on an area wildlife basis," said Bill Berg of Bovey, a now-retired DNR wildlife research biologist. "He was really innovative."
But it was perhaps his work to restore the open-country habitat preferred by sharp-tailed grouse that most distinguished Dickey's long career in the Aitkin area.
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"He really got enthused in the mid-70s trying to save some of these large open areas and manage them for sharptails," Berg said. "His enthusiasm spread to all the other area wildlife managers in Virginia and Cloquet and Brainerd. If Dave's enthusiasm hadn't caught on, sharptails might not be around in the east-central range."
"He did lots of prescribed burning and brushland work, and Aitkin County was ideal for that kind of thing," said Jay Janecek, a former DNR regional wildlife supervisor from Grand Rapids who supervised Dickey.
Rich Staffon, Dickey's neighboring area wildlife manager in Cloquet, says Dickey was always a detail person.
"He's always picking up some things that nobody else would notice," Staffon said. "An example is, this spring, the research guys put this deer population model together. Most managers took it and started using it. Dave's always checking the numbers, and he found an error in the Winter Severity Index figures. They got that corrected. That's typical of Dave."
Dickey supervised the creation of 16 wildlife management areas during his 41 years at Aitkin. For the past 10 years, he's written a weekly column for the Aitkin Independent Age and he did a weekly radio show for years, too.
DNR wildlife management is in good shape, Dickey said, despite doing more with less.
"One thing that's kind of frustrating to me is the change in deer hunter attitudes," he said. "It seems hunters are a lot more concerned with instant gratification. The baiting thing is an issue that really bothers me. We're trying to get a handle on that with a ban on feeding from Sept. 1 to Dec. 31."
That feeding ban proposal failed to pass in the Minnesota Legislature this spring.
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Because of budget constraints, the DNR, as it had done in both Eveleth and Grand Marais, will not name a new area wildlife manager in Aitkin to replace Dickey. Assistant area wildlife manager Dave Kanz will remain in the office as an assistant area wildlife manager, reporting to area wildlife manager Gary Drotts in Brainerd.
