By Paul Walsh

Minneapolis Star Tribune

A seasoned federal wildlife official who knows Minnesota and neighboring states well will be filling a key leadership role in regulating all hunting and fishing in Minnesota.

Jim Leach will take over next month as director of the Fish and Wildlife Division for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the state agency announced Wednesday.

In his duties with the DNR, Leach will oversee a division that sets fishing, hunting and other wildlife-related regulations; carries out census, survey and research projects; and promotes habitat protection and development on public and private lands. The division has a $139 million annual budget and a staff of 575.

When his tenure begins on April 18, Leach will succeed Ed Boggess, who is retiring after 34 years with the DNR.

For the past 16 years, Leach has been the wildlife refuge supervisor for Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in that agency’s Midwest regional office in Bloomington. He has been with the USFWS for 35 years and has forged strong relationships with hunting and fishing organizations, tribal authorities and other conservation groups.

“Jim is an excellent collaborator at all levels of government and has a strong network of relationships in the Minnesota conservation community,” DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr said in announcing the selection. “Moreover, he started his career as a field biologist, so he has firsthand experience on how on-the-ground conservation gets done.”

The 62-year-old Leach, a native Minnesotan, has a master’s degree in zoology from the University of South Dakota and did his graduate research on trumpeter swans. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in biology, with a wildlife emphasis, from St. Cloud State University.

Leach is a lifelong hunter and angler and has passed that passion on to his four children.

In the role he’s departing from with the USFWS, Leach oversaw up to 18 field stations in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, focusing on land acquisition and habitat restoration.

“Jim’s experience in working on habitat issues runs from restoring wetlands in western Minnesota, to managing land and water resources in northwest Minnesota, to working the hallways of Congress to promote funding for wildlife,” Landwehr said.

Leach began his fish and wildlife career in 1977 as a laborer at the Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. He joined the USFWS in the late 1970s working at Tamarac and Agassiz national wildlife refuges. In those capacities he worked with local governments and state agencies to restore and manage wetlands on public lands.

Leach became the USFWS’s coordinator for the Upper Mississippi and Great Lakes Joint Venture in 1993, a position focused on improving habitat conditions for waterfowl across the Upper Mississippi River basin. He put in place a strategic habitat conservation plan for ducks and geese.