Buying Land in Kidder County, North Dakota

Beyond Long Lake: Slade and Hutchinson Lake, two more refuges inside Kidder County

Long Lake National Wildlife Refuge -- the 22,300-acre saline-basin refuge established in 1932 and recognized as a Globally Important Bird Area -- straddles the Kidder/Burleigh county line, with its headquarters near Moffit. But Kidder County's federal refuge footprint doesn't stop there. Slade National Wildlife Refuge, a separate 3,000-acre refuge in south-central Kidder County, was established in 1941 from land donated by G.T. Slade, a Northern Pacific Railroad executive; it includes more than 900 acres of wetlands and potholes around Harker Lake and Upper Harker Lake, and is managed as part of the Long Lake NWR Complex.

A third, smaller unit -- Hutchinson Lake National Wildlife Refuge, roughly 479 acres -- is a genuinely different kind of designation worth understanding before buying nearby land: it's a "limited-interest" refuge, meaning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service holds an easement over the property for wildlife management purposes, but the land itself remains privately owned and taxed as private property. In other words, a Kidder County parcel can appear on a plat map as ordinary private farmland while actually being subject to a federal wildlife easement restricting how it can be used or altered. Before buying near any of these refuge boundaries, check USFWS refuge and easement boundary data for the specific parcel rather than relying on a listing description.

The bigger picture: WPAs and easements across a large share of the county

Zooming out from the named refuges, USFWS data attributes a substantial amount of additional federal interest to Kidder County: 88 Waterfowl Production Areas totaling 23,723 acres, 107,384 acres of wetland easements, and 98,806 acres of grassland easements, all managed through the Long Lake Wetland Management District (which also covers neighboring Burleigh and Emmons counties). Add those figures together against the county's roughly 864,000 acres of land area, and the federal waterfowl/wetland footprint works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of Kidder County's total land -- an estimate this site calculated from the underlying acreage figures rather than a single published county-level percentage, so treat it as directional rather than precise.

What this means practically: Waterfowl Production Areas are outright federal fee-title land (no different, functionally, from a small piece of a wildlife refuge), while wetland and grassland easements sit on land that stays in private ownership but carries permanent federal restrictions -- typically prohibiting wetland drainage, burning, or grassland conversion to cropland, purchased originally under the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp Act (Duck Stamp) program. Because these are scattered across the county in a patchwork tied to individual wetland basins rather than concentrated in one obvious area, there's no shortcut to checking a specific parcel -- confirm WPA, wetland-easement, and grassland-easement status directly with the Long Lake Wetland Management District or USFWS before assuming a tract is unencumbered.

A live, documented dispute over easement enforcement and drainage tile

Given how much of Kidder County carries these easements, it's worth knowing that their enforcement has become an active, publicly reported political fight rather than settled practice. North Dakota farmers have raised documented complaints that Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement of Waterfowl Production Area easements -- particularly rules restricting new agricultural drainage tile near protected wetlands -- oversteps into their property rights and causes real financial harm, and North Dakota's U.S. Senate delegation has publicly pressed FWS leadership and nominees on the issue through 2025 and into 2026. None of this changes what an existing recorded easement legally requires today, but it does mean a buyer whose plans depend on drainage work near a wetland easement, WPA, or refuge boundary in this county should research current federal enforcement posture directly and not assume either the restriction or a policy change will hold by the time they close.