Tracey Slough is the kind of lake that almost disappears when you ask the internet what it is. No marina voice. No weekend itinerary. No entry in the state's own lake database. It shows up instead as a coordinate in Pope County, Minnesota as 89.5 acres depending on which water table is doing the counting. But the anonymity is a trick. Nobody drives to Tracey Slough; everything flies to it. Within a short morning's radius are federal Waterfowl Production Areas, Bangor WMA, Lake Johanna, Ordway Prairie, Lake Johanna Esker, Sheepberry Fen, Moe Woods, and Sedan Brook Prairie. The amenity list is not docks and restaurants. It is a fen, an esker, native prairie, and a marsh loud enough to make a nameless road feel like the edge of an orchestra pit. At 6 a.m. in June the place is probably more voice than view. Sora. Virginia Rail. Marsh Wren. Sedge Wren. Yellow-headed Blackbird making that rusty-hinge sound that belongs to prairie sloughs. Black Tern over the wetland. Trumpeter Swan, Sandhill Crane, white pelicans overhead, maybe a Common Loon carrying some larger lake in its throat. Behind it, the dry side answers with Western Meadowlark, Dickcissel, Grasshopper Sparrow, Vesper Sparrow, Clay-colored Sparrow, pheasant. No pine. Cattail marsh and wet mud, cured prairie grass, irrigation-damp sand from the Bonanza Valley. In winter, Glenwood cold closes the water hard. In fall, dawn has a legal meaning, because duck season begins a half-hour before sunrise and the whole neighborhood knows how to lift off.
curator · lake-level · as of Sep 3, 2026
The facts
- Surface area 0.4 km² usgs-3dhp · lake-level · as of Jun 2, 2026
- Nearest town Brooten · 7.1 km osm-overpass · lake-level · as of Jun 2, 2026
- Bird species (within 25 mi) 202 ebird-api-v2 · lake-level · as of Jun 2, 2026
- Bird diversity index 0.81 ebird-api-v2 · lake-level · as of Jun 2, 2026
- Median home value $294,200 census-acs-2024-b25077 · block-group-level · as of Jun 2, 2026
- Water clarity Moderate sentinel-2-l2a · lake-level · as of Sep 3, 2026
- Night sky Darkest skies viirs-black-marble-vnp46a4 · lake-level · as of Sep 3, 2026
- Surroundings Rural — open country, few close neighbors curator · lake-level · as of Sep 3, 2026
- Water origin Natural lake curator · lake-level · as of Sep 3, 2026
In more detail
- Climate
- strongly four-season; frigid winters (~15°F mean), warm summers (~69°F); ~29 in precip/yr curator · lake-level · as of Sep 3, 2026
- Public access
- Public walk-in access via Bangor Wildlife Management Area (WMA00677): roughly the northwestern half of the 119-acre slough (MN DNR public-waters basin 61-14) lies inside this 80-acre DNR WMA, listed in the DNR's publicly accessible WMA inventory with no special restrictions, with a public parking lot on the north side (from Brooten: 3 mi W on CR 8, 0.5 mi N, 1 mi W on trail). No DNR Public Water Access boat launch exists on the slough itself; the eastern/southern portion of the basin is private. Fees/permits: none for WMA entry; state licenses for hunting/fishing. Sources: dnr.state.mn.us Bangor WMA detail sheet + WMA finder (fetched 2026-07-19); MN DNR public-waters inventory DOW 61001400. curator · lake-level · as of Jul 19, 2026
- Property tax
- 0.77% ACS effective-rate proxy (2024 ACS 5-year; Pope County anchor: $1,967 median real-estate taxes paid ÷ $255,100 median owner-occupied home value; Minnesota proxy 1.02%, -0.25 percentage points). census-acs-2024-property-tax · county-level · as of Dec 31, 2024
Where it’s heading
Stable hand-rated for v0.1 · lake-level · as of Sep 3, 2026
Tracey Slough sits in a landscape anchored by permanent conservation holdings — an eBird hotspot query identifies four federal Waterfowl Production Areas, multiple Nature Conservancy preserves, and Sedan Brook Prairie SNA within about 12 km. The slough has no entry in the Minnesota DNR LakeFinder database and effectively zero web coverage, so nothing is documented either way and there is no housing or visitation time-series to read; this is a conservative default-to-stable rating against a quietly locked-in landscape of conservation land and a long-established irrigated farming district. That district — the Bonanza Valley — is one of three DNR groundwater management areas in the state per MPR News.