And there go the prairie potholes....

[Treeshark]

The effect I’ve noticed locally can be easy to miss: it’s not as if large marshes are disappearing. It’s the 1/2 acre puddle in the middle of a field that used to exist for a few months in the spring/summer, just long enough for a hen to raise a brood. Those are disappearing at an alarming rate.

 

[R.K.]

The majority of wetlands I hunted along the Mississippi River growing up are now incapable of holding water. Chisel plows ripped out the bottoms, and field tile drained the rest.

I nearly gave up duck hunting because there was nowhere left to hunt that wasn’t an arm and a leg to lease every year, and there was no habitat left for the birds to exist on without getting shot at. If they can’t rest places and trade around to small wetlands, they leave. The ones that don’t just sit on a million dollar flooded corn refuge that represents the only area they can do that on, and then never leave because there’s nowhere to go except Arkansas.

When the river flooded and filled the borrow pits, or backflooded fields, there were birds in abundance. But that’s getting to be rare, too.

You can say what you want about agriculture being good for waterfowl, but it’s absolutely proven catastrophic to pintails, and nearly as bad for the average waterfowl hunter.

 

[twraska]

That's actually not even what this thread is about. And it's not surprising that you've lived in the EL area for 66 years based on your baises.

Look, let's think back 100 years ago. Exactly what do you think was supporting the flocks of waterfowl that were known to "darken the sky" in those days? Foreign rice? Even Eagle Lake was first planted in sugar cane. The rice didn't come until your lifetime. Stretch that noggin just a bit. Set the Colorado County wisdom aside for just a second and listen to the folks here. Many of them actually understand prairie potholes and tiling.

My point, there were not the big numbers of birds there before the rice. BTW, the rice came in pre-WW2 with the big expansion during the war. POW labor was used to help expand the canal system.