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.
And there go the prairie potholes....
- Thread starter Justabirdwatcher
- Start date
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.
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.
Last edited:
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.
Justabirdwatcher
Well-known member
Maybe there weren't artificially high numbers of waterfowl before the rice (but definitely higher than there are now), but there were big numbers of other birds, including migratory grassland birds (the group in the steepest decline of all bird species) and now-critically endangered Attwater's prairie-chickens that were decimated by the sugar and then rice industries, not to mention recreational shooting parties that would just pile them up and let them rot. But again, this thread is about draining prairie potholes, primarily in the northern prairies. It's not about rice or Eagle Lake, TX.
If you want to talk about the number of natural prairie potholes on the TX coastal prairie that were ditched and drained for the rice industry, we can start another thread and I'll be your huckleberry. It's an area I spent nearly 25 years of my career working in and I've closed in many a rice field ditch to restore natural pothole wetlands. If you want a real eye-opener, go to Google Earth and use the time slider to go back and look at the TX coastal prairies in the Katy, TX area in the 1950's. There were natural prairie pothole wetlands literally everywhere and they are now all gone either through development or ditching for agriculture.
If you want to talk about the number of natural prairie potholes on the TX coastal prairie that were ditched and drained for the rice industry, we can start another thread and I'll be your huckleberry. It's an area I spent nearly 25 years of my career working in and I've closed in many a rice field ditch to restore natural pothole wetlands. If you want a real eye-opener, go to Google Earth and use the time slider to go back and look at the TX coastal prairies in the Katy, TX area in the 1950's. There were natural prairie pothole wetlands literally everywhere and they are now all gone either through development or ditching for agriculture.
Last edited:
Irrelevant
Well-known member
Not that you probably want to spend a bunch of money, but you could combat this with a grout/bentontite curtain.
A clay/bentonite cutoff wall is the solution. I tried to explain this to the state engineer last year when they designed the tile, but was dismissed and reassured the wetland would be fine. He was wrong. I’m working on getting funding for it right now.
