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.

 

[Justabirdwatcher]

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.

 

[Irrelevant]

We restored a wetland on our property two years ago. It included a conservation easement. Last year we had broods of mallards, bluewing teal, wood ducks, and hooded mergansers raised on it. Muskrats, mink, cranes, and a million frogs moved in. The neighboring farmer didn’t like it and installed a drain tile up to the property line. This year we have a big mudflat with a tiny puddle in the middle. Zero ducks. Makes me sick.

Not that you probably want to spend a bunch of money, but you could combat this with a grout/bentontite curtain.

 

[NoWiser]

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.

 

[Irrelevant]

I’m not sure what part of what I said was incorrect . What else would the water be doing that’s drained through the tile? I suppose a very small percentage might run off the surface. Some might evaporate. But, the vast majority that’s now piped directly to our waterways would either be soaking into the ground or filling up wetlands. No degree in soil science needed.

We are in a drought here. The neighbors’ tile lines that discharge onto our property are all flowing. Every one of them. I personally checked them last week. We hadn’t had rain in weeks. We did finally get 2.5” on Friday. I guarantee the water is literally shooting out of them right now if I went and checked.

Go plug them up with a pipe ball and some timber bracing...

 

[Irrelevant]

I understand more than you probably imagine. The fact remains that water that runs out of those tiles is water that otherwise would be recharging aquifers or filling wetlands. This is the case, even if it only happens when the water table is higher in the spring.

My beef isn’t only with grid tiles, though. I’m an equal opportunity tile-hater. Every single depression in every single field around me has an orange tile intake sticking up in the middle of it. Nearly all of these were once wetlands. No matter the soil saturation level, every one of these expedites nutrient laden water straight to a waterway when there’s a moderate or heavy rain. The results are more frequent flooding and nasty algae blooms.

I drive by a wetland everyday on my way to work. A pheasant and duck paradise. I ran across the landowner about a year ago and mentioned how cool it was. He went on a tirade about it being protected by an easement so it can’t be drained, resulting in a big, worthless, “wasteland.” Maybe this new rule will make him happy. Throw in a few new tiles and, if he’s lucky, all the water will disappear so he can hay it. No ducks, but at least it’ll no longer be “worthless.”

"This comment was approved by a licensed Hydrogeologist"