Rebuilding Wetlands and Waterfowl Resources in North and South America - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 154

North America's pintail and mallard populations converge there at this time (Young
and Batt 2004). Wetland loss in this area has been enormous, to a degree similar to
that in Iraq (i.e., over 95 percent of the historic wetlands are now gone). This is a very
modified landscape with some of the best corn and bean agriculture in the world. As
in present-day Iraq, what happens in Nebraska is that all the birds showing up in the
spring are now concentrated in the few remaining patches of wetlands. In Nebraska,
this has had the result of enormous die-offs of waterfowl which are likely to increase
in the future. Mortality is due to avian cholera, and it's anticipated that in the right
combination of weather, wetland scarcity, and concentration of birds, many hundreds
of thousands, maybe millions, could die here in a single year. The management issue
then becomes how to restore wetlands and to distribute the birds farther apart so that
they're not caught in these huge and potentially deadly concentrations. These are the
kinds of issues that are by no means endemic to Nebraska but rather are characteris-
tic of many wetland systems around the world (Young and Batt 2004).
In order to address the problem, Ducks Unlimited purchased land in Nebraska
with the aim of restoring the wetlands by taking a former cornfield and converting it
into a more desirable kind of habitat for waterfowl and other environmental interests.
The landscape is a complex mosaic of wetland basins that required a major planning
exercise based on obtaining considerable biological information as well as establish-
ing a close network with the local community. A Global Positioning System (GPS)
survey of land contours was needed to develop a detailed topographic information
base from which to plan future restoration efforts. And because the view of many
people was that the area should be a cornfield and not wetlands, very careful coordi-
nation was needed with the local community. Engineering plans were developed, and
invasive trees removed, and because some of these wetlands had been so silted-in due
to poor farming practices, bulldozers were actually required for much of the restora-
tion work. Project success was based on involving local volunteers. Future plans are
to expand upon the success of the pilot project with a goal to restore a major wetland
complex in the greater river basin for the primary purpose of redistributing the birds.
By spreading out the birds, the chances of disease transmission will be reduced as
will pressures for food availability during the breeding and pre-breeding seasons.
C hesaPeake B ay
Chesapeake Bay is a large estuary with strong waterfowl interests given that during
winters, a very high proportion of North America's mallards reside there. The envi-
ronmental management issue here is the loss of food for waterfowl due to the aquatic
vascular plants diminishing tremendously as a result of estuarine eutrophication and
other causes. Collectively, this has resulted in a marked decrease over the last four
decades in the use of the area by ducks (Young and Batt 2004). This is of concern
to Ducks Unlimited as well as other organizations with interests beyond waterfowl
alone because these diving ducks are operating very much like the classic canaries in
the mine through alerting us to the fact that all estuarine life is threatened.
Using GIS analysis again, Ducks Unlimited and their partners targeted the water-
shed, specifically addressing those counties and communities whose various land
uses were contributing to the problems. Because Chesapeake Bay is tightly coupled