Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway

3. Places in the Grid

65 By the early 1930s, migratory bird populations were plummeting. Although both the U.S. and Canada had implemented more stringent hunting regulations and had had some success curtailing market hunting, wetland drainage continued at an alarming rate. Farmers , often with the aid of government agencies, drained wetlands or diverted the water that nourished them for the benefit of agriculture. This onslaught took a devastating toll on the wetlands in the wintering range of Pacific Flyway birds. Major breeding areas for migratory waterfowl, such as the Prairie Pothole region in the upper Midwest and southern Canada, though less important for Pacific Flyway birds, also lost many wetlands. In a matter of decades, most of the wetlands in the wintering range of the Pacific Flyway had been destroyed. Conservationists feared that some species of ducks and geese might become extinct. Yet by the late 1930s in the United States, the fortunes of migratory waterfowl—and the Biological Survey—began to change. An infusion of federal funds and labor allowed the agency to establish dozens of new refuges and rehabilitate the beleaguered wetland landscape. 3 Places in the Grid 66 Places in the Grid It also drew upon new ornithological knowledge based on years of migration studies to create a more systematic refuge program. The agency also sought to replace its earlier ineffectual oversight with an increasingly rationalized waterfowl management program. Under the direction of new leaders such as survey chief Jay “Ding” Darling and J. Clark Salyer II, the head of the Biological Survey’s refuge program, the scale and scope of waterfowl management changed considerably. From the level of the continent to individual refuges, agency managers sought to build a refuge system that would sustain migratory birds throughout their entire migration route. Restoring marshes entailed reengineering the landscape. The complex patchwork of pools and marsh vegetation was replaced by grids of dikes and ponds (units) in which managers could regulate water levels. The agency showed a remarkable willingness to experiment and engineer the landscape within refuges in new ways. Sometimes this meant resurrecting ponds and marshes that irrigated agriculture had destroyed. But often it meant creating wetlands where few had existed previously or taking relatively poor waterfowl habitat and attempting to improve it. What emerged was a “complex machine aimed at increasing waterfowl production.”1 The dire situation of migratory waterfowl in the early 1930s made conservationists more amenable to solutions that could create bird habitat quickly.2 Other factors affected their decisions. Foremost among these was disease. Avian botulism (known as western duck sickness at the time) took a horrendous toll on ducks and geese in the Far West. Ornithological studies in the early twentieth century suggested that better management of water could reduce the severity of botulism outbreaks and save thousands of birds. Such careful management of water was only possible in an engineered landscape of dikes, ponds, and canals. More importantly, refuges were imbedded within an irrigated landscape in which the Biological Survey had only limited control. Water that had once nourished the Pacific Flyway had long since been diverted by irrigators for farms. The Biological Survey’s solution was to make refuges within this new hydrologic system and carve individual refuges into diked units to facilitate the easy manipulation of water. In doing so, the agency sought advice Places in the Grid 67 from irrigation engineers and employed irrigation technologies. After fighting irrigators and the Bureau of Reclamation for decades, the Biological Survey now put the knowledge and tools of these groups into the service of restoring marshes they had damaged or destroyed. The New Deal , Planning, and Wildlife This change of fortune resulted from federal responses to dire environmental and economic conditions plaguing the nation. The federal government sought solutions to both of these conditions at the same time. During the 1930s, the Biological Survey went from an ineffective bureau managing a tattered collection of refuges to a more robust agency with dozens of new refuges under its care. Birds and wetlands, once seen only as impediments to development, were now used to contend with the problems that plagued agriculture during the Great Depression. Amid this national trauma, the Biological Survey constructed a network of refuges—not only along the Pacific Flyway, but throughout the nation. The populations of ducks and geese had increased briefly after the signing of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, but began to decline shortly thereafter. Fewer...