'Tis the season to get together with family and friends … even those who we may not always see eye to eye with. In a similar vein, that is what the North American Conservation Wetlands Act is about.
If you’re like me, over the year you’ve tinkered on a couple home-improvement projects or have done some repair work to keep things in working order. In a way, you can think about the Duck Creek renovation as refurbishing an old house. I think this analogy works well for Duck Creek, and I’m going to see how far I can take it.
If you’ve being keeping up with the blog, we’ve mentioned flooding Pool 8 in November a couple of times. The decision to flood has been delayed, and we wanted to pass this along to keep you informed.
In the last month we collected data in the timber at Duck Creek, Mingo and a few of our other forested conservation areas in Southeast Missouri. While I was out there, I saw something that caught my eye.
While Duck Creek doesn’t typically provide much teal-hunting opportunity, in the coming years we should be able to increase the amount of teal-friendly habitat during this time of year.
I mentioned last month that the Duck Creek renovation has been reminding me of renovating a house. House improvement projects, at least in my experience, don’t always go as quickly or as smoothly as planned. Progress occurs, but the completion of the work doesn’t always happen when you had originally intended.
Conditions were extremely dry at the end of July when the dirt work began in Units A and B. It was great to get things moving forward. Over the last few weeks the isolated thunderstorms have knocked the dust back down and allowed for the soil to pick up some much needed moisture.
This year we have continued to trap and band wood ducks at Duck Creek to help with efforts to monitor the breeding population of wood ducks on our managed wetland areas.
A couple weeks ago I went into detail about the aquatic plants in Pool 1. Over the last 10 years American lotus has expanded in parts of the lake. The expansion of this plant is an annoyance to anglers and a concern for biologists. However, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. From this perspective I thought it would be interesting to explore some of the other uses of this plant.
It is getting close to fall, and folks are looking forward to waterfowl season. Here is Duck Creek’s outlook for the 2011-2012 season based on the current rate of construction and water levels in Pool 1.
Pool 1 and the plants that call it home are definitely a challenge to manage and fish through. However, this very habitat is why folks have filled their coolers with fish over the last 60 years.
We are having a fish salvage between now and Aug. 15 at the five fish ponds on the east side of Duck Creek, approximately 0.7 mile south of the main Duck Creek entrance along Highway 51. These ponds will be drained shortly, and we would like to maximize the public use of this resource.
If you’re traveling over this holiday weekend and are heading towards Duck Creek with intentions to fish Pool 1 and enjoy the area, we’d love to have you. We are in the middle of some construction work on the bridge that crosses from Pool 2 to Pool 1 and are currently re-routing traffic around the main entrance road.