A wildlife "spectacle"
About once a month, Harold Draper drives 90 miles north from his Kansas-City home to spend a day volunteering at the front desk of the Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge outside of Mound City, Missouri.
An enthusiast of national parks who has lived in different regions of the United States, Draper began volunteering at the refuge shortly after moving to Missouri in 2007.
“Kansas City doesn’t have a national park,” he explained, “but we have this. I figured: it’s kind of like Kansas City’s national park.”
What makes a man-made wetland in a rural region of Northwest Missouri remarkable? It’s the populations of snow geese, bald eagles, waterfowl, shorebirds, trumpeter swans, and more which use the refuge as a nesting ground or stop-over point on long their migrations.
“You don’t often see this type of spectacle – this number of birds – anywhere in the world these days. It creates a sense of wonder,” Draper said.
During a typical spring migration, hundreds of thousands of snow geese can descend on the refuge's wetlands on a given day in late February and early March. Refuge staff conduct weekly waterfowl surveys, released on Tuesdays. A survey from Feb. 24 counted 755,550 snow geese on the refuge. The record for a daily count is around 1.5 million.
“This is one of the best locations, arguably, in the United States to witness the snow goose migration,” said Refuge Manager William Kutosky. “It sits at a choke point of the Mississippi and Central flyways. And you have the Missouri River right here, and then you have this refuge of open water that’s surrounded by all these ag crops, all these farmlands, that these birds have evolved to rely on.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the 7,440-acre refuge (roughly half of it is wetland) in 1935, and it was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. It sits on the eastern edge of the Missouri River Floodplain just below the jagged, rumpled terrain of the Loess Hills.
When it was founded, wetlands along the Missouri River were being drained and turned to farmland, and conservationists saw an essential corridor for migrating waterfowl disappearing. Facing multiple threats, snow geese had been hunted nearly to extinction.
Conservation groups responded. “That was one of the main reasons this refuge was established,” Kutosky said, “and it’s very much a manmade refuge to serve that purpose.”
The refuge’s 3,400 acres of wetlands are split into 15 impoundments which are heavily managed by Refuge staff. Each spring the pools are drained and staff use controlled burns, herbicides and seeding techniques to manage for a specific mix of vegetation, which a diversity of waterfowl and eagles now rely on.
Visitors flock to the refuge each spring to witness the migrating geese from a 10-mile auto road which loops around the reservoir's banks. On a sunny afternoon in late February, the crowd of geese formed a stark, cacophonous horizon of white between the bright blue reservoir and the vast blue sky.
A rebounding species
Through decades of habitat and climates changes, snow geese have adapted to the human world. The rise of industrial agriculture in the 1970s created an ample food source of so-called “waste grain,” crop left behind from the previous fall’s harvest, along migration corridors in the country’s heartland.
According to Rob Wilson, a research professor at the University of Nebraska who studies the evolutionary biology of waterfowl, “that [food source] helped facilitate these massive explosions in geese populations throughout North America. In some instances, the annual growth rates were over 16%.”
In a turn-about, conservationists are now concerned about overpopulation as snow geese deplete food sources in the fragile Canadian Tundra where they breed each summer.
In the arctic, “they are eating themselves out of house and home,” Wilson said.
Hunting as a conservation tactic
Hunters are now encouraged to harvest the geese to draw down the population. Many visitors to the Loess Bluffs partake in the tradition, coming to see the spectacle of the waterfowl resting on the refuge at midday before hunting the birds at dawn and dusk when they leave the refuge to forage for food on surrounding fields.
Marc Gruber of Dyersburg, Tennessee is one of those hunters. He was eating lunch on the refuge on a recent afternoon, having driven over 8 hours to gather with family members from across the Midwest for a few days of hunting, an annual tradition.
But even the traditional hunt is changing. “It’s getting tougher and tougher,” Gruber said.
As the arctic warms, there’s evidence that geese are increasing the pace of their migration, trying to get north in time for the right conditions.
“A lot of hunters will tell you that the geese aren’t stopping for as long as they used to when they use stop-over sites [such as Loess Bluffs]. They’re taking less time to refuel along their migration to make it [to the arctic] sooner,” Wilson explained.
Studies into the effectiveness of hunting as a conservation tool to curtail overpopulation have returned mixed results.
Despite decades of resilience and evidence of “behavioral adaptation,” Wilson said the species could have more challenges ahead.
“Snow geese — even though they are pretty robust and pretty flexible — there is a limit to how much they can withstand and how much they can change [their behavior]. Evolution is very slow going. They can’t really change in a year or two. It’s going to be a gradual process,” he said.
If the crowd of geese this spring is any evidence, Loess Bluffs remains an important part of that resiliency. The site is one of 573 designated wildlife refuges in the United States.
“This is an important function that our government has,” Draper said, “and we should promote this, and we should proud of this. We should be proud of what we have here in Northwest Missouri.”
