Wildlife Managers Hope For Rain

January rain along the lower Mississippi River is raising water levels and the hope of wildlife managers.

“If we get another 8 to 10 inches by March, we’ll be fine,” said Bill Peterson, manager of Wapanocca National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. The area is a migratory bird refuge with groundwater levels that rise and fall with the elevation of the Mississippi, four miles east.

The added rain would raise Wapanocca Lake, a key regional fishery, that’s dropped five feet. It would also cover thirsty hardwood bottomlands where winter waterfowl normally roost.

Randy Cook, manager of five wildlife refuges in westernTennessee, is also cautiously optimistic that rain will raise the river and the water table. A higher table helps his refuges provide winter habitat for migratory waterfowl.

But in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas and Colorado, there’s no end in sight to the record drought that’s shrunken bird habitat and forage, drained waterways and increased wildfi res.

As Mississippi River levels dropped in 2012, the threat to commercial shipping south of St. Louis made national news. Less widely reported have been regional wildlife impacts such as changes in bird migration and the drying of thousands of acres of normally wet wildlife habitat.

To flood 30 to 40 percent of their usual waterfowl impoundments, West Tennessee refuges spent $16,000 more to pump groundwater than in 2011.

Further north and west, wildlife refuges in Kansas have been particularly hard hit by drought.

Nearly 70 cranes touch down at the refuge, which is a normal to high count. Instead of staying the usual week or more, most took off within days. With Texas and Oklahoma habitat dried up as well, she said, many cranes likely fl ew on to the Gulf Coast for food and rest.

Continued drought stress on the birds’ return fl ight, she ventures, could affect their ability to reproduce.

Reduced flow on the Marais de Cygnes River has taxed wildlife at Marais de Cygnes National Wildlife Refugein Kansas. Dozens of statelisted mussels were repeatedly stranded in September after rapid draw-downs of the drought-lowered river.

Refuge staff rescued the mussels and moved them back, one by one, into the receding water.

Fish kills included 58,000 shovel-nose sturgeon on the Des Moines River in Iowa and thousands along the central and lower Platte River in Nebraska.

The summer was so dry that the Platte stopped fl owing along a critical habitat area for terns and plover. The U.S. drought outlook for early 2013 calls for drought conditions to improve along the Mississippi River and in much of the East and Midwest, but persist in the West.