By Peter Ziegler, WWA Project Director
It has been a productive spring for WWA’s habitat program, with a lot of my time spent both looking at and surveying new sites. The best is when you get pictures of past projects though. Most recently a landowner sent me pictures from a wetland restoration site we completed last year. The pictures show a near perfect outcome. 3-8 inches of water spread out over 25 acres.
This area had been ditch and through restoring the hydrology to the site we were able to capture and retain water, creating excellent conditions for waterfowl.
The ideal feeding conditions for puddle ducks is surprisingly shallow compared to what most people believe. It’s based a bit on the size of the duck, with Teal on one end and Mallards on the other. 2-6 inches is the ideal puddle duck water depth for dabbling around in a mix of 50% open water/50% emergent vegetation. The restoration pictured above has water level control and I would imagine will be lowered to allow vegetation to grow, and then likely have the water raised in late summer into fall flooding seasons at an ideal depth for waterfowl feeding.
As the year moves forward we will be looking at restoring more habitat like this, so get any project ideas to me if you want something done this year.