VICKSBURG, Miss. — New wetlands are under construction at Tara Wildlife along the Mississippi River, an effort sponsored by the federal government to try to detour migrating shorebirds bound for the oil-threatened coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will give about $6.1 million to landowners in Mississippi to create habitats for herons, egrets, terns, ibises and other shorebirds migrating to coastal marshes this summer.
“If we can keep the birds here, even for a few days, it’s one more bird we keep from heading to the coast,” said Homer Wilkes, of the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service.
“If you have a full belly and you’re happy, there’s a good chance you’ll stay around here,” he said.
Tara Wildlife, a privately owned management area along the Mississippi River north of Vicksburg, is one of the landowners to receive the funding.
“The next three years are crucial as the coast recovers,” Wilkes said.
More than 26,000 acres statewide will be transformed into wetland habitats in the next few weeks. Farmers had the chance to apply to the Natural Resource Conservation Service earlier this month.
The program’s goal is to help landowners pay to turn lowlands into wetlands.
“It costs money to crank and run irrigation systems,” said Bill Tomlinson, Tara’s consulting wildlife biologist.
Shorebirds eat invertebrates and small fish in the shallow water that is created by tilling up the ground and flooding the area.
The ground was disked Friday at Tara, and the pumps are already running. They expect it to be a wetland by the middle of this week, said Tara’s general manager Gilbert Rose.
Properties like Tara are perfect because the irrigation system and pumping infrastructure is already in place, said Raymond Joyner, Warren County’s district conservationist.
Tara serves as a place for people to pay to hunt ducks, deer and turkey as well as a site for people to bird watch these shoreline birds during the summer.
Tara typically begins to flood parts of the property in October for the duck season, but this funding will start the flooding process months earlier.
Migratory birds, including shorebirds and waterfowl, fly along the Mississippi River annually. Shorebirds are migrating now, and waterfowl, like ducks and geese, come in the winter, Tomlinson said.
Because shorebirds are migrating now, the application approval process typically takes a month with the agency.
But applications in this program, called the Migratory Bird Initiative, only took a day, Joyner said.
“In my 27 years with this agency, I’ve never seen it put together so fast,” he said.
States along the Mississippi River are taking part in this program that was organized last month. Wilkes said he and other conservationists from neighboring states were thinking of ways to help the oil spill disaster.
“These birds are our natural resources, and we wanted to find a way to help,” Wilkes said.
The Clarion-Ledger, 8A, July 19, 2010
