Page 14 - Waterfowl

Foreword
Bringing Resources to Bear on the Challenges of Waterfowl and Wetland Management:
Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained
In 1978, I was a brand new fisheries/wetlands biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. One of my first assignments was to work on an emerging federal wetland lawsuit, known locally as the Lake Ophelia Case, in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. We were soliciting scientific help from professionals knowledgeable in bottomland hardwood wetland ecosystems, and that’s when I met Dr. Leigh Fredrickson from the Gaylord Memorial Lab. Getting to know Leigh and how Missouri approached wetland conservation was my introduction to the Missouri Model for waterfowl management
and it had a significant influence on this young biologist. But that level of waterfowl management maturity did not occur overnight.
As settlement moved west into the frontier, Missouri slowly lost, by some accounts, 90 percent of the wetlands that existed prior to human intervention on the landscape.
By the 1900s and the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, it would have been much easier
for Missouri waterfowl hunters to simply go to North Dakota or Arkansas to find
the waterfowl that could no longer be sustained in Missouri. Instead, a new era of understanding of what had been lost and what could be gained began when key interests decided that a partnership to rebuild and restore was preferable to giving up. Starting
with vigor in the 1940s, the Missouri Model began to take shape and mature with the understanding that waterfowl hunting was the final activity sought, but much work
and collaboration would be required in order to set the plate to have the waterfowl populations in numbers near historic levels. It became clear from the outset that this could not be done by any single entity or interest. The forged manifestation would be to have the federal government working with the Missouri Department of Conservation, private land owner stewards, non-profits like Ducks Unlimited, and, most critical, Missouri citizens who provided both the soul and the commitment to make it happen.
12 Waterfowl Hunting and Wetland Conservation in Missouri