An estimated 60,000 acres of cattail sloughs, in North Dakota alone, have been eliminated since 1991 according to Agweek news paper I just read. The main reason is to reduce damage to crops (sunflowers) by reducing habitat for blackbirds that eat the plants seeds.
The method is herbicide spray to kill cattails. Last year 3,700 acres were sprayed in ND.
Turns out any landowner can apply to USDA to treat their slough and Government turns around and hires it out at a cost to the taxpayer at $22/acre.
I get that sick feeling in my stomach again. Cattail sloughs provide some of the finest if not the only critical winter habitat for pheasants and other wildlife.
How long do you think it will take them to figure out that cattails in sloughs probably play a key role in filtering out contaminants from reaching the water tables???
Uguide:
I own a part of a large slough in SE South Dakota that is choked up with cattails. The slough is about 100 acres and is under water most of the time however the open water is only about 15 to 20 acres and the rest is cattails. Ideally the open water/cattail ratio should be about 50/50 so I've tried to find a away to reduce the cattails and increase the open water. Since we don't find a lot of sunflowers in this area the primary benefit of reducing the cattails is to help increase habitat for waterfowl. This slough is enrolled in the WRP program so I needed permission from the USDA to spray the cattails, which was granted. Then I applied for assistance with the Sunflower Association and USDA but was told that since there aren't a lot of sunflowers grown in the area that funding would not be available. I think most of the funding for cattail elimination is coming from the US Fish and Wildlife Service or the Sunflower association, with help from the USDA.
However, I did purchase a small quantity of Rodeo Herbicide and tried to spray some of the cattails on my own. We cut a path to the open water with corn knives and sprayed both sides of the path using back pack sprayers. What a job because you have to do it in August for best effectiveness so carrying a backpack in a foot of water choked with cattails on a hot and muggy day is a job for a young man, of which I'm not. Then on another day we took a small duck boat and used it to spray the outside edge of the open water. It was a big effort and we probably only sprayed a half acre but we hope to get back out there next summer to spray some more in hopes of moving the cattails back a little each year.
According to the instructions, it is best to spray cattails at the end of July or early August. A couple of weeks after spraying the affected cattails started turning brown. But a few weeks later all the unsprayed cattails turned brown too as part of the normal growth cycle so in Sept and Oct it wasn't possible to distinquish the cattails that were sprayed with the ones that weren't. Supposedly the cattails we sprayed last summer will not grow this summer and so we shall see. If we see good results we hope to go back and spray some more.
Last spring while doing some work in northern SD, I saw a slough that looked like it had been sprayed for cattails. I should have taken a picture because the waterfowl were really using the slough, I suppose because of the shallow water depth, which is hard to find. Most cattails will grow in areas that have less than a foot of water. Any more than a foot and they can't survive and less than a foot they will thrive.
In summary, I feel that this is a good program for waterfowl. Because of the cost I doubt if many acres will actually be sprayed and even if sprayed the cattails will come back in four to five years unless sprayed again. I estimate the cost of spraying a 20 acre patch of cattails with an airplane would cost between $50 to $75 per acre. I called a couple of airplane chemical applicators and they seem reluctant to spray cattlails because it usually is a small area to spray and because of the risk involved with overspraying on unwanted areas using Roundup based herbicide like Rodeo, which would be a liablility issue for them. I suppose the cost could be less per acre if several areas are going to be sprayed at one time as what may happen in areas where a lot of sunflowers are grown like in ND.
I can see where one would not want to lose good cattail habitat for pheasants but this program may only target very large cattail sloughs and mostly just in ND where more ducks and geese may benefit. Another way to control cattails is to simply cut them down in the fall and winter and so many of the smaller cattail sloughs can be treated this way.
LM
