How To

Stone Soup
by Carl Madsen, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Most of us remember the children’s story of Napoleon’s stone soup: his soldiers showed French villagers how to make a pot of soup with stones and with ingredients people brought to share. After each villager tossed in an onion, a head of cabbage, a chunk of meat, a couple of potatoes, a few carrots, and a handful of salt, voila, they had soup! The lesson children were supposed to learn from this little story is one of sharing—and it’s a good lesson.

There is a twist to this lesson that is useful in our conservation work, and that is how to get people to share. First you need to define what it is you want to do. Next you need to find others who might have an interest in that goal and learn what their specific needs are. Then you need to divide the work and costs into bite-sized pieces that each can handle. That is exactly what we did in South Dakota, where more than 500 partners amassed $2.2 million dollars to build 445 ponds covering 1,900 acres in the State’s Prairie Pothole Region.

Farmers and ranchers who chose to have a pond built on their land paid for part of the construction costs and then planted the construction area back to grass. They did this mostly to create a source of water for their livestock, so pond design had to accommodate that use. Each pond that was built became a valued part of the property and became one more reason to keep the grass instead of converting to row crops.

Ducks Unlimited, Inc., and the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks provided dollars and technical services to build these ponds. Their motivation was to have duck ponds and water for other wildlife, so pond design had to accommodate their interests.

Thirty local conservation districts and their state association provided dollars and administrative support for the program. They were interested in reducing erosion, improving water quality, and improving rangelands. Once again, design included their concerns, and each pond served their visions.

The complete recipe for pond design included a shallow-water area where emergent plants could flourish, a “feathered edge” favorable to ducks and other birds, a grass buffer to reduce siltation entering and leaving the pond, and a deep-water area for livestock.

A $984,000 North American Wetlands Conservation Act grant was the pièce de résistance, allowing us to carry out this project. As each partner brought in their matching share, the pond soup gained in flavor and aroma. Each participant recognized their contribution to the simmering caldron and eagerly awaited the final feast: sweet success.

You see, this was not a government project, a wildlife project, or even a livestock project. It belonged to all 500 of us. We all helped create it; we all put something into it; we all benefitted from it; and we all feel “m’m, m’m good” about it.

For more information, contact Kurt Forman, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Box 247, Brookings, South Dakota 57006, (605) 697-2500, kurt_forman@fws.gov.

A Means to Bird-friendly Cotton Farming
by Sandra Cederbaum, Robert Cooper, and John Carroll, University of Georgia

The United States’ southeastern landscape has become an intensely managed, homogeneous, agricultural landscape that no longer supports the diverse wildlife community it once did. The increased tillage and the large quantities of fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides used in conventional agriculture have had and continue to have both direct effects (increased mortality and nest destruction) and indirect effects (reduced food supply and changed field structure and composition) on birds.

Intensive agricultural management is typified by the practices seen in conventional cotton farming. There are, however, alternative management approaches that can create productive wildlife habitat and, at the same time, enhance crop production. Newer cropping systems such as conservation tillage and relay strip-cropping have been found to reduce some of the negative effects associated with traditional farming practices, yet they maintain or increase farm profit. In a project funded by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Monsanto Company, Quail Unlimited, and the University of Georgia, we examined the effects of these alternative agricultural methods on bird and insect populations.

Relay strip-cropping refers to the practice in which a winter-clover cover crop is left to grow between the cotton rows throughout the early part of the growing season. The clover acts as a nurse crop that attracts neutral and beneficial insects much earlier than would be possible in conventional cotton agriculture. As the growing season progresses, the clover dies back naturally or is chemically suppressed. The structure and vegetative matter of the residual clover sustains beneficial insects for an extended period, until some of these insects move to the growing cotton crop. This movement maintains a high population of beneficial insects in the field throughout the summer and consequentially depresses pest populations for the same period, reducing the growers’ dependence on insecticides. While achieving a better balance in the field and allowing natural processes to control the system, farmers can realize a reduction in cost to maintain pest control and still expect similar or even elevated yields.

As opposed to conventional cotton farming, our analysis showed that the early availability of herbaceous cover in strip-cropped fields provided needed cover for birds during the winter and an expanded menu of insects in greater abundance. Avian densities on these fields were 10 to 12 times higher than those of conventionally managed fields. Birds found on the strip-cropped fields ranged from the common to species of concern for the Southeast, such as the eastern meadowlark, grasshopper sparrow, and northern bobwhite. The use of conservation tillage on strip-cropped fields had the concomitant effect of reduced nest destruction.

We believe that the use of strip-cropping and conservation tillage on cotton farms may help to compensate for the declining grassland and early-successional habitats needed by birds of the southeastern United States, especially if used in conjunction with field borders and other early-successional habitat management techniques.

For more information, contact Sandra Cederbaum, Warnell School of Forest Resources, University of Georgia, DW Brooks Drive, Athens, Georgia 30602, (706) 542-1403, scederbaum@forestry.uga.edu.