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1. Outdoors women classes still have openings
2. Diversity of life ebbing from some Missouri streams
3. Conservation Department outlines plans for Combs Lake
CORRECTION
A story that first appeared in this Sept. 11 issue of All Outdoors contained an error concerning the name and location of a stream that has suffered a loss of biological diversity. The stream was identified as Fox Creek, located in the Meramec River watershed between the cities of Pacific and Eureka. The stream should have been identified as Fox River in Clark County.
"There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the 'best men,' as the Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected."-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
1. Outdoors women classes still have openings
There's still time to enroll in classes on hunting, canoeing or backpacking.
JEFFERSON CITY-Women who have wondered what it's like to bag a white-tailed deer or awaken to the soothing murmur of an Ozark stream will want to check out the fall schedule of Beyond Becoming an Outdoors Woman (Beyond BOW) activities offered by the Missouri Department of Conservation.
Three years ago, the Conservation Department launched the Becoming an Outdoors Woman (BOW) program to help women get started in recreational activities that traditionally were the sole province of men. Last year it augmented BOW with Beyond BOW, a program intended to give BOW graduates a chance to use their new skills.
Although designed for BOW graduates, some Beyond BOW events that do not fill with previous BOW participants are open to anyone interested in getting started outdoors. In some cases, no previous experience is required; in others, you need basic proficiency in the skill being taught. Beyond BOW activities are led by experienced guides, most of them women.
The first Beyond BOW event is a canoeing and camping weekend Sept. 25 through 27 on the Niangua River near Lebanon. The trip costs $100. Participants will practice paddling skills, set up and break camp and cook meals with a campfire and camp stove.
The next event will be a backpacking trip Oct. 2 through 4. It also costs $100. Participants will hike 12.6 miles along one of the most rugged portions of the Ozark Trail, including Missouri's highest waterfall and Taum Sauk Mountain, the state's tallest mountain. All will learn preparations and the basics of practical backpacking.
The final Beyond BOW event of the year will be a guided deer hunt at Mingo National Wildlife Refuge in Stoddard and Wayne counties Oct. 16 through 18. Registration for this event costs $75.
Participants in the deer-hunting clinics must have completed a Conservation Department or Heartland Outdoors Woman workshop to ensure competency in marksmanship and firearms safety. They will receive additional training in deer biology, hunting techniques and field dressing and preparing venison.
Beyond BOW participants are encouraged to bring their own equipment, but necessary gear is provided. Enrollment in these events is limited, so call 573/751-4115, ext. 189 as soon as possible to discuss eligibility and receive registration materials.
- Jim Low -
2. Diversity of life ebbing from some Missouri streams
The Missouri Department of Conservation hopes to help find ways to accommodate development and conservation.
PACIFIC, Mo.-The handwriting is on the wall for streams in Missouri, but there still may be time to prevent irreversible damage to the Show-me State's unique and invaluable resource. The Missouri Department of Conservation has announced a series of public forums to help citizens and developers pursue both development and conservation.
Between July and November last year, Conservation Department workers counted the number and noted the species of freshwater mussels at 79 sites in the Meramec River Basin southwest of St. Louis. Fifty-eight of those locations had been similarly checked in 1979. In 1997, they discovered that the number of mussel species had dropped from an average of 14 species per site to eight, a decline of 40 percent. On the Bourbeuse River, a tributary of the Meramec, the decline was 55 percent, from an average of 19 to seven species per site.
Al Buchanan, an environmental services biologist with the Conservation Department, says fresh-water mussels are the water-dwelling equivalent of a miner's canary. Because they filter water to obtain their food and are unable to move away from harmful environmental conditions, mussels are among the first creatures to suffer from pollution, sedimentation and other stream degradation. The loss of diversity in mussel populations is evidence that the Meramec River itself is in trouble and a warning to the area's human inhabitants.
"We are looking at a whole flock of canaries going belly up," says Buchanan. "The question is, what does that mean for the rest of the aquatic fauna and, ultimately, us?"
While the plight of Meramec River mussels is interesting, it isn't very visible, and it doesn't immediately affect people. But even people who don't care about mussels are likely to be concerned about another ominous trend that was detected in routine Conservation Department surveys of fish populations in Fox River in Clark County, another tributary of the Meramec River.
Fox River in Clark County flows south to meet the Meramec River just downstream from Pacific Palisades Conservation Area. The river's watershed shows evidence of the greater St. Louis area's booming economy. A flush of development, including Six Flags Over St. Louis, a bevy of residential neighborhoods and attendant businesses has been good for the area's economy, but not for its fish.
In 1987, Conservation Department fisheries biologists sampled fish at nine sites on Fox River and found 33 fish species. When they checked the same spots last year, they found only 27 species.
More revealing than the total number of species is the types of fish found in Fox River. Ten species of fish, some of which had been common in 1987, had disappeared by 1997. During the same period, four new species moved in.
Species lost from Fox River included smallmouth bass, orange-spotted sunfish, black crappie, white crappie, freshwater drum and black bullhead. These are all fish that are valued by anglers and that require good water quality. The four new species are gizzard shad, shortnose gar, bullhead minnow and Mississippi silvery minnow, fish that can live in badly degraded streams."This is a serious loss," says Fisheries Management Biologist Travis Moore. "Just a few years ago Fox River was a productive stream where parents could take their children fishing. It's hard to put an adequate value on that, and it has been lost. Unfortunately, Fox River isn't the only place this is happening."
Conservation officials say that careless development is the biggest factor contributing to stream degradation in Missouri's metropolitan areas. Instead of leaving existing plant cover and stream corridors in place when building homes and businesses, it is common practice to bulldoze the entire area, scrape away existing vegetation and then begin construction. The result, aside from barren landscapes, is soil erosion and unchecked runoff of silt and pollutants into streams like Fox River.
"You would think that by now Americans would demand that their surroundings include healthy hills, forests and creeks," says Conservation Department Fisheries Field Operations Chief Stan Michaelson. "But look at the average construction site and you will see that we still don't pay much attention to the surrounding environment. I think the public would be willing to pay extra to live in places developed with more care."
Michaelson questions the notion that environment-conscious development is too expensive. Maybe, he says, "flatten and clear" development is just a bad habit we have gotten into.
"If we change the way we put up buildings, we may discover that we are better off in the long run-economically as well as environmentally. There are lots of costs associated with careless development that we don't take into account. The people around Fox Creek surely would have liked to keep the smallmouth bass, but they never got the chance to decide how much that amenity was worth."
To encourage developers and citizens to discuss such issues, the Conservation Department will sponsor a "Common Ground Forum" from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. Sept. 29. The meeting at Powder Valley Conservation Nature Center will bring together city and county officials, developers and members of Missouri Stream Teams, a citizen group dedicated to stream conservation.
The focus of the discussion will be sustainable flood plain use. The public is invited to attend and participate in a question-and-answer session at the close of the panel discussion.The day's program will include a historical review of flood plain use in Missouri and how the Great Flood of 1993 changed ideas about sustainable flood plain management.
Additional Common Ground Forums are slated for December and for March and June of 1999. These will focus on urban streams and watersheds, urban forests and urban redevelopment.
For more information about the forums, call 573/751-4115, ext. 250 or 246 or 314/301-1500, ext. 2238 or 2240.
- Jim Low -
3. Conservation Department outlines plans for Combs Lake
Officials still hope to provide a 150-acre fishing lake in Dunklin and Pemiscot counties, but recreational opportunities already abound there.
KENNETT, Mo.-Missouri Department of Conservation engineers say they are optimistic that they have found a way to seal leaks in Jerry P. Combs Lake. The repair plan will remove sand deposits from the lake bottom, then use clay excavated from the lake and other sites on Little River Conservation Area to resurface the lake bed.
The opening of the 150-acre, above-ground lake just east of Kennett has been delayed for slightly more than a year due to leaks caused by sand veins in the underlying soil. Those sand fissures functioned like conduits, transporting water from the lake to the water table beneath it. Design and Development Division Administrator Bill Lueckenhoff says the sand veins were discovered when the Conservation Department attempted to fill the lake.
"The Department began filling the lake at the project dedication in August 1996," says Lueckenhoff. "By early 1997, it was discovered that the lake was not filling at the anticipated rate, and monitoring of the lake was initiated. It was determined that the lake was losing water at the rate of about one inch per day or 2,500 gallons per minute."
Investigation continued until July, when the cause of the problem was discovered in an exploration pit at the site. Diagonal sand veins dissecting the 8-foot thick layer of clay in the bottom of the lake extended from the deep sand layer beneath the lake to a level just below the ground surface.
Lueckenhoff said the sand veins and deposits likely resulted from the earthquakes of 1811 and 1812. The earthquakes probably caused separations and cracks in the ground surface, forcing underlying saturated sand to the surface. Most of the sand at the site appears to have been covered by several inches of fine sediment deposited after the quakes.
"The Missouri Department of Conservation hired a highly qualified consulting engineering firm with expertise in lake design to perform the surveying, soils investigation and design of the lake," Lueckenhoff says. "In performing their work, the consulting firm failed to detect the problem which subsequently caused the lake to leak. The department plans to repair the lake and attempt to recover the cost of the repair from the consulting firm,"
The cost of the lake repair is estimated at approximately $1.1 million, depending on the size of sand deposits in the lake. "The extent of the sand deposits within the lake will have a direct effect on the cost of the repair and will not be known until encountered in the work," says Lueckenhoff. "If we encounter extensive sand layers which would cause the cost of the repair to exceed this estimate, the Department will reevaluate the situation."
The repair project for Jerry P. Combs Lake will begin in May 1999. With favorable weather conditions it should be completed within six months.
In the meantime, Little River CA still provides many opportunities for outdoor recreation. Access to the 1,036-acre area had been restricted to foot traffic since April due to vandalism and littering. But the Conservation Department recently reopened the area, and conservation agents will increase patrols to prevent further problems
The Sept. 1 reopening enabled dove hunters to be the first to pursue wildlife on the area. Little River CA's approximately 350 acres of wetlands attract a wide variety of other migratory birds, making it a great place for birdwatching and for photographing wildlife.
Little River CA will be open to all statewide hunting seasons except duck season. Geese may only be harvested on the area after the close of duck season. Only shotguns and steel shot may be used on the area. For details on regulations at Little River CA, contact the area manager or local conservation agent.
- Arleasha Mays -
News Services Coordinator
(314) 751-4115, ext. 243
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