DAN ENGLAND

Ducks Unlimited workers admit the idea behind their plan is a selfish one.
The organization wants to see more waterfowls.
But what sprang from a self-serving idea has local water officials excited, especially now that the organization
wants to begin to focus some of its efforts in Weld County along the South Platte River.
The idea is for Ducks Unlimited is to recharge and in some cases recreate wetlands, and while the idea isn't entirely
new, it has water officials wondering whether it's the wave — no pun intended — of the future.
The organization siphons off excess flows from rivers in the spring through a diversion or a pump installed at the
river. It then runs the water off either right next to the river or maybe as far as a few miles away. The water
creates wetlands duck habitat. The water then sinks into the ground, where it eventually returns to the river in the
summer, when water is needed the most. Underground pipelines carry the water to the location if it's far away.
“We prefer to do restorations,” said Greg Kernohan, manager of conservation programs in Colorado and Wyoming,
“but on occasion we can basically create these wetlands out of nowhere.”
Areas that seem to fit best include naturally occurring sandhills and basins, flood plain meadows from irrigation and
marginal farmland, Kernohan said. Ducks Unlimited sees unlimited potential along the South Platte in Weld because
marginal farmland tends to work fairly well. The organization has done several projects in Weld, including the
relatively new Centennial State Wildlife Area, but really is just now taking a hard look at the county to see what
else it can accomplish.
Part of the reason for that is the organization believes the best way to create wetlands is to appeal to farmers in
the area to get them to “fowl” a portion of their property. They agree not to irrigate as much land and use those
credits to flood another area to create the wetlands habitat, Kernohan said. Ducks Unlimited will help with this and
in some cases helps cover the costs associated with it as long as the farmer maintains the land once it's been
“fowled.”
Those decisions can be profitable for farmers, who discover they can charge up to $3,500 per gun to hunt on their
new waterfowl habitat.
“They tend to get on board when you put it that way,” Kernohan said. “This can be a whole new enterprise for
them. We've seen a few just quit farming.”
Ducks Unlimited has worked with only a few private landowners, though it hopes to change that soon. One of those
is the Beebe Draw Gun Club, a private hunting club due east of Gilcrest. Harold Evans of Greeley is the treasurer of
that board and helped reach a deal with Ducks four years ago to create more waterfowl habitat using recharging
methods. He's also a lifetime member of Ducks Unlimited, but he's mostly known for his 13 years on Greeley's Sewer
and Water Board, of which he currently is chairman.
The project helped Beebe attract more waterfowls to the area by creating “badly needed” habitat. The club had a
- JIM RYDBOM/ jrydbom@greeleytribune.com
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lake but lacked what Evans called “puddle duck habitat.”
“If you provide a food source, it's interesting to see how quickly ducks and geese will find it,” Evans said. “We saw
them all — teal, mallards, wigeons — but we didn't see them in the numbers that we have now. This is the future of
water development projects. We need to find projects like these that have multiple benefits.”
That's why Ducks Unlimited is working with organizations such as the Central Colorado Water Conservancy District.
The idea is to create duck habitat, but it also helps create water recharge credits and even add flows to the South
Platte River in the summer, Kernohan said. Siphoning off water flows in the spring when there's excess water helps
add to that water in the summer. And there's more than enough water to go around, said Randy Ray, assistant
manager with the Central Colorado Water Conservancy District.
“In the springtime, there's flows leaving the state that aren't entitled to Nebraska,” Ray said. “We'd like to use some
of that.”
The only downside is there are restrictions to what Ducks Unlimited can do because it tends to rely on federal and
state grant money. Kernohan said the organization gets seed money from its members and uses that money to
match it against other grants, and then uses that grant money to keep moving up the ladder, so to speak, until that
big pot of grant money gets leveraged to match the huge amounts needed for the biggest federal grants.
“We leverage the money that a member gives us eight times over,” Kernohan said.
The organization also faces some resistance from owners in North Park concerned that siphoning any water from the
rivers, even excess spring water, may impact their fisheries, Kernohan said. Ducks Unlimited does not divert any
water from the rivers during the drier summer months.
One day Ducks Unlimited hopes to expand several of its projects into Weld. And that could mean some of the wells
shut down during the drought of 2002-03 could be recharged.
“We really hope we can move this program into Weld,” Kernohan said. “We're hoping to put this system to work and
get some of those wells back into production.”
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