by Daniel B. Botkin, originally published by Perigee Books, a division of Penguin/Putnam, 1999.

I have decided to share this book with the readers of my website, and I am going to present the entire book here, one chapter at a time, with a new chapter appearing each week.  There are more than 40 chapters.  If you follow along and read all of them, you will learn about the entire Missouri River as seen by Lewis and Clark at the beginning of the 19th century, and as I visited it during the 1990s to see what they had seen, and to learn how the countryside had changed.  I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.

- Daniel B. Botkin

All of the chapters published thus far can be found in the Passage of Discovery category. Please note that they are listed in reverse order of date posted.

More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.

6. Pelicans and Grand Pass: The River and Migrating Birds

From Arrow Rock take Route 41 west to Marshall where 41 joins 65.  Continue on 65 west to State Route N and take that to the end of the road, which is the entrance to Grand Pass.  The office is to your left.

Well up river, in the general vicinity of present day Onawa, Iowa, 40 miles south of Sioux City, the expedition saw a strange site on August 8, 1804.  Lewis wrote that  “ I saw a great number of feathers floating down the river,” covering sixty or seventy yards of the river’s width.  “For three miles after I saw those features continuing to run in that manner,” he continued;  “We did not percieve from whence they came.”  It was as if the river had painted itself white.  “At length we were surprised by the appearance of a flock of Pillican at rest on a large sand bar,” Lewis wrote.  Almost three months into the journey, you might think that Lewis was becoming used to strange and extraordinary sites, but miles of white feathers amazed him.  There were so many birds that he did not even try to count them, merely writing that the numbers “if estimated” would “appear almost in credible.”

He shot one bird as a specimen and made an accurate, written identification of its features as Jefferson had instructed him to do.  The beak was “a whiteish yellow” and the pouch under the beak was so big that they filled it with five gallons of water.  It had yellow feet, most white feathers except that the “large feathers of the wings are of a deep black.”  Lewis recognized these as the same pelicans that are found in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico — the white pelican.  The birds were “no doubt engaged in procuring their ordinary food,” Lewis wrote, “which is fish.”

The pelicans were all the more remarkable because Lewis noted that “We had seen but a few aquatic fouls of any kind on the river since we commenced our journey.”  He listed a few geese, wood ducks “common to every part of this country” and cranes.  The expedition had left too late to see the spring migration of waterfowl, which occurs generally in March or April, and saw primarily resident water birds.

Starting one of our trips along the Missouri River in late April, near the end of migration, we had better luck.  One of the best places to see waterfowl during their migration along the Missouri River is at Grand Pass Conservation Area, 5,000 acres managed by the Missouri Department of Conservation.  Pelicans pass through and stop here, just as they do along other parts of the Missouri where habitat is suitable.

We visited Grand Pass Wildlife Conservation Area with Rob Leonard, the top wildlife management biologist there, driving along gravel roads past many kinds of artificial wetlands developed to provide habitat for different species of wetland wildlife.  Rob, a direct descendent of William Rogers Clark, had the same red beard for which Clark was famous and the same outgoing manner and ready smile.

Grand Pass is one of many bottomland areas being restored for fish and wildlife habitat between Sioux City and St. Louis.  The challenge at each of them is to find the best and most economical way to recreate the muted mosaics of backwaters, oxbows, perennial wetlands, seasonal wetlands, wet prairies, and floodplain forests.

One approach is to do as much as possible to speed up natural processes.  This is the approach of the Missouri Department of Conservation at Grand Pass. Rob explained that Grand Pass is intensively managed to create wildlife habitat.  The Missouri Department of Conservation has chosen an active, intense management approach at Grand Pass, with creation of many artificial wetlands, and careful timing of when these were filled and emptied to try to match the natural, pre-channelization seasonal patterns.

We drove first to a pumping station where Rob told us that the pumps were capable of pumping 250 acre-feet a day – enough water to cover 250 acres a foot deep  and enough to provide a day’s water for more than 800,000 people, more than twice the number of people in St. Louis, at the liberal but U. S. average water use of 100 gallons a day.  Water pumped into a wetland is not lost to public use, rather it is enhanced and then returned to the river.  Rob commented that “wetlands should be viewed as a part of public infrastructure in much the same way as roads and highways.  Wetlands are nature’s way of providing clean water and flood control.”

The water is pumped into a set of large ponds and wetlands separated by levees of different heights, forming an artificial network.  About one-third of the area’s 5,000 acres is in a status Rob referred to as “refuge,” meaning once a pond or wetland is constructed there is a “no-touch” policy — no other actions are taken.  Refuge areas of no disturbance provide habitat to migrating waterfowl. The refuge wetlands are juxtaposed with actively managed areas where much more is done. Some are flooded only in the spring and the fall and then pumped dry in the summer and winter, to mimic seasonal wetlands as they used to be on the river.  Others are flooded for shorter periods.  Still others are restored as wet prairie, planted with switch grass to protect levees.  According to Rob “switch grass was selected because of its ability to hold soil, while providing wildlife habitat.”

Many kinds of waterfowl depend on the Missouri River and its backwaters for nesting, breeding, rearing, and migratory feeding habitat.  Today there are eighteen species of ducks that use the river.  Of these, wood ducks remain the most common nesting species, just as Lewis reported in his time. There are three geese: Canada, snow, and white fronted.   There are ten species of wading birds, 25 species of shorebirds.  A total of 200 species of migratory birds use the floodplains.

Some birds are threatened or endangered, or have become locally extinct along the Missouri.  The birds whose situation is of concern live in many of the kinds of habitats once common along the Missouri floodplain.  Restoring the floodplain for migrating birds means restoring many kinds of habitats, putting the mosaic back together.  In addition, wetlands are important for many species, as well as waterfowl.

An alternative to the intensive, active management at Grand Pass is a light touch, do-as-little-as-possible-and-let-nature-heal-itself approach.  This is one of the policies of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Big Muddy National Wildlife Refuge.  The light-touch idea is that a few smartly selected and well-executed actions could allow the river to repaint the landscape in the most natural way — a break in a levee at just the right location, for example, to form a single new chute.  Then the river would be left alone to erode a complex maze of channels the way it always had and, given the opportunity and following the laws of physics, always would.

The two policies, at Grand Pass and at the Big Muddy, were two different approaches to designing landscapes.  It was as if two different landscape painters were set before a large canvas. We tend to view environmental issues as a matter of a single truth whose identification is our goal and the solution.  But I have found that environmental issues are often a question of the best design.  The path to the best design is to try several, just as major building are often the focus of a design contest.  Lacking precise information and having only poor understanding of how nature worked in the past, we have no “silver bullets,” and it is wise to let a number of approaches bloom on the river.

The intense management at Grand Pass seemed to be working.  As we walked by one of these ponds, two sandhill cranes rose majestically into the air, banked and turned and flew away from us, their wings the warm brown of loess soils, to settle in a distant pond.  To our right several hundred ducks — shovelers and blue-winged teal mostly – swam among rushes and sedges and wetland grasses.  Here and there in other immense ponds and wetlands we saw great blue heron, cormorants, mallards, Canada geese, snow geese, coots, and the American white egret.  A blackboard at the headquarters listed more than 150,000 ducks having stopped at Grand Pass this spring and more than 50,000 snow geese.

And all this is relatively new.  Grand Pass land was purchased by the state of Missouri in the early 1980s, but the intense management did not start at Grand Pass until Rob arrived there in the late 1980s.

If you want to see migrating water birds that are characteristic of the Missouri River in Lewis and Clark’s time, you can do no better than stop at Grand Pass.  But if you want to see 150,000 ducks and 50,000 snow geese, then you have to pick your time carefully — March/April or November.  The migration timing various somewhat from year to year, so you may also need a little luck or flexibility.

I was impressed with both approaches I had seen, the intense management and the light touch, and glad that we had a landscape large enough to allow both to be happening at this time, in my lifetime, when I could see it.  Later in our trip, far upriver, we came across the last of the migrating pelicans.  When we stopped to watch them, they flew as a flock into the air and circled high above us in a pure blue sky.  When they flew one way, only their white wings reflected the sun and we saw a brilliant white spiral moving above us.  When they flew in the other direction, their black feathers caught the sun.  The alternating white and dark-gray spirals in the air illustrated the complexity of natural patterns and seemed to symbolize the multiple paths underway to try to restore the Missouri River’s habitats.