At this time of the year, not much appears to be happening in the McPherson Valley Wetlands.
The Kansas Wildlife and Parks office where public lands manager Todd Pesch oversees the wetlands is in one end of a Morton building that blends in with the browns and grays of Kansas winter foliage. Outside of the building is a KPW truck (with a front flat tire), and despite the bright red 1900s-vintage barn across the gravel driveway, late January is a collage of muted colors and stillness.
It's cold, and although the ice has melted on the marshy ground a few hundred yards away, as Pesch strides toward the water the most apparent wildlife movement comes from a rabbit scared out of a long-unused fencerow. No ducks. No whooping cranes. No blue herons. No red-tailed hawks.
But listen to Pesch for even a few minutes, and you'll begin to believe you hear flocks of geese gliding toward Clear Pond on their migration back from the south. You'll begin looking over your shoulder in anticipation of hundreds of Mallards that surely must be on their way.
Todd Pesch goes way past enthusiastic when he talks about the wetlands project Southwestern College is becoming a part of. He's passionate, ardent, even frenetic.
As Pesch talks, you begin to see the market hunters who lived in the region in the late 1800s. These local farmers would climb into punt boats and head out into the marshes, some less than a foot deep, where birds had settled thick around them.
"The guy in the back of the boat would stand up, see," Pesch pantomimes the boaters, "then as the birds started to fly up, the guy in the front would light the fuse on this big, six-inch gun. They called 'em punt guns, and you didn't have to use any special ammunition. Gravel, or tacks, or little pieces of broken glass, or whatever they had. Then they'd fire that gun, and they'd get hundreds of birds without even making a dent in what was out here."
These market hunters, who were harvesting the birds exactly as they would harvest their wheat on other ground, would field dress the birds and pack them in ice on trains bound for Kansas City or St. Louis. Or they'd can them-"not in those little Bell jars; they'd put birds into 55-gallon drums, with a layer of birds, then a layer of wax, another layer of birds, another layer of wax, and fill the whole barrel."
Back then the marshy area and lakes made up a huge wetlands that migrating flocks could see for hundreds of miles. Most of it was shallow; only Lake Farland and Lake Inman were slightly deeper, over five feet deep at high water mark. But the birds could spot the landing areas even in dry years.
"See, the shorebirds fly up four miles up, and they can see 80 miles on either side of their head. That means they can see water that's within 160 miles of where they're flying," Pesch explains.
Big Basin (four square miles of water), Little Basin, Clear Pond, and the dozens of smaller marshy areas and ponds stretched in a chain 43 miles long and as much as six miles wide, marking a depression Pesch says was the old river bed of the Smoky River, before its course shifted north centuries ago.
But not everyone appreciated this chain of lakes. Settlers living near the basin were convinced it should be drained: the smell of drowned prairie animals when they became caught in high waters after a storm was almost overpowering; a 1901 McPherson Sentinel article spoke of a toad invasion 12 years earlier in which an epidemic of toads from the basin made walking in town after dark impossible; crops that were planted in the basin vicinity often were flooded out.
So in 1901, John Schrag, a Harvey County engineer-farmer-carpenter, was contacted by McPherson County engineers to drain the basin. For the next decade Schrag bought up Big Basin land, and began building a system of dikes and ditches around the Big Basin that would eventually drain run-off from 20,000 acres south into the Blaze Fork Creek. The wetlands, which had become second only to Cheyenne Bottoms as a migratory stopover, was converted to farmland.
For decades the land was farmed, but the land contours made the going tough. In dry times, crops were possible, but during wet years harvest was doubtful or impossible. "We had one farmer who told us in 18 years he harvested one crop," Pesch says.
So in the late 1980s the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks began working to buy back land in the wetlands area. It was decided that the time had come to restore the wetlands to at least a semblance of its former magnitude. And that's where Southwestern College's involvement with the project began.
At about the midpoint of the former chain of lakes, a 160-acre parcel was part of the Southwestern College endowment. It had been given to the college in the late 1920's by the Huston family; the college was only the second owner of the property.
Last year, when the board of trustees decided to sell some of the less productive land in the endowment holdings, this farm was bought by The Nature Conservancy for eventual purchase as part of the wetlands project. Although the plot is only 160 acres of what will eventually be nearly 5,000 acres of wetlands, Pesch describes the spot as "prime acreage" in the restoration-halfway between the Big Basin and Lake Farland.
This area will be named the Southwestern College Wetlands, and will be owned by the state to give educational, recreational, and conservation opportunities. The potential for migratory birds, Pesch says, is almost unimaginable.
"Early in the project we had 86 ducks per acre, so multiply that by the 5,000 acres and we have the potential for upwards of half a million birds to come though here during the migrating seasons," Pesch points out. "Cheyenne Bottoms is a wetlands of international importance, with 76 percent of all migratory shorebirds staying at Cheyenne Bottoms during the spring or fall migration. We have every reason to believe the McPherson Valley Wetlands will be just important."
So for now, the Southwestern College Wetlands are quiet. The information kiosk, parking area, identifying sign, and other paraphernalia will be dedicated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony later in the spring when the browns and grays are beginning to change to green.
Then, as the flocks pass overhead, they'll look down, and like their ancestors of a century ago, they'll glide to a halt.
— by Sara Weinert
Editor's note: Historical reference in this article came from "Draining the Big Basin," written by Rynnell R. Schrag in 1991. Schrag is the great-grandson of John Schrag.