HOW TO MOVE A FLYWAY
So, here we were in 1990 with a newly purchased run down farm. My wife Kathy wanted a house in the woods and I wanted a duck marsh. We settled on this 160 acres of land on the east side of the Willamette Valley near Brownsville, Oregon. It had a 20 acre hillside covered with mature Douglas firs and Big Leaf maples and 140 acres of poorly drained farm ground (6’’ of clayey top soil with blue clay extending for a few feet below that). I could visualize duck ponds extending for a quarter mile below the cabin in the woods.
Tom Isom, in his late 80’s, had a little house across the road. He told me stories of thousands of ducks and geese flying over his fields each winter in the old days.
We had a seasonal creek running through our new property. That first winter I was so excited to see one flight of 14 Mallards fly up that creek.
The following summer I accepted the challenge and built my first pond. I planted wild millet and waited for the rains to come and the creek to run. In December the rains came and the pond filled. Lo and behold, DUCKS. Not tons, but over the next weeks, first a few, then 30 or 40 and then a hundred. I hunted that pond 7 or 8 times that winter. I didn’t get limits, but always got at least a few.
Within the next 3 to 4 years I constructed half a dozen ponds from a couple of acres in size to 10 acres each. AND THEN, I DISCOVERED WILD RICE. By year 6, I had built a dozen ponds, had planted Wild Rice in all and began to move our local flyway. At the peak of the migration during our waterfowl season, I now had 4,000 to 5,000 ducks and hundreds of Canada geese frequenting my ponds.
The traditional local flyway was located 20 miles west of our property. It was on the west side of the Willamette Valley across three major highways and the Willamette River and home to 5 large waterfowl refuges. For 50 to 75 years ducks and geese used this and the surrounding farmland as they migrated south. Now with 50 acres of flooded WILD RICE lots of birds had changed course and we now had some of the best shooting in the valley.
