• Protecting Water and Farmland in Simcoe County

Wetland projects already having an impact in Barrie area

By
In Council Watch
Apr 25th, 2015
0 Comments
1269 Views

By Laurie Watt Barrie Advance

The first generation of wood ducks that nested in boxes installed last year are returning from their southern U.S. winter homes.

At the first few sites in the Oro-Medonte hills, wood ducks are beginning to nest again.

“What’s really neat is waterfowl, when they come back in the spring, they’re able to remember the area where they hatched a successful clutch the year before. They come back and most often in the same pond,” said Ducks Unlimited Canada conservation officer Mike Williams.

“The young females hatched in a wood box will come back to the same area, so you gradually build your population.”

Starting last year and continuing until 2017, the Lake Simcoe Georgian Bay Wetland Collaborative is building and maintaining habitats for wetland waterfowl and wildlife.

Projects range from installing wooden nest boxes on private property — small in size but big in impact — to restoring wetlands, such as one in the Rathburn Tract of a Simcoe County forest in Ramara.

“Historically over 70 per cent of wetlands in southern Ontario have been lost due to urban expansion and agricultural conversion,” said Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority healthy waters program co-ordinator Shannon Stephens.

“(Our) wetland coverage is 12.3 per cent and just exceeds the minimum adequate coverage Environment Canada says is needed to sustain healthy watersheds.”

The nest boxes are a simple but effective way to help a new clutch of wood ducklings survive, explained Williams.

Led by their mother across a kilometre of woodland, “12 to 15 ducklings are easy prey for coyotes and hawks,” said Williams. With the nest boxes on a predator-proof pole at the water’s edge, the ducklings fall out into the water, where they learn to swim and survive.

The collaborative reaches out to landowners to not only to create a long-term home for wood ducks but to help them better manage their lands to support wildlife and improve water quality by limiting and reducing nutrients.

Livestock fences, for example, prevent cattle from wading into streams and polluting them. Instead, the fences allow water-filtering plants to grow along the watercourse.

At the Rathburn Tract of county forest, there’s a wetland constructed in the 1960s that needs some maintenance work, Williams added.

“Wetlands are typically most healthy when they can go dry once in a while,” he explained. The project involves managing beavers and muskrats, which as they build up the dyke can increase the water level, rather than allowing it to fall naturally and cyclically.

Leave a Reply

Commenters must post under real names. AWARE Simcoe reserves the right to edit or not publish comments. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *