Midwest Flood Plains Turning Into Wildlife Refuge

Through years of repeated flooding, the Missouri River has never stopped trying to reclaim the land people took from it.

Now, with the federal government’s help, about 60,000 acres of that land in Missouri will eventually be returned to the “Big Muddy.”

“What I think we’re all understanding is, the river is much more than the channel it flows in. It amounts to the flood plain as well,” said J.C. Bryant, manager of the new Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge.

The refuge was born of disaster. The government had long considered a wildlife refuge along the Missouri River, but it didn’t have money available to buy up flood-prone land until the massive 1993 floods.

If all the envisioned purchases are made, the Fish and Wildlife Service will oversee one of the nation’s most unusual refuges, a series of natural pockets stretching from Kansas City to St. Louis. There are only two others like it.

“It would be kind of like beads on a string,” Bryant said by telephone from his office in Columbia, Mo.

Since human development began along the Missouri, about 500,000 acres of wildlife habitat have been lost from Sioux City, Iowa, to St. Louis. Once a constantly shifting series of braided channels, pools, marshes and wooded flood plain, much of the Missouri now resembles a free-flowing ditch held in check by levees.

The result has been disaster for the river’s wildlife. The endangered status of the pallid sturgeon, the interior least tern and the piping plover have been blamed directly on the harnessing of the river.

Despite those losses, it probably was the 1993 disaster that provided landowners with sound economic reasons to consider giving up bottom land.

“The flood maybe caused some people to think we might have encroached upon the river too much,” Bryant said.

So far, the refuge consists of about 1,600 acres, bought with flood disaster money from people fed up with fighting the river. Environmental assessments have been done for proposed purchases totaling 10,828 acres in five Missouri counties: Howard, Saline, Lafayette, Cooper and Osage.

Little Missouri Bend in Saline County is a prime example, a piece of land surrounded on three sides by the river that has repeatedly flooded. An aerial photo shows deep sand deposits and scouring from the most recent floods.

Once allowed to return to its natural state, forests would return and bring food for a vast array of creatures. Fish would have more structure in which to hide and spawn. Nesting sites would be created for birds such as wood ducks and bald eagles, as well as habitat for larger mammals such as deer and raccoon.

Eventually, the government wants to convert 10% of the flood plain within Missouri into wildlife refuge. The Fish and Wildlife Service is preparing a full-scale environmental impact statement for the project.

The program is purely voluntary: A landowner can’t be forced to sell to the government, and both sides must agree on a fair price. An appraisal process would ensure that the price reflected the local real estate market.

Although the refuge would be accessible to the public, the government would take steps, such as signs and fences if necessary, to ensure that people don’t trespass on nearby private lands.

The federal government also would compensate local governments for lost property taxes, probably at either 75 cents an acre or three-fourths of the appraised value of the land.

“Some people feel threatened by the government coming in and buying land. We don’t want to run anybody out,” Bryant said. “But in this river bottom, these people have been inundated numerous times. There are a lot of folks that are concerned about the integrity of the Missouri River.”

For now, there is about $5 million available for the purchases, he added. The remainder of the project will depend on future appropriations by Congress, which are by no means certain.

But other government agencies are making similar acquisitions along the river. The Army Corps of Engineers is setting aside about 14,000 acres in Missouri as wildlife habitat and another 10,000 acres has been identified as eligible for a program that converts farmland into wetlands.