IMPACT ON HABITAT AFFECTS WILDLIFE

Two years ago I was given the opportunity to move to Southeast Missouri to advance my education at Southeast Missouri State University. Although I have thoroughly enjoyed my days here and now realize how much I will truly miss this area for a multitude of reasons, I also feel inclined to leave one last mark before departing.

I wish no ill repute. I wish only to portray a few blatantly obvious environmental issues.

One autumn afternoon last year I stood behind an old farmhouse talking to a gentleman with whom I was inquiring about goose hunting on his property. Soon, as these conversations always do, the topic was directed toward my profession as a biologist. As a wildlife biologist, random inquiries on where all the critters have gone is an expected topic.

The farmer asked -- standing next to a laser-leveled field, drained, hedgerows removed, sloughs filled, timber cut and burned, only soil -- "Where have all the quail and rabbits gone?"

Then he added: "Back when I was a kid, there were ducks all over our farm."

What was even more shocking was his thought on how well the lands had been managed. Only a few sentences later he stated, "You won't believe how we've improved this land. Grandpa came through here right after the ditch was dug, cut all the trees. We've got this land all leveled and drained. She drops one inch for every hundred feet. Cleaned out the hedgerows. We did a lot of good for this land."

Good for this land?

Definitely not good for the critters, but are these actions even good for man?

Many of our counties have some of the highest per-capita cancer rates of anywhere in the United States.

Why?

Most Southeast Missouri towns contain no large coal-burning facilities, no huge chemical plants, no stacks billowing fumes.

What they do have is particulate matter tossed from plows over sloughless landscapes, over treeless plain, over dusty herbicide- and pesticide-filled fields, onto truck stops, into school windows, under house doors and into or on or under or through every crack and crook of the land and ultimately into the lungs of men and women.

Further, land leveling has begun to expose riverbed soil, which often contains natural heavy metals. For example, selenium is needed by all organisms in small quantities, but taken up into plants from these exposed soils may have scary implications. Selenium poisoning to birds has been documented on land subjected to similar practices. If plants take up these heavy metals, someone somewhere is consuming those products.

We have lost connection with the land. Southeast Missouri may be the epitome of that statement. I have lived or traveled through over half of the states now and can say that Southeast Missouri may be the most degraded wildlife habitat I have ever seen.

Southeast Missouri's major waterways are now wetland drainage ditches, the only ditches in the United States that show up on a map of rivers. And amid the symmetrical landscape of blue lines are so-called clean farms where swamp-rabbit habitat is still cleared each year to eke out another acre or two to plant more crops, which are already at dismal prices.

The once familiar sight of cottontails and sounds of spring bobwhites are few. The swamps flow to the south and exist no more.

What we now call Kingshighway was once a braided trail of oxbows, sloughs, swamps and timber with Cape LaCroix Creek, now contained in a concrete ditch, mixed through. Most will never realize these losses, nor do they care.

That may be where the problem begins.

Most noticeable is a drastic change in landscape appearance. However, we no longer notice these aesthetic changes because we are merely human and our lives are short. A discount store sits on an ancient filled oxbow that once harbored a pair of wood ducks and brood each year. Yet the children know of no marsh. Therefore, they do not respect its loss.

Since the tea-colored water met its first bulldozer, there has been a compounded loss of untold wood ducks from that one slough.

No, animals do not just move somewhere else. They die, plain and simple.

We have only so much room, and we are displacing so much of it. I only wish people could see these losses and understand we are developing at an alarming rate.

These events are occurring right here in our backyard faster, bigger and better than most places in the United States.

I pose no solutions. I wish I could.

We have come to accept our conservation areas as habitat. However, a wise fellow told me once that we must always push the envelope of preservation and not the evil hand that finds ways to cram more critters into quickly dwindling wild places. We now accept these areas as habitat. We hunt our fowl on them, watch our birds and catch our fish. But few of these areas exist, and we often drive our fume-pumping vehicles an hour or more to get to them, once again compounding the problem.

Our children accept this as habitat. The more generations that are placed upon the layers of others, the further we get from the fact of what the land was and more toward what the land has become.

Soon society will no longer be able to play the role of skeptic that the lands need.

I hope I have given a glimpse of what the past has brought upon us and what our progress has left us with, a moment of literary gesture that may give us a chance to look again at our actions and reset our ideals, a chance to reset our ethics, resume our trail, not be mere cattle, but be free-thinking mammals, gather our wit, and render a more vivid image of a place we meddle with so much.

Michael Schummer is a graduate student in the biology department at Southeast Missouri State University.