Wildlife habitat restoration on a Mississippi plantation (success at Circle M)

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CONTROLLING undesirable vegetation allows the resurgence of native grasses and plants that provide wildlife food and habitat. Bobby Watkins, who is supervising a habitat restoration/management program at Circle M Plantation at Macon, Miss., checks a field that has been repopulated with broomsedge, partridge peas, goldenrod, ragweed, and other desirable plants.
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When farmers were migrating westward out of the Carolinas 150 years ago because the scourge of johnsongrass had made cotton production unprofitable, they found in the gently rolling prairie lands of east central Mississippi a virtually blank slate.

So one story goes, a preacher arriving in what is now Noxubee County, bordering the Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway that separates Mississippi and Alabama, stood atop one of the low hills, beheld the panorama before him, and described it in his diary as “countless miles of grass blowing in the wind.”

There were buffalo and elk, turkeys, bears, quail, deer, and all manner of other game, flourishing in a prairie environment of continually replenished native grasses and plants that provided both food and habitat. The occasional wildfires, either lightning- or man-caused, would burn off the grasses, suppress tree growth, and scarify dormant seeds from the native plants, creating a new cycle of growth for the vegetation that had adapted and blanketed the area for centuries.

“It made excellent farming and grazing land for the new settlers because there were no trees,” says Bobby Watkins. “All they had to do was burn off the vegetation, plow, and plant in soils that were rich from centuries of decomposing organic matter.”

But there was a downside, says Watkins, who retired from a career as research agronomist with American Cyanamid and BASF, where he worked on the development of Prowl, Scepter, Pursuit, Arsenal, and other agricultural chemicals, and is now a wildlife habitat/property management consultant in the Starkville, Miss., area. “When the land was cleared of native grasses and plants to make way for crops, chiefly cotton, trees started coming in, along with a host of undesirable, rampantly-growing species that were of no value for supporting wildlife — privet, sweetgum, lespedeza, coastal bermudagrass, etc.

“Later, with the advent of large-scale pine plantings, the situation was only compounded, because the trees often were not adequately managed, and the understory of the pine plantations became thickets of species that not only sapped water and nutrients from the trees, but provided no food or habitat for wildlife. And they spread like crazy, infesting thousands of acres.”

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Today, there is no cotton on Circle M. The property, now about 6,000 acres of owned and leased land, is operated by a group of Birmingham, Ala., investors, offering an array of hunting, fishing, and other sporting activities, which can be combined with business meetings/dining for up to 100 people in the restored commissary building and other facilities on the property, as well as weddings and other events, or just weekend getaways.

For entertainment and leisure, there is a huge game room, a sporting clay range, and tours of the property on mule-drawn wagons, including opportunities to view the nesting pair of bald eagles that have taken up residence in trees surrounding the lakes (they raised a pair of eaglets in 2008).

“Basically, these are owners with foresight and capital, who want to do all the right things to provide native habitat for wildlife and hunting, and at the same time have properly managed pine acreages for long term income, so they can have an ecologically and financially sustainable operation for their children and grandchildren,” Watkins says.

“In places where things have gotten out of kilter with invasive, non-native plants, I’m working with the owners on an aggressive program to control those species and restore native plants.”

More: http://deltafarmpress.com/news_archive/wildlife-habitat-0421/