Tulsa World: Drawing them to the Kaw

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Drawing them to the Kaw

Ron Folks, biologist and manager of the Kaw Wildlife Management Area for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, sits on the edge of an airboat in the middle of a wide expanse of Japanese millet during a recent tour to look at the successful 2,200 acre millet crop on Kaw Lake. KELLY BOSTIAN/Tulsa World

By KELLY BOSTIAN World Outdoors Writer
Published: 11/5/2009 2:32 AM
Last Modified: 11/5/2009 5:18 AM

Go to Kelly Bostian's blog

PILOT KEVIN Brown of Blue Stem Aerial Sprayers had a unique opinion of the sweeping fields of head-high heavy headed millet growing on Kaw Lake.

"It's slower," said the pilot when asked how the crop looks now compared to the many times he has helped seed the area from above. "This is the first time I've seen it from down here," he said.

Brown was one of a group of people recently invited to tour a portion of the lake courtesy of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. About 2,200 acres of Kaw's shoreline and wide mud flats are covered with Japanese millet this year.

From a distance, the millet looks almost like fields of wheat, but on closer inspection it is much taller, heavier and, of course, growing over shallow water. The green expanse spreads out like a waving welcome mat for waterfowl

and hunters.

Saturday, the opening day of waterfowl season in eastern Oklahoma, likely will see more than 160 hunters on Kaw, which has become a waterfowl hunting draw due to its millet and the waterfowl it attracts. For the last good millet crop, in 2006, a warden counted license plates from 32 states at Kaw on opening weekend, said Ron Folks, state biologist and manager of the Kaw Wildlife Management Area.

"People call me all the time to check on the millet,"

he said.

Put simply, the food brings birds.

"Everything from goldfinches to all kinds of waterfowl and geese eat it," said Mike O'Melia, programs and research director for the department. "When this works, it's just unreal."

And therein lies the rub. Seeding with millet doesn't always "work." Sometimes, like the past two years, Mother Nature just doesn't cooperate. And of the several reservoirs seeded by the department this year, only Kaw produced a good crop. But Kaw is making up for the lost opportunities elsewhere, Folks said.

This isn't just any old field of millet. Folks said the planting at Kaw this year is the biggest and best any Oklahoma lake has seen in the 30-year history of the state's seeding efforts. Folks was the first to start planting millet on Oklahoma lakes in 1974. He accepts credit for the development.

The program had its origins in the northern end of Oologah Lake. When the reservoir was new, waterfowl poured in to take advantage of freshly flooded native vegetation.

"A warden there compared it to Stuttgart, Arkansas, which is, of course, known for its waterfowl hunting," Folks said.

But the native vegetation didn't last and empty mud flats replaced what once lured thousands of waterfowl.

"I kept thinking, 'What can we could do to replicate what had been going on there,' " Folks said.

He stumbled across an advertisement for Japanese millet in a seed catalog and decided to give it a try on a limited basis. A few weeks after that first planting he had his answer.

"The warden called me up and said, 'You'd better get down here and look at your millet, it's going wild,' " he said.

The seeding program has grown from early attempts by hand and by tractor to the aerial program that drops seed, weather and water permitting, on several of the state's lakes.

Kaw has become the most reliable, and most widely seeded, of all the lakes, he said. Help from the U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers and a relative lack of demand for Kaw's waters sets the stage. Bill Chatron, a hydrologist with the Corps of Engineers in Tulsa, summarized the situation

e_SEmD

which can be subject to an endless options depending on the weather and water. An agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the endangered Interior Least Tern, which nests in the Arkansas River, means that Kaw's waters are deeper in the summer. After nesting there are some hydroelectric demands and the river can flow fuller. That means Kaw can be drawn down to expose mud flats for the department's seeding program in August. In the fall, weather permitting, the water level will be allowed to again rise roughly 4 inches per week through the end of the year so ducks can make use of the new millet.

"You want to make it available gradually so it's available into December-January," O'Melia said. "You wouldn't want to flood it all at once." By KELLY BOSTIAN World Outdoors Writer

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