ASHBY, Minn. – It was late in the season and most of the birds were gone. But there had to be a few stragglers out there, late migrators that hadn’t yet left for warmer waters.
Jordan Lillemon tossed his decoys into Lake Christina, a few yards from shore, and hoped that western Minnesota still had some goldeneyes, ducks with stark black-and-white bodies. He was almost certain that sunlight would bring in hooded mergansers, smaller ducks that fly fast and dive and appear suddenly from any direction, at any time, and are among the most difficult to shoot.
Kettle, his 7-year-old black lab, paused for a moment in the water, then climbed up to her platform next to the hunting blind and waited for the sun to rise.
Nearly all of the wetlands in Minnesota’s prairie region have been destroyed, drained away and turned into row crops by thousands of miles of ditches and tile lines. Many of the few that remain – an estimated 5% of the total before settlement – were saved by duck hunters.
The love of birds, for sport and food, or simply for observation, has been the saving grace of the swamps, marshes and shallow lakes along the Mississippi River, from its upper reaches in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa on down to Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.
Hundreds of species, including every kind of duck, goose and swan, need those wetlands, which rise and fall, flood and recede, to breed, forage and rest.
When wetlands are destroyed, the birds are usually the first to noticeably die off.
By the early 1900s, it was clear that draining the swamps, bayous and backwaters of the Mississippi River to create new and valuable farmland was causing drastic falls in duck and wildlife populations across the continent.
In 1918, a man who grew up in Davenport, Iowa, and moved out east wrote to the Omaha World Herald to ask if duck hunting along Davenport’s portion of the Mississippi River was still the best in the world.
“All swamplands have been reclaimed, drained and fields of waving corn now stand where in your days the muskrat built his home,” the paper’s outdoor writer responded. “Very little duck hunting is now enjoyed along the Mississippi River.”
Waterfowl populations continued to fall for the next 15 years, until the habitat loss and over-hunting pushed several species to the brink of extinction.
In 1934, Congress tried something new – and simple. Lawmakers required every goose and duck hunter over the age of 16 to buy a $1 stamp. All the money collected from the stamp would be used to buy and permanently protect swamps and marshes up and down the Mississippi Flyway that the birds needed to survive.
It worked. Through the first few years of the program, the United States and hunters were able to save thousands of acres of marshes. Then tens of thousands.
The ducks almost immediately returned.
The agency in charge of the duck stamp, which became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, started working with non-profit conservation groups like Ducks Unlimited to not only save swamps but revive ones that had been destroyed. Ducks Unlimited would negotiate easements with landowners and then remove drainage tiles, ditches and dams to restore the natural flow of water to breeding grounds that had been lost. The Fish and Wildlife Service worked with Ducks Unlimited and other groups to buy and permanently protect restored wetlands.
Over the last 90 years, revenue from the hunting stamp, which now costs $25, has saved about 6 million acres of wetlands. Ducks Unlimited, which is funded primarily by hunters, estimates it has restored 18 million acres in North America, the vast majority in nesting grounds for birds that migrate along the Mississippi Flyway, from prairie Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
That’s a total area of swamps, marshes, bogs and shallow lakes larger than Lake Superior.
But it’s a fraction of what it was.
Lake Christina was one of the most famed and productive hunting lakes in Minnesota in the 1920s. There were regular reports then of more than 100,000 white-backed canvasback ducks dotting the lake. But by 1959, that number had fallen to about 250.
Lillemon grew up on the lake, and seeing its rebirth helped inspire him to become a habitat engineer for Ducks Unlimited.
“It’s hard for me to hunt anywhere else,” he said, as the birds have become so consistent.
The waterline in a healthy and functioning wetland needs to fluctuate, like lungs. The damage done to a wetland when it is drained is immediate and obvious, like air sucked out of a collapsed lung. The rich soil dries up and can be plowed and turned into a corn field. But the other extreme is just as damaging. Wetlands can be flooded to death. This happens when dams, drainage ditches and tile lines force too much water into the system and don’t let it leave. Imagine taking a deep breath and never being able to exhale.
That’s what happened to Lake Christina.
As thousands of acres of what had been meandering streams and marshes were drained to build out the crop fields of west-central Minnesota, some of that water pushed into Lake Christina. The higher water levels allowed bullheads and carp to thrive. They churned up the lake bottom, and it became dark and mucky. Native aquatic plants like wild celery died off.
The birds left.
About 15 years ago, Minnesota lawmakers funded a pumping system in one of the dams near the lake with the help of Ducks Unlimited and the Fish and Wildlife Service. In 2010, the state drew down water levels, allowing the system to exhale for the first time in 50 years. Fish and algae populations immediately dropped to more natural numbers. Sunlight once again reached the lake bottom. Plants started growing.
As the lake rose with the rains and snow melt of the following spring, thousands of ducks returned.
Shortly after sunrise on his hunting trip in November, a lone bird flew in high and fast from Lillemon’s left. The duck ignored the decoys, going straight overhead. Lillemon swung and fired. The bird fell.
“Hooded merganser,” he said.
Kettle leaped from her platform, swam out, brought it to Lillemon and then looked back up at the sky. It would be a busy morning for Kettle. There were no goldeneyes, but Lillemon and his party had nearly filled its limit of mergansers by 9 a.m.
Restoration can still feel like a losing battle.
For every acre of wetland being restored in Minnesota, more are being lost. A 2024 U.S. Department of Agriculture study found that eight of the top 10 U.S. counties where tile drainage was growing fastest were in southern Minnesota. Nearly all of those drainage systems shoot water into a river that ends up in the Mississippi.
Minnesota lost 140,000 acres of forested wetlands between 2006 and 2020, with many replaced by flooded or man-made ponds and lakes.
The Supreme Court’s 2023 Sackett decision has also removed federal Clean Water Act protections for wetlands unless they have a continuous surface connection to navigable waters. That strips federal protection from many shallow breeding ponds, which fill up with rain and snowmelt only in the spring.
Those ponds, called prairie potholes, will now have to rely either on state protections or conservation programs like those funded by the duck stamp.
Over the last 20 years, wetlands have been losing some of their most ardent advocates. Duck hunting, as a pastime, is in decline throughout their breeding grounds of the Upper Midwest.
The number of licensed waterfowl hunters in Minnesota dropped by 45% between 2000 and 2023 – a loss of about 55,000 hunters. South Dakota duck and goose hunters fell by nearly a third over roughly the same time. Wisconsin has dropped by 5,000 licensed hunters.
But across the country, sales of the federal duck stamp have remained stable at about 1.5 million stamps sold each year since 2010. Some of that is because duck hunting has been growing as a sport in the South, in places like Arkansas where licensed hunters have increased.
It’s also because there has been a new-found push among birders, those who observe but don’t hunt, to buy duck stamps to support the preservation of wild places, said Scott Glup, the recently retired project leader of the Litchfield Wetland Management District for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“They take as much pleasure in seeing a bird as I do watching my dog work a field,” he said. “If you want bird habitat, here’s something you can do. Buy a duck stamp.”
Each acre is its own struggle to reclaim.
The farmland where much of the losses have been is valuable. Some of it was drained by county or state governments for what was believed to be for the public good.
In November, Glup stood by the side of one of the wetlands he helped restore a few days before his retirement. It took 15 years for the Fish and Wildlife Service to work out a deal with the landowners to put a conservation easement on the property. It’s still owned by the farmers, but it can never be drained or intensively farmed again.
The site was a 200-acre lake named Butler Lake more than 100 years ago. But in 1919, a handful of nearby farmers asked Meeker County to drain it away to give them more room to graze their cattle. The county obliged, hiring a contractor to empty the lake.
Using duck stamp dollars, the Wildlife Service bought the easements. Partner groups including Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever helped tear out some of the old drain tile. And in 2024, a smaller, 65-acre Butler Lake held open water for the first time in more than a century.
Glup watched a pair of trumpeter swans in the lake. Just a few weeks earlier he had seen sandhill cranes, sora rails and black terns all finding an old stopping ground for their migration that had been covered up for a century.
How can you justify taking land out of production?
That’s the most persistent question Glup received in his 37-year career restoring wetlands.
Watching the swans, Glup said he used to dread that question from hostile county boards and skeptical farmers. But then he started looking forward to it, after he had hunted in some of those restored fields, and seen all that they had brought back.
“We’re not taking it out of production, we’re putting it back into production,” Glup said. “With these wetlands we’re producing groundwater recharge, erosion control, flood protections, ducks and pheasants. We’re producing public land that people can go out and enjoy. We’re producing pollinators.”
Throughout his career Glup was usually the first one in the office, arriving around sunrise. The Litchfield office is a small building off of a two-lane road that backs up a few hundred acres of restored prairie. During the season he would hunt pheasants over his lunch break in that prairie with Rica, the best pheasant dog Glup has ever had.
About four years ago, as he walked from his car he heard the clear and cheerful song of meadowlark. It’s a sound he had once heard often, but not in years as Minnesota’s western meadowlark population fell.
“I know young folks who don’t know what a meadowlark is because they’ve never seen them, they’ve never heard them perform,” he said.
Glup ran into his office, grabbed a pair of binoculars and found the bird — a male, bright and yellow, singing in the field.
“For about two weeks, he sang,” Glup said. “And then he disappeared.”
Each year since, meadowlarks have been back. He’ll count up to 10 of them some mornings.
He’s not sure what exactly the limiting factor was. Was it space, water, a certain mix of insects brought in by the right combination of wildflowers? But somehow the field behind his office went from inhospitable to hospitable for meadowlarks, he said.
And as soon as it did, a bird that he hadn’t seen in decades returned.
It’s almost always the birds, he said, that will tell you if the land is healthy.
This story is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.