OCR Text |
Show and fall flights. Comprising Utah's waterfowl habitat are about 86,000 acres of Federally developed marshes, 75,000 acres of State marshes, and numerous privately developed and natural undeveloped marshes. Several waterfowl management areas are located within and adjacent to the Bonneville Unit area. These are the Ouray, Bear River, and Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuges; the Brown's Park, Stewart Lake, Salt Creek, Locomotive Springs, Ogden Bay, Harold S. Crane, Howard Slough, Farmington Bay, Timpie Springs, Powell Slough, Clear Lake, Bicknell Bottoms, and Desert Lake Waterfowl Management Areas; and the undeveloped Topaz Marsh. The Bonneville Basin portion of the Unit area contains a large area of high quality waterfowl habitat, mainly in Utah and Juab Counties. Of special significance are the marshes associated with Benjamin Slough and the Provo and Goshen Bay areas of Utah Lake, Mona Reservoir, and Sevier Bridge Reservoir. The waterfowl habitat of the Uinta Basin is not as plentiful as that of the Bonneville Basin and consists mainly of marshes and meadows near Strawberry Reservoir and along the Duchesne River0 The principal waterfowl species utilizing the Unit area are Canada geese, whistling swans, and mallard, gadwall, pintail, teal, shoveler, redhead and ruddy ducks„ A more complete listing of birds is included in Attachment D, Tables 1 through 3. An assessment of the fall migration waterfowl population, 1967- 71, ' revealed that the most abundant species are mallard and pintail ducks and Canada geese. During the 1971 hunting season the Statewide harvest of waterfowl was estimated to approximate 607,000 birds of which about 17,400 were geese. Utah County, which includes Utah Lake, supplied about 10 percent of the total yield of ducks and geese. In 1971 only four other counties showed higher hunter use or higher harvest than did Utah County. An outbreak of botulism takes its toll of ducks annually in the Provo Bay area of Utah Lake. This disease is a form of food poisoning chat the ducks get while feeding in the shallow stagnant water that is prevalent in this area. Botulism is also called limber neck because that is the major sympton with the ducks losing all muscular control and then soon dying. Because of shallow water and local high temperatures, the botulism bacteria strikes a number of ducks each year. The onset of cool fall nights brings a halt to the disease. 141 |