OCR Text |
Show in Utah is intimately associated with land under irrigation and within a certain range of environmental parameters most irrigated land can be productive pheasant range. 119 Not all irrigated land constitutes year- round habitat for pheasants. Suitable win tec habitat contains permanent vegetation often including some woody plants. Marshe. 3, particularly those close to grain field constitute excellent winter habitat. The winter pheasant habitat contained in and around Provo Bay is of excellent quality and its loss would seriously reduce pheasant production in Utah County. Of the 8,000 acres of winter habitat that would be eliminated by the diking of Utah Lake, the bulk would be associated with Provo Bay. The Unit would create about 16,000 acres of suitable pheasant habitat but this would be of a quality inferior to that of Provo Bay and would not constitute a complete replacement. •*• According to the publication Pheasants in North America, 119 Utah possessed approximately 1,756 square miles of pheasant range in 1945 and a potential for about 3,400 square miles of habitat. These figures corresponded to the amount of irrigated land available at the time. The adverse impact of the loss of 8,000 acres ( 12.5 square miles) of winter habitat would be less significant at the Statewide level than at the local level. The Bonneville Unit would destroy about 28,000 acres of waterfowl habitat of which about 25,000 acres would be associated with the marshes of Utah Lake. These marshes are primarily utilized as wacerfowl resting areas and provide an important link in the Pacific Flyway migration route. The local impact of this loss of habitat would be significant. However, the effect of the loss on the waterfowl resource of the State is more difficult to ascertain. Many thousands of acres of good habitat primarily associated with the Great Salt Lake and the Bear River would still remain. The National and International impact would be even more obscure. The loss of this relatively small amount of habitat would comprise a tiny part of a drainage process that has already eliminated approximately 100 million acres of waterfowl habitat on the North American continent in the past 355 |