What worked

[Blackduck]

What experiments that y'all tried worked or didn't work. We had a nice stand of grasses that the birds did not use at all. Hard to change a traditional afternoon spot to a morning spot.

how about beans ect.

[Wingman]

Grass, smartweed, and browntop millet are what they've been in all season on my place. Not using the beans much until the last couple of weeks.

[SWAG]

We have one brake that has held continuous water for 20+ years, never dried all the way down even on drought year. Really open brake, long and skinny, with steep banks and one beaver dam controlling the water level (high). We broke that dam several times in summer of 2012, got 90% water out of it, flew in millet and rice around July 4. Millet and rice both did well in spots, got some regeneration of some annual grasses, ducks used it a little more than usual winter 2012-2013. Skip ahead to the spring/summer of 2013. We broke the dam again a few times in May and June. Did not get the chance to fly in any seed but got good annual grass response. Signal grass, crabgrass, sprangletop, barnyardgrass were main grasses out there covering about 80% of the area. Did have some redstem (toothcup) and coffeeweed in a patch here and there. Beavers content last two years to only build the dam back half as big. Water level last two season has been around 8-16 inches deep where in the 20 years leading up to this the water level would be from 1 foot - 4 foot deep. The brake did have a pocket that would have duck potato on it on very dry years and it would be a hot spot for a short time. We lost the duck potato in this new cycle from what I have seen. The big plus is duck use did go up overall. It is a more productive brake and we still have other brakes that hold water most if not all season so the risk was minimum to try something on this spot. The big change is species of duck...........this spot went from being a 85% gadwall, 10% mallard, 5% other type of duck hole to a 90% mallard, 5% gadwall, 5% wood duck location. All ducks killed in this spot in the 2013-2014 season has been mallard/wood duck.

It is risky to mess with something that was already pretty good. You do not know what seed bank is laying there. You do not know if beavers will cooperate. Had we not had other similar spots to count on, we probably would not have been so drastic as to pull the water level all the way down. It worked this time under this scenario and has been fun to watch the change.

[GrizwalD]