The Fallout of Drought

A decade ago, with high water over much of the state from the Devils Lake basin to the Missouri River corridor and in between, North Dakota was as wet as it had been in more than a century.

Crop fields were flooded. High waters washed out roads. The lives and livelihoods of many were challenged. Flood waters from Garrison Dam south along the Missouri River that inundated homes, infrastructure of river-bound communities and an untold number of acres of wildlife habitat, was called a 500-year event.

Today, following a hot, dry summer that featured little precipitation and a record number of days over 100 degrees, farmers, ranchers and wildlife managers are wondering if there is an end in sight.

“It’s a pretty bad drought … realistically, we’ve been looking at almost two years of it,” said Casey Anderson, North Dakota Game and Fish Department wildlife division chief. “Because we're coming on a second year of this thing, it really starts to add up.

“If you get one year of drought, a lot of stuff out there, whether it's wildlife or vegetation, deals with that fairly well in this kind of country,” he added. “But when you start getting into multi-year droughts, things start to get really taxing across the landscape for wildlife, habitat, agriculture producers … everybody really.”

Life on the Northern Plains, if you hang around long enough to experience the unpredictable weather ups and downs, will stagger even the hardiest.

Some of the fallouts for wildlife during a drought, Anderson said, is a decline in habitat, which means lower quality food and scarce to lower quality water sources.

“Because of this, the critters out there are unable to thrive like they normally would in spring and summer when they add fat and have large broods with the good available nesting cover,” he said. “While it doesn’t seem like it now because there are grasshoppers everywhere, we had pretty low insect numbers in spring. During that time in the spring is when pheasant and grouse chicks are hatching, they depend on a high protein diet of insects, and they just weren't there.”

Drought also severely impacted breeding duck habitats across North Dakota in spring and summer. Breeding conditions varied from very poor to fair, and the Game and Fish Department’s wetland index declined by 80%.

While 2.9 million ducks were estimated during the Department’s annual breeding duck survey in May, Mike Szymanski, Department migratory game bird management supervisor, said behavioral cues suggested breeding efforts by those ducks would be low.

Conditions were not good statewide, he said, and after a high count in 2020, the decline in wetlands counted represented the largest one-year percentage-based decline in the 74-year history of the survey.

The number of broods observed during the Department’s July brood survey dropped 49% from last year’s count and 23% below the 1965-2020 average. The number of broods observed was the lowest since 1994, yet the count in 2021 was still 62% above the long-term average. The average brood size was down 4% from last year’s estimate.

With winter on the horizon, biologists reason that animals having dealt with lower quality food sources for an extended period will potentially go into North Dakota’s leanest months without the proper fat reserves.

“And you're also going to end up with winter cover that is either short or nonexistent, so if winter gets bad it's going to be pretty hard for a lot of species to really thrive,” Anderson said. “Also, think about the deer out there that might not even be in good enough shape to conceive a fawn, for example, or certainly not in good enough shape to carry one until birth in spring if the winter is tough. If these things happen, it’s going to be an issue.”

One of the remedies to help usher out drought conditions in North Dakota would be a white winter. Yet, getting what you wish for, Anderson said, will likely have some negatives attached.

“We need snow to give us that flush of green in the spring, maybe fill some wetlands and improve the quality of water on the landscape,” he said. “Yet, the worse the winter gets, the harder it’s going to be on the wildlife out there.”

In the interim, Anderson said everyone would welcome more of the late August and early September rains that fell in parts of the state, turning the landscape greener than it had been all summer.

“That's maybe going to improve the quality of some of the food sources out there for wildlife as they're trying to put on reserves to go into winter,” Anderson said. “A few more of those rains would help give us some sort of soil moisture. The more rain we can get now, the better off we'll be in the spring, regardless of what the winter does to provide some nesting cover and other benefits.”

Waiting to See What Winter Brings

While Greg Power, Department fisheries chief, describes the drought as a “tough one,” he’s quick to take the edge off any doom and gloom talk concerning North Dakota’s fisheries.

“We got through the summer without really any substantial fish kills,” he said. “Given how hot and dry it was, we totally expected to have half a dozen, 10 lakes with some type of, maybe even substantial kills, especially pike lakes. But we didn't see it, so that's good news.”

Then again, depending on what happens this winter, his outlook may change.

“What often controls our fishery populations is winterkill, especially in those marginal waters, and we're set up for some serious winterkill potential if we get snowpack, especially if we get a snowpack in December and it stays,” he said. “That early snow can really challenge a lot of our lakes. It's a double-edged sword. We need the moisture; we need that runoff come next spring and oftentimes it comes in the form of snow. Even under the best-case scenario this winter, we're going to lose a few lakes. Worst case scenario … Well, only time will tell.”

For the most part, North Dakota’s fishing waters were impacted equally across much of the state.

“We’re down, as a general rule, 2 to 5 feet in our lakes from where we were two years ago,” he said. “So, if the lake only has a maximum depth of 12 feet, that becomes very concerning.”

If 2022 is a continuation of 2021, Power expects the state to possibly continue to feature hundreds of managed fishing waters. But in a couple of years if conditions persist, things could change significantly.

---

The fallout of drought on boat access to a lake in northern North Dakota.

---

“We could lose a hundred waters,” he said. “Of course, they're going to be your more marginal waters. Again, time will tell.”

The other short- and long-term issue heading into 2022 is going to be boating access.

“We got through this summer in surprisingly decent shape,” Power said. “We have a lot more boat ramps out on the prairies today than we did 20 to 30 years ago, but we're going to start finding where the bottom of those boat ramps are soon.

“It's possible if conditions continue like this, some boat ramps may not be available next year,” he added. “Shore-fishing and ice fishing opportunities will still be out there on those waters, but we're going to be really challenged about providing boat access if we don't start getting some significant rain or snow.”

Power said that projections are not good for the Missouri River System in 2022, which means access to the big lake could be somewhat of an issue.

“On Sakakawea, we have a lot of low-water boat ramps, which is the good news, but we also know that they are probably under tons of sediment from all the high water in the last 10 years,” Power said.

Power hopes the agency can work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to clear those low-water ramps of sediment so anglers and other water users have access to the lake.

Today, North Dakota features about 440 managed fishing waters, which is a record for the state, thanks to an incredible wet period beginning in 1993.

“We’re going on almost 30 years of way above normal moisture, but in the middle of that we had pretty tough drought for four or five years prior to 2008,” Power said. “Right now, maybe this is just going to be a one-, two-, three-year anomaly and the wet conditions will continue over the long term. We'll find out in a few years, I guess.”