The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and contractors on Dredge Material Placement Facility 3-D in Tampa Bay recently earned warm-n-fuzzies as they assisted the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) in effort to collect data.
The Corps and its contractors, Carter’s Contracting Services, Inc. and LG2 Environmental Solutions (LG2ES), hosted and volunteered as assistants during a two-day FWC operation that involved building a corral and herding wild ducks for banding.
To Aubree Hershorin, Ph.D., project biologist, this sounded like a great opportunity for the FWC and she was glad that the Corps and the contractor were able to accommodate the request while constructing the 3-D dike raising. The raising will bring the dike from 23 feet to 40 feet to create about 15 million cubic yards of capacity and will help sustain another 20 years of dredging for the Tampa Harbor Federal Navigation project.
Small Game Program Leader Jamie Feddersen was excited about this venture because of a newly started multi-state color-banding project that the FWC is undertaking with several southern states. Collectively, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas have breeding populations.
FWC is viewing this first year as more of a test year to see if all the cooperating states can actually catch a large number of black-bellied whistling ducks (BBWDs).
[mappress]
Press Release, September 29, 2014