Water Lettuce on Lake Onalaska: Friday November 6 Date: 11/06/2015 08:04 AM From: Fritz To: Participating Natural Resource Agencies and Volunteers There are still occasional water lettuce plants being found along the Brice Prairie Channel, but with recent winds it is unlikely that any have escaped across Lake Onalaska and beyond. Most recent (Tuesday Nov 3) survey of the Brice Prairie shoreline attached. Removal efforts have largely prevented widespread broadcast of water lettuce plants this fall. We should keep looking for and removing the occasional overlooked plants that head toward the lake, but I think our efforts have been largely successful. Looking ahead, two additional efforts will be needed to contain this outbreak: Winter Cleanup - Find and remove surviving plants in shoreline groundwater "springs" or other warm spots. Spring Cleanup - Find and remove plants that hatch from the seed bank that is likely under the source mat location. Hopefully there will not be a spring/summer flood timed to broadcast seeds or newly germinated plants. On a brighter note, the fall waterfowl migration is in full swing on Lake Onalaska. Large rafts of mixed wigeon and canvasback have been feeding along the Brice Prairie shoreline. It can be great entertainment to watch the wigeon charging the "cans" as they surface and stealing the wild celery buds from their bills. Being puddle ducks (closely related to the mallard), the wigeon can't dive deep enough to get down to the celery root buds themselves - they have to steal the high-energy buds from the deep-diving canvasbacks. The telescope at the USFWS overlook on Brice Prairie is a good place to see this. You should be able to hear the squeaky three-toned "whistle" of the wigeon drakes. If you're out doing late-season boating, try to avoid areas with large rafts of feeding ducks - it does not take much boat traffic to clear birds from large swaths of the lake! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvasback Lake Onalaska waterfowl avoidance area info: http://www.umesc.usgs.gov/documents/fact_sheets/voluntary_waterfowl_avoidance_area_fs2005-3127.pdf --Fritz Funk Event Summary on Lake District Web Page: http://www.lakeonalaska.org/invasive_species.html attachment: Tuesday_Nov_3.jpg