Clearing a field at Mattamuskeet to plant food crops for waterfowl. 



goose food, to come in. And the disking lias to 

 be repeated every year or so to keep the willows 

 from again taking over. Carp had so infested 

 the lake that they had destroyed practically all 

 of the aquatic food plants. Millions of these 

 rough fish were trapped or seined, and sold, with 

 the result that aquatics are coming back beyond 

 the greatest expectations. 



Mattamuskeet is now one of the most famous 

 waterfowl wintering areas of the Atlantic coast. 

 Here from 60,000 to 80,000 Canada geese, 80,000 

 to 150,000 pintails, mallards, black ducks, and 

 teal trade back and forth to adjacent Pamlico 

 Sound and Swanquarter Refuge while hundreds 

 of stately whistling swans — rigidly protected— 

 fly unconcernedly overhead. 



About 10,000 acres of the 50,000-acre refuge 

 have always been open to public shooting and 

 hunters normally bag from 3,500 to 5,000 Canadas 

 and a like number of ducks from blinds managed 

 by the Conservation Department of the State of 

 North Carolina. Hunters on farms surrounding 

 Mattamuskeet account for 

 more. 



as many geese, or 



The Service's 205 refuges and management 

 a leas are used at some time of the season by about 

 •20 percent of the continental population of water- 

 fowl. Some use them as feeding and resting 

 places during migration, some as winter homes, 

 and some as suitable homes to bring off their 

 broods of downy young. 



To provide the food essential for this extensive 

 use of the refuges, the Fish and Wildlife Service 

 has become one of the Nation's largest farmers, 

 and certainly it holds a record for diversification. 

 Refuge personnel are now cultivating more than 

 17,000 acres, which produce such varied crops as 

 rice, wheat, corn, clovers, barley, millets, buck- 

 wheat, and maize. In addition, they supervise 

 sharecropping on 48,000 acres of refuge farmland, 

 in which practically all of the Government's share 

 is left in the fields for waterfowl. The total is 

 more than 65,000 acres of highly developed crop- 

 land. 



The totals of some of the refuge improvements 

 are impressive: 1,136 miles of dikes, equivalent 

 to a dike stretching from Washington, D. C, to 

 New Orleans, La.: 1,657 miles of ditches and 



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