A- 7 



Strategically positioned in the Atlantic Flyway, Chesapeake Bay 

 is very important in the migratory bird pattern. Most of the waterfowl 

 produced on both sides of the James and Hudson Bays all the way up to 

 Greenland funnel into the Chesapeake marshes on their southward 

 migration. As a wintering area for waterfowl, the Chesapeake salt 

 marshes have few equals. More than 75 percent of the wintering 

 population of Atlantic Flyway Canada geese occurs on or near tide water, 

 from Kent County in Delaware to Hyde County in North Carolina. The 

 marshes and grain fields of the Delmarva Peninsula are particularly 

 attractive to Canada geese and to grain feeding black ducks and mallards. 

 In the early fall, home is the Susquehanna flats for huge flocks of 

 American widgeon. Several species of diving ducks including the 

 canvasback, redhead, ring-necked duck, and sometimes, scaup, winter on 

 Chesapeake Bay from the Susquehanna flats south to the confluence of 

 Bay and ocean at the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. About half of the 

 80,000 whistling swans in North America winter on the estuaries of 

 Chesapeake Bay and Currituck Sound. Much of the breeding area in the 

 Atlantic Flyway is still wild and remote. It can be counted on to 

 send hundreds of thousands of new birds winging down the flyway each 

 fall. But good wintering areas, adjacent to preferred feeding grounds, 

 are relatively scarce, and as human populations inevitably expand, the 

 size, number, and quality of these wintering areas will diminish 

 accordingly. At present, Chesapeake Bay provides some of the best 

 and most heavily used waterfowl wintering habitat remaining in the 

 Flyway . 



The Atlantic Flyway has more than 32 million acres of wetland 

 habitat and 96 percent of it is located from Maryland south. Only 

 4 million acres are of moderate to high value for waterfowl, and only 

 2 1/2 million acres are salt-marsh, the type of high-quality waterfowl 

 habitat found in the Chesapeake Bay. Estimates vary, but the bay area 

 encompasses roughly one-third of a million acres of salt-marsh habitat 

 of which about one-quarter of a million acres is of moderate to high 

 value for waterfowl. Public owned wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay area 

 total about 95,000 acres. Most of this habitat too, is high in quality 

 and supports large populations of wintering birds. An additional 55,000 

 acres of quality marsh is owned and managed by approximately 380 private 

 waterfowl hunting clubs. Thus, about 150,000 acres or approximately 

 half of the salt-marsh in Chesapeake Bay is managed specifically for 

 waterfowl and is likely to continue to be managed for this purpose in 

 the foreseeable future. 



In recent years, Chesapeake Bay has wintered approximately 550,000 

 ducks and 350,000 geese which provided an estimated 250,000 man-days 

 of waterfowl hunting and 275,000 birds in the bag. Nearly 100,000 

 Canada geese, the king of waterfowl, are harvested on Chesapeake Bay, 

 the queen of bays (USDI, 1970). 



