So Sick and Tired of Invasive Plants

Eric Patterson

Eric Patterson

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Now that we are maintaining several sled blinds it is an annual pre-season activity to camo them. I've always liked using ornamental grasses on my boats along with some other local vegetation but find they are a bit more labor intensive for an entire blind. For blinds we use river cane which is historically easily harvested and goes a long way. A typical day of camoing is hook up the utility trailer and pull up to one of several river cane thickets. Tree pruners make fairly quick work of harvesting the cane. Then we trailer it to the blind and run it through grass rails. Three blinds can be done in a weekend.

But over the past several years this activity has been getting more time consuming. The cane thickets are all but gone. Invasive privet has outcompeted river cane. There was a time when river cane could easily be found along field edges and creeks. Now, the only good stands I know of are on the TN river so that adds boat logistics to the task of camoing. No thanks. Before work this morning I drove around the county looking for any last stands that I can get to. None, they are gone.

I know I have commented frequently about the loss of hunting areas to alligator weed and water primrose which troubles me to no end, but now I have another plant to disdain. Chinese Privet. Another useful plant, river cane, has been displaced by a worthless nuisance.
 
As primarily an upland hunter, I'd like to add an invasive that is screwing up my bird covers everywhere: Tartarian Honeysuckle (Lonicera tatarica). Hate the stuff.
Gary
 
This is not exactly duck related but it is invasive plant related...my neighbors planted bamboo and let it run wild, now it is invading my property and i am loosing the battle. I am not a happy neighbor now.
 
OliverNJ said:
This is not exactly duck related but it is invasive plant related...my neighbors planted bamboo and let it run wild, now it is invading my property and i am loosing the battle. I am not a happy neighbor now.
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If what you are talking about is Japanese knotweed, there are options that work. A friend has taken to raising pigs. He built his pig pen around the stand of knotweed and after two years of pig forage it appears to be gone. We'll see it if pops back up when he moves the pig pen--that stuff is resilient as hell.

The only other option I know have that has been successful is applying the herbicide glyphosphate (Round Up and other commercial verisons). It works best if injected into the lower end of each stem--a time consuming process. Even then, expect a couple of rounds of treatment for complete eradicatiion if it is well established. Applying to foliage kills the stems, but it resprouts from roots, often through several applications.

Nasty stuff.

I wonder if our use of some of these plants as blind and boat camo is one of the vectors for their spread. (Not the primary one for sure.) For that reason I try to always use plants I can harvest near my blind site--wild rice, cattails, spartina and seaweed for the sculling boat, and red maple, alder and other shrubs and small trees on my shore blinds.

I remember seeing someone's duckboat completely covered in Phragmites ( a non-native wetland plant here) a few years ago and hoping that guy was going nowhere near my favorite duck spots.
 
Here in the Northwet, himalayan blackberry, Japanese (and other) knotweeds, purple loosestrife, phragmites, Spartina (its an east coast species), reed canary grass, elodea all invade wetlands and waterfowl habitats. The scourge is real. All are very difficult to control once established.
 
I was in a conference a few years back presenting on a restoration project where Spartina alterniflora was the main species that we were planting.
Ironically, the presentation immediately preceding mine was a woman from California talking about how they were trying to eradicate Spartina alterniflora from the marsh she was working in as part of marsh bird (rail) recovery efforts.
I told (sorta) jokingly told her to cut it into sod and ship me all she could find.
 
I didn't know Spartina extended so far south. I've rarely been on the coast anywhere south of New Jersey except way down in mangrove country in Florida.
 
Its the primary low salt marsh species (along with Juncus) along the northern Gulf coast, it gets displaced by mangrove from the Florida Big Bend and south.

Mangrove is extending north as climate warms, it dominates Spartina wherever its warm enough for mangroves to make it through the winter. There is a lot of concern about what kind of ecosystem shift we could see if mangroves increase and Spartina decreases.
 
The “global warming” has us very busy. Our spray season is over, we got a lot of NRCS jobs done, i treated a large water body for milfoil for the army corps, and now we are starting the mowing phase of a big FWS floodplain project on the CT River.

Invasive plants = big money
 
Elodea sp. is native to North America; a good oxygenator and waterfowl food source that grows well. I suspect you meant Brazilian Elodea, Brad.
 
We gave up on controlling milfoil down here, already too widespread, propagates so fast in our 9 month growing season and expensive to treat.
Plus research by our local academic institutions showed that it was highly productive from a fisheries stand point. Its full of juvenile shrimp & fish and tons of forage base too.
The number of snails and amphipods in the stuff is mind boggling.
And gadwalls & coots love to eat it.
 
RLLigman said:
Elodea sp. is native to North America; a good oxygenator and waterfowl food source that grows well. I suspect you meant Brazilian Elodea, Brad.
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Yes and since Carl brought up milfoil, its out there too. Throw in the non-native animals including fish, insects and diseases -- we have really screwed up things. I'd love to see the eastern forest with chestnuts, the sagelands without crested wheatgrass, the list is long.
 
I hear there is progress on breeding blight resistant American Chestnut. But I am no expert on that field.

Can you imagine what the mast crop used to be like when there we million of chestnuts trees in eastern US????
 
Fescue- the scourge of grassland birds throughout the eastern us. Easy to kill, but hard to convince people to do it.

As for privet, you can use a triclopyr herbicide on it, and it will not kill the cane if there's some remnants.
 
Vince Pagliaroli said:
Ya, there were Passenger Pigeons, prior to improvement and other new things brought by invasive human beings...[;)]
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Its funny how humans are root of all these problems.... just like “invasive” fish. People would loose their minds if you cut the gills of every large mouth or brown trout and tossed it in the woods. Pickerel are native here but people toss them in the woods.
 
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