The variety of wetland types in the CHBCR provide habitat for a diversity of priority bird species, including landbirds, wading birds, shorebirds and waterfowl.

Bottomland forests and emergent wetland habitats in the Central Hardwoods are largely associated with the region’s larger rivers (the Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Cumberland, etc.) and their tributaries. All these rivers are impounded at some point along their reaches, and many of the wetlands are submerged under large reservoirs. In other areas wetlands have been drained for agriculture. Remaining bottomland forests on smaller rivers are rapidly being converted to pasture and campgrounds.

Bottomland forests are important to a variety of high-priority landbirds, such as Cerulean and Prothonotary Warblers. Naturally flooded bottomland forests also provide important habitat for breeding Wood Ducks and other migrant and wintering waterfowl.

American Black Duck Photo courtesy of US Forest Service.

Extensive cane thickets (Arundinaria gigantea) associated with the CHBCR’s rivers and larger streams were important habitat for the high priority Swainson’s Warbler, but have been reduced in size or extirpated along most of the river systems where they occurred historically. Restoration efforts are underway in some areas, but there is potential to do much more.

Mudflats and emergent wetlands in the Central Hardwoods provide important habitat for shorebirds, waterfowl and wading birds during spring and fall migrations. High priority waterfowl, such as American Black Duck and the James Bay population of Canada Goose, use emergent wetlands and associated open-uplands (e.g. row crop and flooded agricultural lands) during winter as well.

Restoration and management of wetland habitats has received the most attention where the CHBCR overlaps one of two Joint Ventures formed under the auspices of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan and in areas associated with the lower Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Wet meadows, a much more poorly understood and inadequately mapped wetland type, may serve as important migration habitat for some shorebirds, rails, and tall grass prairie sparrows and are in great need of attention.

Wetland Habitat Projects