(light music) - [Bret] On today's "Prairie Sportsman," we explore Memorial Park in Shakopee, a prime location for waterfowl viewing.

(ducks quacking) Then, we examine the impact of power boats on our lakes.

- It's something that we need to ask ourselves, "What's happening underwater when I use my watercraft?"

- [Bret] And Nicole Zempel highlights the healing power of plantain.

- I can have the worst sunburn.

I will apply plantain, and by morning, that sunburn is gone.

- Welcome to "Prairie Sportsman," I'm Bret Amundson.

It's time for another new episode starting right now.

(light music) (bright theme music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources; by Mark & Margaret Yackel-Juleen, on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota on the web at shalomhillfarm.org;; and by the Friends of "Prairie Sportsman."

To become a friend of "Prairie Sportsman," visit pioneer.org/prairiesportsman.

- When it comes to the state of our wildlife, we often look to past.

Decisions regarding regulations, land use, and ethics have shaped our current outdoor landscape.

Now, while those decisions are always evolving, we can use history as a guideline for the path forward.

(gentle music) In the 1800s, there wasn't much to protect waterfowl and other migratory birds.

A market had grown where brightly colored feathers were sold to hat makers, and the meat from these birds would be loaded onto trains and shipped to big cities and fancy restaurants.

Soon, various species became extinct, including Labrador ducks, passenger pigeons, heath hens, and more.

Something needed to be done.

John F. Lacey, a Republican from Iowa, introduced the Lacey Act to Congress.

It aimed to prohibit trade in wildlife, fish, and plants that have been illegally taken, possessed, transported, or sold.

It was signed into law by President William McKinley on May 25, 1900.

Over the years, the Lacey Act was amended to include different species of birds, animals, and plants.

While this laid the groundwork for protection, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918 played a larger role in protecting waterfowl.

It ended the feather trade, made it illegal to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, sell, transport, or trade any migratory bird, including the feathers, eggs, and nests.

This put an end to market hunting and the most effective method for taking ducks and geese: the punt gun.

(gun firing) In the years that followed, defined seasons and limits were enacted.

Those have been refined over the years, and in 1995, the adaptive harvest management system was implemented.

This allowed for management strategies to fluctuate based on waterfowl population trends and ensure that no matter how many birds are legally killed by hunters, it won't have an effect on the overall population.

While these rules have protected waterfowl, other factors such as habitat and weather can play a larger role in migratory bird survival.

(gentle music) National wildlife refuges and waterfowl rest areas give ducks and geese places to escape pressure and restore fat reserves during the spring and fall migrations.

(gentle music) In recent years, it seems that large metro areas with protected agriculture and open water have also served as safe staging areas for these migratory birds.

(ducks quacking) While these metro areas have become havens for waterfowl, they also give us a chance to see them up close.

This park along a busy road in the Twin Cities has become a popular wildlife viewing destination, while also honoring both veterans and the Native Americans who settled here.

(gentle music) Memorial Park, it sits along the busy Highway 101 here in Shakopee.

Burial mounds rise up behind me on the east end of the park, and a Vietnam-era helicopter rests right here near the entrance.

While visitors come to pay their respects and dig into the region's history, others head toward the watery west end with cameras in tow.

(gentle music) Most visitors at the park come to see the waterfowl.

While mallards are the most common, you'll also see Canada geese, trumpeter swans, wood ducks, blue-winged teal, a few random farm ducks, some hybrids, various divers, and the somewhat rare black duck.

(gentle music) Black ducks are always fun to see.

While more common in the Atlantic Flyway along the eastern part of the United States, they're occasionally seen in northern Minnesota.

Memorial Park always seems to have one or two swimming around, however.

They're similar to mallards but feature darker colors.

While often mistaken for mallard hens, seeing them side by side gives you a better look at the differences.

One obvious way is to check the bill color.

Drake black ducks will have a yellow bill, similar to a drake mallard, despite the brown to black plumage.

The ducks also find similarities with each other and often interbreed.

Experts differ on the true extent of their differences and their histories.

In my years of hunting in Minnesota, I've only come across a few black ducks.

And despite this, the limit is two, since overall, the species is of least concern.

Now, if you hunted out east, shooting your two can be a bit easier depending on where you're at.

Visitors to the park can walk or bike the paths through the trees or get a little bit closer to the wildlife and come down even on a pier like this.

We can get up close and personal with the waterfowl.

(gentle music) The pond is part of a former mill.

Its location near the expanse of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge makes this a perfect stopping ground for ducks, geese, and swans.

But you won't just see them during the warm summer months, because there's current that runs through here behind me.

The pond stays open year-round, and if ducks have open water and access to food, then they won't need to go anywhere else.

(gentle music) While this open water opportunity for wintering mallards has given them refuge and a place for wildlife photographers to get close to them in the metro, it raises other questions about human interaction, hybridizing with farm ducks, and migration patterns.

While myself and other photographers have honed our skills at this park, what does it mean for hunters down south?

Maybe the number of birds staying in the Twin Cities over winter isn't large enough to make an impact, but maybe these wintering areas should be considered when researchers study their flight paths.

Or is this just a great opportunity to educate people on ducks and geese?

Regardless, this 137-acre park, set aside to preserve habitat and serve as a memorial for notable residents of our past, has become a safe haven for these colorful birds.

- The lake knows you're there, you're creating velocities, and if you're in too shallow of water, the lake can actually be disrupted.

- [Nicole] This is truly an incredible plant.

(light music) - [Bret] One of the best ways to enjoy the Land of 10,000 Lakes is by boat.

But what impact does our use of powerboats have on the lakes?

Researchers at the St.

Anthony Falls Laboratory, an institution specializing in the study of fluid dynamics, decided to investigate.

(gentle music) In recent years, the sport of wake surfing has been gaining in popularity, and with it, the watercraft that makes the sport possible: wake boats.

- So these boats are designed for surfing, and by that I mean somebody will get on a small surfboard, and right off the back of the boat, they surf on the big wave that's produced.

I have never tried surfing myself.

I would love to try it, actually.

As an older person, that one of the advantages of the sport is that it's done at a slower speed.

- [Bret] At first glance, the crafts used for surfing may look rather ordinary.

- Wake boats are really similar to typical recreational boats, but there are some very important distinguishing features.

The first is that they can take water on board.

They have ballast tanks that the operator can throw a switch, and these tanks fill up with water, and they actually kind of double the weight of the boat.

So a boat that might weigh 3 or 4,000 pounds all of a sudden weighs, 8, 9, or 10,000 pounds.

And that makes a big difference in how much water it displaces.

And because it is so heavy, it needs a big engine.

So the motor on board, these can range from 300 to 600 horsepower, which is far greater than boats.

At least like when I grew up, we were happy to have 85 horsepower in a boat to ski behind.

These boats are big and powerful.

- There's also things called surf tabs, which are little tabs on the back of the boat that can be deployed that help shape the wave and make it so it's a little smoother so that you can ride on it on the wave.

And then there's also things called wedges or hydrofoils, and those are on the back of the boat and can also be deployed to help pull that stern into the water more to create that surfable wave.

And the key factor about these boats is the speed at which they're moving.

So we call it the mode of operation, and those boats are going generally at two different modes of operation.

- If you've been on a boat, you've water-skied or you've tubed, the boat is hydroplaning.

It's going fast enough where lift forces are generated, much like an airplane wing, and the boat rides up on top of the water and sits up there, with very little contact between the water and the boat.

Another condition is if you're just going slowly, you're trolling or you're pulling away from your dock, we call that displacement.

The hull is actually supported by buoyancy forces holding the boat up.

- But then you have this mode of operation that wake boats are in during surfing, which is called semi-displacement mode.

And that's that transition period between slow displacement mode to fast planing mode, and it's this plowing mode and that speed is what's also, in addition to the hull and the weight and technology, it's that speed that is really helping to create these big waves.

- [Bret] As surf waves become more common on the lakes of the Upper Midwest, interest in the boats producing them has grown.

- We actually started getting a lot of phone calls and emails kind of around the 2019 timeframe, asking if we're studying or know anybody that's studying the issue of wake boats.

- And a lot of the questions we were getting asked is, is there any data out there about these boats, the size of waves that they're creating?

There was not much data out there in the scientific literature.

- So there was a real gap there.

And as University of Minnesota, that's our role.

We're a land-grant research institution.

We see our role as doing research that impacts Minnesota or the Upper Midwest.

And so we kind of threw our hat in the ring and got to work.

- [Bret] Phase one of the study examined a noticeable boat-created wave.

- I'm sure we're all familiar with that V-shaped wave that comes off the back of a boat.

Those are the waves that you see when you're standing on shore and waves kind of come crashing into the shoreline.

That's called a divergent wave, or the divergent waves.

How we tested that in the field was we had sensors at various depths and distances from shore, and then we would run boats at also certain distances, and we would measure those waves coming into shore past the sensors.

And the sensors were basically measuring wave height.

From wave height, you can do some calculations and also get wave energy and wave power for the entire wave train.

So we tested four different boats.

Two of them were wake boats, and then we tested two additional boats that would be non-wake-surf boats.

Again, typical boats that have been around for decades.

- [Bret] Phase one compared boats under typical operating conditions at a distance of 100 feet from the boat and found that the wake-surf boats produced maximum wave heights that were two to three times larger, total wave energies that were three to nine times larger, and maximum wave powers that were 6 to 12 times larger than the non-wake-surf boats.

- So basically the same time we published phase one, we were already starting phase two.

- [Bret] The second phase of the study took a more in-depth look at how boats were interacting with lakes.

- We're now looking at what's going on in the water column, so the water column being from the lake bed up to the water surface, so that entire column of water.

And what we were looking at was three additional hydrodynamic phenomena, and that being what's called the propeller wash.

Most boats in operation, they're being pushed by a propeller that's rotating, and off that propeller, you have all this turbulent water and exhaust bubbles, and that's getting pumped down and pushed down into the water column.

Then there is what's called bow and stern waves on a boat that's moving.

As the boat is moving, the bow is pushing water down and forward, and at the same time, the stern is creating what we call a stern wave, where the water is rebounding and moving backwards.

Then you have the third hydrodynamic phenomenon that we looked at, which is called the transverse waves.

And these, if you are sitting in the boat, you're a passenger, and let's say, you're looking out behind the boat, you're gonna see these big rolling waves that almost look like they're moving with the boat.

Those are transverse waves, and these are actually really large circular waves in the water that are following the boat.

(light music) - The findings of this study are really interesting, both for the wake-surf boats and for non-wake-surf boats.

For non-wake-surf boats, we saw that even boats that aren't surfing can be felt by the bottom of the lake, depending on how deep you are.

So even if you're hydroplaning across the lake in your ski boat or your fishing boat, the lake knows you're there.

You're creating velocities, and if you're in too shallow of water, the lake can actually be disrupted.

- [Bret] As part of their phase two study, researchers made operational depth recommendations for both traditional powerboats and wake boats.

- Boats like the ones we tested, when you're on plane, we recommend maintaining 10 feet of water or greater to minimize impacts to the lake bottom.

When you're in that slow displacement mode, so just slow, leisurely cruising around the lake, again, 10 feet of water or greater is what our recommendation is.

For wake boats, when you're in surfing mode, so again, that's slow kind of plowing mode, we recommend 20 feet of water or greater when surfing.

- So some of our data that is most compelling is video data.

We put GoPros down on the bottom of the lake.

And what you see under surfing conditions in too shallow of water, 15 feet, 10 feet, is the lake bottom absolutely erupting, getting blown apart by the velocities that are produced.

(gentle music) And we're actually quite concerned about this in our research group.

We don't exactly know all the impacts of that, but we know that the bottom is completely eroded, suspended in the water column.

We see vegetation flying by the frame of the video, impacts that are very severe.

So you see vegetation pass by that probably took one or two or three years to establish itself, and in one boat pass, it's gone.

What does that mean to our lakes?

It's something that we need to ask ourselves, both the researchers but also the citizens that are operating these boats need to think about what's happening underwater when I use my watercraft.

I'm Minnesotan, so I'm really proud of our lakes.

I think it's one of our big legacies.

Nowhere else in the lower 48 do we have lakes that are so clear, so natural.

And so if we lose that, that's a real problem.

- So for phase one, we did not look at any environmental impacts.

It was simply looking at the wave characteristics.

For phase two, we did collect and start to look at potential environmental impacts, which is that disruption to the lake bottom.

And again, sediment resuspension.

And why that's a concern is because if you have sediment resuspending into the water column, specifically really fine sediments, they can stay in the water column suspended for long periods of time.

- We call that turbidity.

It's how much light can penetrate the water column.

We think about how deep can I see down.

When I look on my dock, can I see the bottom or not?

Or, no, I can only see a couple feet?

- So turbidity can disrupt vegetation growth.

It can make the water warmer because there are particles in that water that can absorb the heat.

And if you have warmer water, you could potentially have decreased dissolved oxygen, which can affect fish, plants, and such.

Another thing is nutrients.

There's a lot of nutrients in our lake bed.

Disturbing that lake bed and potentially releasing those nutrients, you could end up having excessive algal growth or plant growth.

If we think about sight-feeding fish and now we have increased turbidity, these fish might not be able to see as well and feed as well.

There's just a lot of things that are kind of like what-ifs, and we know from the literature that it's a possibility.

- [Bret] The studies become a hot topic to lake users since their release.

As they continue to gather data, researchers hope the study can help Minnesotans determine a path forward regarding their lakes and their boats.

- I hope that our study and our results get taken seriously and can help inform science-based guidance, because the ultimate goal here, I think, from most people that either live on lakes or recreate on lakes or just enjoy Minnesota resources, is let's preserve what we have.

They're a gem.

We have amazing lakes here in Minnesota.

Wake boats and the sport of wake surfing are likely not going anywhere.

They're here to stay, and so we just have to come up with a way to use the resource so that everybody can use it.

(light music) (bright music) - I am next to one of my all-time, I say that about every plant, but this is truly like an incredible plant.

It is a non-native plant.

It was brought over by Puritan colonizers.

Indigenous folks commonly called it "white man's footprint," and that is because not only did they bring over the plantain, but also it grows prolifically in very disturbed ecosystems, compacted soils.

And so really, when you see this plant, love it, because it's actually repairing your soil, creating a healthy ecosystem again wherever you're finding it growing.

And also, it can be used in places if you're trying to prevent erosion.

First, though, I want to talk about how to ID the plantain plant.

And most people think I'm talking about bananas, not that kind of plantain.

So it is in fact the green rosette plant that grows from the ground and eventually will grow to be large, and also its central spike here will continue to grow too.

And so mature plantain plants can get very large.

You can see the leaf here, and you can see it's got very distinct veins in the leaf.

And so that's another telltale sign that this is plantain.

Something cool about it too, utility-wise, let's just say you're just someplace like maybe in a survival situation, you can tear away very gently and peel kind of a string that has been used for emergency suturing stitches.

It's been used as fishing line.

Oh, and also you can make rope if you need to.

So utility-wise, it's also nutritional.

Medicinally, though, is the way I utilize it most.

I will harvest plantain when they're about like this, and then I dry them.

When they're completely dry, I'm gonna crush them up, and then I am going to place them in a carrier oil.

I like to use extra virgin olive oil.

I will soak those dried leaves anywhere from six months on up to two years, depending on how patient I am.

And then very easily, I'm gonna strain that, and then I'm going to put the liquid in a double boiler.

So all of the medicine has then been transferred from the dried leaf right into that carrier oil as it's soaked.

So again, strain it, dump it in a double boiler.

You're going to use, let's just say, you take it in a cup measurement.

So then you're going to pour that liquid in a cup, and then you're going to take beeswax.

And I incorporate probably two to three tablespoons of the beeswax crumbles into that solution, and then I melt the beeswax down.

As soon as it's melted, give everything a good stir, and then you can transfer that into a jar.

So I make a salve or a balm.

That salve or that balm is like a miracle in a jar.

I can have the worst sunburn.

After coming off of the river, I will apply plantain, and by morning, that sunburn is gone.

One of the coolest things, though, say you don't have the balm or salve handy.

Let's just say I'm sitting here right now, I get stung by a bee.

It kind of hurts, right?

And you get the little throbbing, stinging sensation.

Take a plantain leaf, chew it up, make like a poultice, and slap it right on that sting.

It will take care of that sting.

So plantain is one of my absolute go-to favorite plants.

(light music) (light music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources; by Mark & Margaret Yackel-Juleen, on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org; and by the Friends of "Prairie Sportsman."

To become a friend of "Prairie Sportsman," visit pioneer.org/prairiesportsman.

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