I'm about as PO'd about the "cereal bowls" in the Skagit flats as RA3 is about hatchery practices All those damn things do, besides encouraging all sorts of unsportsmanlike behavior like stashing boxes of shells to get around the shell limit, skybusting, shooting over other peoples decoys, throwing garbage around, and a host of other ills common to locations where game is artificially concentrated, is make the ducks winter up in Skagit County instead of coming down to the Chehalis Valley. And you want to talk about expenses and a waste of state money - maintianting that diked land in farmland and farming it every year is the real waste of money. Wintering habitat for waterfowl is not limiting at all - I myself have 80 acres of it that never got more than 2 dozen mallards on it all winter - and no northerns at all - because they were all up in those Skagit cereal bowls. Damn right, flood those farmed estuaries and force those ducks to spread out a little so we all get a shot at them.

Also, a recent study on the Fraser River delta showed that 90% of the daily caloric intake of juvenile chinook salmon occurred at high tide in saltmarshes, even though the water was only in the marsh 10% of the tide. Saltmarsh is the most critical habitat there is, and it is in the shortest supply in the Skagit of any of the several critical habitats needed for successful production of salmon. And saltmarsh habitat not only grows wild salmon, it grows hatchery salmon too, and can only improve the survival of hatchery fish. I would say that the most important thing that WDFW could do is to get ahold of all the diked saltmarsh it can and blow all the dikes.

And crissake, hunt your ducks in the wild, not in baited fields