Bass Ponds Environmental Study Area

True enough. Things aren't what they used to be. In the beginning (of the 20th century) were the bass. Then, the bass were fished out of local Twin Cities lakes. Then (1926) the bass began to be replenished thanks to the efforts of the Izaak Walton League to breed and re-stock the fish from this spot below Cedar Avenue. Then (mid-1950s or so) there succeeded a period of abandonment and woe. Then, thanks to the establishment of the Wildlife Refuge in 1976, an environmental education opportunity was afforded kids and adults, too, to learn how we'd abused the land and the waters and then restored them, and then abused them again, and so it goes. This too must be part of natural succession.

Legend

1. The Izaak Walton League clubhouse has rotted away, and trees have succeeded.
2. A water control structure sluices water from the Minnow Pond to the Hog Back Ridge Marsh and Pond, plus the Little Bass Pond. Once upon a time, brook trout lived in the cool, clear waters above Minnow Pond.
3. Minnow Pond would flood, regularly, and the minnows and fingerlings would go skidding over the rim: wheeeee!
4. Wood Duck Pond is still the scene of annual water level controls. When the level is raised a few inches in the fall, migrating waterfowl feed bottoms up on fallen seeds and acorns.
5. Big Bass Pond was installed in the 1930s by the Works Projects Administration (WPA).
6. At one time, Long Meadow Lake produced carp for a cannery! Yum! In the winter of 1940, duck hunters froze to death out here.
7. Peppery watercress once crew in abundance here.
8. Willows at the start, then cottonwoods. Another woody succession.
9. Little Bass Pond, once known as Musellunge Pond, was where the U of M's Dr. Eddy raised tiger muskies, which, once they ran out of minnows, had the nasty habit of devouring each other!
10. The original Bass Pond: stocked by the state with 250 fingerlings in March, the pond would generate some 235,000 fish by season's end.
11. A.D. 2006, the Bass Ponds are not about the bass, or raising bass, they're about raising hell for the cause of environmental education. Oh eeeee! Bring those school kids down, y'hear! And if they can't hear a thing down here anymore, under the new MSP Intl. Airport north-south runway, you can send 'em upriver to the new US Fish & Wildlife Jordan unit, starting next summer.

This map and information from it were drawn from the U.S. Department of Interior's brochure "Bass Ponds Environmental Study Area," available at the National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center in Bloomington. The content and tone of the brochure are based on a conversation with a former caretaker of the Izaak Walton League ponds, about 1980.