Odd Ducks

The ducks appear minutes before sunset.

A half-hour ago, there was only the odd duck -- a mallard here, a widgeon there. Flying high and out of range, they had ignored decoys and calls here on the outskirts of O'Fallon, Missouri. Judging by the paucity of shotgun blasts on surrounding land, hunters elsewhere didn't have much luck either.

Now that the hunting has ended -- shooting must stop 30 minutes before the sun goes down -- ducks are everywhere, countless black dots stretching as far as the eye can see against a red-and-purple sky. They have come from nowhere, as if answering a casting call from Alfred Hitchcock. Wheeling in flight, birds by the hundreds drop into flooded cornfields, where they will gorge and rest before continuing their journey south.

"See that?" says Glennon Jamboretz, owner of these fields. "They're landing right where we were."

A half-dozen mallards join decoys placed in a baseball-diamond-size pond less than a pitcher's throw from a blind built into a levee. Jamboretz and his hunting companion, Wayne Freeman, knew that this would probably happen. The weather is just too darn nice, in the mid-50s with not a cloud in the sky. Ducks like to travel at night, especially in conditions like this. "You get colder weather, they get antsy," says Freeman, executive director of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance. "They have to eat -- they need those carbohydrates."

All Jamboretz and Freeman can do is watch. They've seen this many times before, but the sight of so many ducks flying so close is mesmerizing. They can't keep their eyes off the sky. "It's a wonderful sight," Freeman says. "I wish they would have come in twenty minutes earlier."

The day isn't a total loss. In the space of two hours, Freeman and Jamboretz have seen marsh hawks circling in search of prey. Killdeer have flown past their blind so close you can identify them by the shapes of their beaks. They have watched a flock of red-winged blackbirds, hundreds of them, rise as one a stone's throw away. Hidden by cornstalks, they had been invisible.

You need connections to see this. Like his neighbors, Jamboretz has posted his 86 acres with "No Trespassing" signs. If you can find a willing landowner, permission to hunt on such a place for one 60-day season can cost $6,000. Although Jamboretz calls his land Mallard Farm, this is a duck club. Jamboretz and owners of other nearby duck clubs let someone else plant, harvest and sell the crops. Their return is perhaps the best hunting land in the state -- and they want to keep it that way.

Alarmed by encroaching development, Jamboretz and other duck-club owners, who include some of the region's richest and most prominent residents, have formed the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance. They're against raising levees. They're asking landowners to either donate land or put property in trust to protect it from development. They warn of catastrophe if development continues on land that was under water nine years ago. They're asking for millions of public dollars, but what's good for ducks, they insist, is good for taxpayers.

In some ways, this is nothing new. Rich folks have long been a cornerstone of conservation in the United States. A dozen years before Theodore Roosevelt created the first national wildlife refuge in 1903, Benjamin Harrison, who was a lawyer before he became president, established the nation's first national forest in Wyoming.

Leaders of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance see themselves as saviors of the floodplain, but for all their money, they know they can't save the earth by themselves. And so they're enlisting the support of environmental groups that had barely heard of these guys two years ago.

In short, the alliance wants to change the face of St. Charles County by creating the state's largest national wildlife refuge area -- and they may just have the juice to make it happen.

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Just two years old, the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance is hardly a fledgling organization.

Board members include Jamboretz, who owns an advertising agency -- his daughter, Kathryn, anchors the nightly news on KPLR-TV (Channel 11). The biggest name is Adolphus Busch IV, heir to a beer fortune. His family is known for its commitment to conservation -- witness the August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area near Weldon Spring, purchased by the state in 1947 with a $70,000 donation from the widow of the late brewery baron.

But some alliance leaders seem out of place in an environmental group.

Garth Fort, for example, is a former executive at Monsanto and its spin-off company Solutia. While at Monsanto, Fort was chairman of the Chemical Manufacturers Association's State Affairs Committee, which tracked and fought legislation deemed hostile to the interests of such companies as Dow Chemical, Du Pont and Exxon.

Don Musick III, a developer who's made a fortune putting up shopping centers and office buildings, acknowledges that he's not your typical environmentalist. He's building a $180 million office-and-retail complex at the intersection of Hanley and Eager roads.

Musick confesses past sins, admitting that he's built in Earth City and other areas on floodplains -- sometimes as a contractor, sometimes as lead developer. The last time was about ten years ago, he says, and it won't happen again.

"I'm not going to do that anymore," he says. "I think it's irresponsible. I now understand what can happen ... in even some of the best-protected floodplain areas of St. Louis County and St. Charles County. I think it's reckless. I'm not just stopping my own development, I'm stopping my construction company and my painting company from getting any business out in those areas."

Musick owns about 330 acres of the St. Charles County floodplain with several partners, including Adolphus Busch IV, a friend and occasional business partner in such ventures as MetaPhore Pharmaceuticals, an Overland-based drug company.

All told, duck clubs consume about 25,000 acres of St. Charles County floodplain, nearly half of the proposed wildlife refuge. Musick can't recall what he paid when he bought into his first club back in 1985 -- he guesses something less than $1,000 per acre. Now, an acre in the same area goes for between $3,000 and $4,000, even though it's prone to flooding.

Land elsewhere in the floodplain is worth much more.

Thanks to the completion of Highway 370 in 1996, development near the duck clubs has skyrocketed. Municipalities in the state's fastest-growing county see dollar signs.

St. Peters has been the most ambitious. By an overwhelming margin, city voters two years ago approved a $35 million bond issue to purchase 1,600 acres and build a levee to protect it from the Mississippi River, which inundated the property nine years ago. Exactly what will be built once the levee goes up hasn't been decided. Mayor Tom Brown, who did not return phone calls, has talked about everything from warehouses to office buildings to, at one point earlier this year, a new stadium for the St. Louis Cardinals.

In the city of St. Charles, economic-development director Nadine Boon raves about the Fountain Lakes Commerce Center, a 472-acre business park, and Elm Point Business Park, which is nearly 300 acres. Land has been elevated by as much as eight feet through a plan of scooping out artificial lakes and dumping the dirt onto the floodplain. Since 1995, the business parks have attracted such companies as Coca-Cola, Atlas Van Lines and Cardinal Health Care.

In Fountain Lakes alone, more than two million square feet of construction has absorbed 130 acres since the 1993 flood. At full build-out, Fountain Lakes will provide 4,000 jobs, Boon predicts, and bring $300 million in private investment into the city.

It's all perfectly safe, Boon insists, even though the sites were flooded nine years ago. Property in Elm Point has been elevated above the 100-year-flood level -- the threshold for development as established by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- and Fountain Lakes is set above the 500-year-flood level. Even a big flood like the one in 1993 isn't a concern. "It would be high and dry," she says.

Elm Point and Fountain Lakes could be full in five years, and when that happens, the city would likely gobble up adjacent floodplain. Aside from a few isolated parcels of twenty-or-so acres, there aren't any other vacant spots. "The 370 corridor is St. Charles' only space for business parks of any size," Boon says.

But Boon may never see the corridor developed.

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Adolphus Busch IV and his buddies didn't do anything when malls sprang up in St. Louis County on land that was a lake in 1993. They didn't make a peep when Highway 370 was built, bringing easy access to undeveloped floodplains in the state's fastest-growing county.

Now, they warn of dire consequences if another flood comes.

"When they put 370 in, we thought, 'Well, they're putting a road there -- it's not a levee,'" Busch says. "What really set us off was the development off of 370. This one hit home. You know so many people who own so much land there."

This leaves the alliance open to charges of self-interest.