A lot can happen over four decades in a wildlife habitat governed by nature.

Charlie Swank, rural Ellinwood, has seen most of it at Cheyenne Bottoms.

Swank retired from the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks in 2018. As a district wildlife biologist stationed at Cheyenne Bottoms since 1978, he’s left management of the wildlife habitat “in better hands than mine.” He still frequents the pools and traverses the raised roads between the dikes, sometimes more than once a week. 

Most people who visit the Bottoms these days remark that they’ve never seen it so dry.

But, says Swank, in terms of wildlife biology, that’s a good thing. There’s opportunity in the dryness.

Swank and a ride-along notetaker toured the Bottoms this week. As he drove, Swank pointed out features and the changes that have occurred there during his tenure and after. The Bottoms was, indeed, dry. In fact, the only water visible was in two collection points between the pools.

Swank was reassuring. “The water is still there, it’s just not visible,” he said. “There’s still enough water out there to get somebody stuck, if they aren’t sure where to go.” But the lack of surface moisture offers the best chance to get at two of the Bottoms’ biggest natural enemies.

The first is the cattail, which normally appears everywhere in standing water. Cattails are a problem in most every prairie wetland because they alter habitat structure and function, resulting in a decrease in use by wildlife.

But far worse than that, he said, is the phragmites (pronounced frag-MY-teez). “Don’t ask me to spell it, because you’ll only get four letters from me,” he said.

A persistent enemy

Phragmites is the genus of four species of large perennial reed grasses found in wetlands all around the world. Their basic mission is to crowd out more useful vegetations and rob fish and other plants of food and space. Their root structure is such that they resist attempts to spray, cut or burn them out. Their plant structure even sucks water out of a pool and releases it into the air.

There are native and non-native varieties. The non-native kind “is a real booger,” Swank said. “The worst part is, they’ve been here a while, and nobody is really sure how they got here,” he said, postulating that the first growth could have arrived as a feature of someone’s boat camouflage, while they were duck hunting long ago.

While the Bottoms is dry, though, “that would be the best time to get the equipment in and clear out as much as they can,” he said. “It won’t stop ‘em, but it will sure slow ‘em down.”

Beginnings

Charles Arthur Swank wasn’t always a phragmites warrior. His family, in Stillwater, Okla., where he was born, have been attorneys for generations. His father Elmer was an attorney and uncle A.R. was a judge.

“My family is mostly attorneys. I guess everybody in Stillwater was expecting me to go to law school, but it didn’t happen that way. It was pretty early on, somebody gave me a bird book as a kid and I was pretty taken by it,” he said. 

“I went to Oklahoma State and took wildlife biology and graduated in 1971 with a degree in wildlife management. It was really hard to get a job in that field back then. I didn’t get anything but part-time and summertime jobs until 1974. Kansas had a big hiring deal they did, called SASNAK (Surging Ahead for Skippers, Nimrods and Anglers of Kansas).”

The program was launched in 1973, with the aim to substantially enhance the department’s biologist staff and increase the statewide sportfish catch by 50 percent, as well as doubling upland gamebird harvest on public lands.

“They had people coming in from all over the country,” he said. The competition was pretty stiff; he didn’t get a job right away. 

He had signed up to work on a master’s degree in New Mexico, when he got a call from the Pratt office wanting to know if he was still interested in a job. He learned that there was an area manager’s job in Council Grove.

“I’d never been to Council Grove in my life; being from Oklahoma, I didn’t really know where it was. Without going to check it out or anything, I just said I’ll take it,” he said.

When he checked in at the Pratt office, “one of the guys there handed me a typewriter and a bunch of paper, forms and stuff and turned me loose. That was it.”

It turned out to be “a fine spot.” He teamed up with a fisheries biologist there, who turned out to be Troy Schroeder from Albert in Barton County. Shroeder took Swank under his wing.

“It was a great place,” he said. He met and married his wife Deanna and there they stayed until the job at Cheyenne Bottoms opened up.

“I was really into duck hunting back then,” he said. “I asked Troy what it was like and he said that it was one of the biggest inland marshes, so I applied and got the job.”

Back then, the district biologist supervised the Bottoms. The job also encompassed 14 counties with public lands.

“They finally cut it back to nine,” he said. Stan Wood was area manager. “I didn’t manage the Bottoms, he did,” Swank asserted. Only two other area managers have headed the Bottoms since that time; Karl Grover and current manager Jason Wagner.

In the private sector

After the rearrangement, Swank began working more hands-on with landowners in the nine counties he served. He traveled to the far northwest corner of Kansas to the Oklahoma line, working alongside Natural Resources Conservation Service personnel.

“We always had something to do,” he said. “Some of it was real neat stuff.”

Swank made three trips to Wyoming to bring back antelope in the hopes of establishing populations here. “That failed miserably,” he said. “There might be two left in Comanche County there somewhere.”

One thing that did work was trapping and transplanting turkeys, he said. One of the biggest Rio Grande turkey populations was around the Oklahoma line, so Swank would go and set up nets then turn the captured bird loose in the western half of the state. “They were successful,” he said.

Swank is also proud of the rows of trees he’s helped plant in shelter belts around the state, with some around the Bottoms. “They’re pretty big now,” he said. “They’re getting old.”

Back at the Bottoms

At home, he was stationed in the block building that has since been surrounded by other structures at the Bottoms. “It started out as basically a bunch of guys stuffed in a closet,” he said. “I can remember when the winter snow would come, I would be brushing snowdrifts off of my desk.” Other times, he’d catch mice eating his typewriter ribbon.

Heading into the Bottoms proper on a recent tour, Swank explained the various structures, especially those that manage the flow of water in and out of the pools.

“There aren’t any wells here; the water comes in from different streams and rivers,” he said. Historically, it was the streams and rivers, such as historic Blood Creek and the Wet Walnut River, where the water came from. 

“There have always been times when it would go dry,” he said. “The center pools held the most water and they would then feed the other pools around the outside.

“There have been a lot of changes out here,” he said. “There has been a lot of work done that I would say would be almost too expensive to do nowadays.”

Arriving at the scenic overlook, a panorama stretches across the horizon.

“It’s a shame that a lot of people that live here never have been out to the Bottoms,” Swank noted as he viewed the marshland vista. “It’s really something to see, even like this.”

Occasional visitor

Swank still makes periodic trips to the Bottoms just “to look things over,” he said. He and his wife have a country home close, just south of Ellinwood, where his son Tanner graduated from high school.

Tanner also studied at OSU, but not the law. He studied wildlife management like his dad, and now practices wildlife biology in Woodward, Okla. He is also an accomplished wildlife artist, and his prints are finding their way into Barton County homes. “He can draw, he’s the artist,” his father said. “I’d have trouble drawing a stick figure.”

Heading back to town, Swank had a final observation. “You know, I’d probably still be working, if it wasn’t for computers,” he said. “I was a typewriter and paper guy. I just couldn’t get the hang of how to work with the things they would send to me on the screen.

“It was a fun run, 44 years,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”

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