6/2/2011:
Summer brings thunderstorms to North Dakota and June days can harbor erratic weather. At least once every summer especially powerful thunderheads roll over the plains and prairies. Some storms give the air an eerie greenish tinge before the thunder and the rain arrive. Black clouds give warning to seek shelter.
But out in the open, there is nowhere to hide for humans and for animals, alike. On this date in 1889, the Minneapolis Tribune newspaper printed a special report on a strange and unlikely tale of a Dakota lightning storm ... a report unsubstantiated by any North Dakota source.
Because North Dakota is situated in the heart of the prairie pothole region, it has always been among the greatest producers of waterfowl in the world. Ducks love to nest in the state’s fens and bogs and enjoy the bounty of summer. In its earliest days, Dakota was home to millions of ducks. Mallards, teal, pintails and wood ducks could all be found on this main station of the Central Flyway.
At Washburn, a severe thunderstorm arose on the first day of June, which was not unusual. However, it was strange that, at the height of the storm, “an enormously large flock of ducks was seen coming from the north.” The “sky was black with birds,” a witness supposedly stated, “undoubtedly the largest flock ever seen” in that “section of North Dakota . . . and the number was variously estimated at from five hundred thousand to one million” birds.
The ducks “were terror stricken and flew along wildly, making a great noise.” “Instead of flying high,” continued the witness, “they scurried along close to the ground, and the flapping of their wings provoked a tumult that could be plainly heard above the roar of the thunder.”
As the ducks fled, a lighting bolt crashed with a “vivid flash” accompanied by “a terrific peal of thunder.” At this first strike “hundreds of the birds fell to the ground.” Still the storm grew “in its frightful intensity” and the ducks grew ever more terrorized. A second lightning flash, even “more vivid than the first,” brought “thousands of the fowls . . . heavily to the earth.” Two more strikes reportedly hit the multitude, with the “slaughter even greater” than before. “Swarms of the birds descended rapidly, and lay in heaps on the ground.”
The report claimed that ten thousand ducks had been killed.
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck, History Department, MSU Moorhead.
SOURCES: “Slaughter of Ducks,” Minneapolis Tribune, June 2, 1889, p. 6.
Numbers also recorded in “Dakota Note and Comment,” Grand Forks Herald, June 19, 1889, p. 3.
Gwyn Herman and Laverne Johnson, Habitats of North Dakota: Wetlands (Fargo: N.D. Game and Fish Department; N.D. Center for Distance Education, 2008), p. 2, 12, 15, 16.
“The Central Flyway,” http://central.flyways.us/, accessed on May 19, 1011.