Quivira National Wildlife Refuge

Quivira is a salt marsh in the middle of the continent. Salty groundwater rises toward the surface here through springs and seeps and into Rattlesnake Creek, carrying halite and anhydrite out of the shallow Cedar Hills Sandstone and the Salt Plain Formation. Little Salt Marsh runs about 2,500 parts per million of chloride and Big Salt Marsh between 5,000 and 10,000, against 250 for drinking water and 19,000 for seawater.

Waterfowl have used the two marshes as long as anyone knows, and shortly after 1900 commercial hunters were sending wagonloads of ducks and geese to Kansas City restaurants. The refuge was approved in May 1955 as the Great Salt Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, renamed Quivira in 1958 after the Spanish name for the region, and completed at 22,135 acres in 1998. It is critical habitat for the endangered whooping crane, which stops mainly in late October and November and again in March and April; counts of 40 or more at once have been logged around Big Salt Marsh.

Rattlesnake Creek depends on groundwater that upstream irrigation wells also pump. The refuge holds a 1957 state water right for more than 14,000 acre-feet a year, senior to many of the farms. A 2016 state analysis found that upstream pumping regularly and significantly impaired it, and regulators found the refuge short of its water in two of every three years from 2008 to 2021. From the visitor center at the south end, an auto-tour road circles Big Salt Marsh, and a tower overlooks Little Salt Marsh.