The Tennessee River Valley in Alabama is the winter home for thousands of waterfowl that migrate from across the northern U.S. and Canada down through the center of the continent. Careful management has created more wetland areas, and regular planting of food crops such as millets, oats, and wheat has increased food sources for these winter visitors, helping bring their numbers to record highs. Much of this work has been supported by waterfowl hunters through license fees, stamps, and excise taxes on equipment. More than thirty species are found in Alabama and the Tennessee River Valley, including ducks, geese, and the American Coot, a dark gray bird often seen rafting with ducks but actually a member of the rail family. The most familiar goose in the Tennessee Valley is the Canada goose, and many released as juveniles now live there year-round. Mergansers, also called sawbills for the tooth-like serrations of their long thin bills, chase and catch fish underwater; Hooded Mergansers and Red-breasted Mergansers are often seen in large groups, sometimes joined by Common Mergansers. Dabbling ducks, with rounded often flat bills used for filtering seeds, aquatic plants, and other organic materials from fine mud just below the water’s surface, include Northern Shovelers, Mallard, Pintail, Green-winged Teal, and American Widgeon. Diving ducks prefer deeper water where they dive for food and are often seen in mixed flocks including Lesser Scaup, Ring-necked Ducks, Canvasback, and Redhead; divers run across the surface to take flight, while dabblers leap from the water’s surface. At Fort Harker in Stevenson, built by the Union Army in the summer of 1862 to guard the junction of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad and the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, birding can be done from a small deck beside the reservoir. The fort was an earthen redoubt 150 feet square, with walls 14 feet high and an eight-feet-deep dry moat, and although skirmishes and sniper attacks occurred as territory changed hands between Union and Confederate forces, no major fighting took place there.