time. Changing water levels and changing seasons will present visitors with varying experiences. “We want everyone to understand that this is a science project as much as a recreation place,” states Spraggins. “The goal is to make it like a natural floodplain. That means that sometimes there’s mud and sometimes there’s flood.” Jason Beverlin adds that there are many different water levels – some years will be great for fish, bad for birds – some years will be great for birds, bad for fish. “That’s OK,” he says. “That’s the way we want it. We are not doing this for one thing; it’s the biodiversity – the more the merrier.”
The work will continue and issues will continue as well. A large group of scientists came together in January for their yearly meeting at which they pool their knowledge to recreate, as best they can, a habitat formerly created and ruled by non-human nature. Yet there is no doubting that we have, in a way, the rare opportunity to relive the past.
Again this area is attracting international attention and again it is acting as a fish nursery. Fishery experts have located species in habitats that are rapidly disappearing, collected them, and brought them to Emiquon, which is once again a site of fertile propagation. Many of these fish have done well and are being taken back to their original habitats.
And then there is the return of the birds…. In 1916, Jim Paul of Peoria reported, “There were thousands and thousands of ducks on the water. Somebody scared them, and when they took flight, they were so thick they completely shut out the sun . . .” In the Spring of 2011, a survey by waterfowl scientist Chris Hine of the Illinois Natural History Survey counted 101,500 snow geese in the area. Springfield’s State Journal-Register would report on March 7, 2011, in an echo of times long past, “When the snow geese lift off Thompson Lake, there are so many it can be hard to see through them.”
Plus, there is the spontaneous return of the native wetland vegetation such as the cattails and the American lotus. Dr. Wiant calls on me to imagine once again. “My gosh,” he says, “think about the adaptive strategy, about basically knowing your world well enough if you’re a lotus seed lying there, and the tractors are going back and forth over your head for 80 years. And one morning it’s wet and warm, and you say, “Hey, you know what? It’s time to put my party dress on and float to the surface!” Wiant continues: “You don’t have to be in a frontier, in a new part of the globe, you can watch it work right here in your yard. It’s the same awe-inspiring event.”
Jeanne Townsend Handy of Springfield has a background in environmental studies and has been writing about the natural world and environmental issues since 1999. She first wrote about the Emiquon Preserve for Illinois Times in November 2004.
