(triumphant music starts) (triumphant music continues) (triumphant music ends) - It's been called one of the Midwest most remarkable ecological success stories.

The Nature Conservancy's Emiquon Preserve in Fulton County turns 25 years old.

And tonight, we're looking at the history of the floodplain wetland restoration project.

We're joined by Randy Smith, The Nature Conservancy's Illinois River Project Director, and Maria Lemke, TNC's Director of Conservation Science.

Good evening, thanks for coming, appreciate it.

- Thank you.

- Absolutely.

- Why don't you start out a little bit by telling us what is The Nature Conservancy?

- Yeah.

So The Nature Conservancy is a global, not-for-profit organization.

We're founded in 1951.

We've grown pretty tremendously since then.

I think we work in 81 countries now, have about 6,000 employees around the world, over a million supporters.

And, you know, the goal is to, you know, preserve natural habitats and to help folks, you know, all around the world with natural resources and conservation issues.

- Well, talking about those projects, Emiquon is a big one.

Let's talk about what is the Emiquon project?

- Yeah.

So, Emiquon is this area along the Illinois River.

It's in Fulton County, so just about 40 miles south of Peoria.

So in the late 1800s or early 1900s, it was this just tremendously diverse, tremendously ecologically productive area in a really ecologically productive stretch of the Illinois River, which was one of the most ecologically diverse and productive rivers in the United States.

This was kind of the best of the best.

So it was this area of forests and wetlands and prairies that just supported a ton of different life, fish and wildlife and people.

People have occupied that place for 600 generations.

And through time, it changed.

The owners of the property decided that it was more productive as farmland.

They built a levee around it, drained the wetlands, and farmed it intensively for about 80 years.

- And then at what point do you look at that and say, "Okay, it was great for farmland, but maybe we need to revert back to what it was originally?"

- Yeah.

- You want to take that one, Maria?

- Sure, I'll take a stab at it.

So, The Nature Conservancy had been looking at the Illinois River system itself.

And, you know, historically, like Randy said, the river is really unique in that it's kind of a small river, but a really big floodplain, which means that when the river floods in the spring, historically, we'll just be able to spread out into these backwater areas and create wetlands and sloughs and backwater lakes.

And about 50% of that was leveed off in the 1920s.

And so, it kind of constricted the river.

Well, the conservancy was looking for places to kind of restore some of these backwater areas.

And the site at Emiquon was a kind of ideal in that it had, most of it was a single landowner, so it was easier to work with kind of acquiring that property.

And it kind of just came available, as I understand, and the conservancy acquired it in 2000, prior to my tenure there.

- So, what is it about floodplains?

Why are they important?

Why do we want one in Emiquon?

Is that something that, you know, is it, we want to get back to nature, or we want more animals and vegetation there?

What is it that we're looking at?

- Sure, kind of all of the above.

So, around the world, really, these large river systems are really productive.

So productive in terms of both primary production, so like, you know, the plankton and things like that, but also then just, you know, fish populations and supporting wildlife and all of that.

A lot of that is because of the exchange of nutrients and species between the river itself and its floodplain.

So the river can get out in the floodplain, provide that area along the river, with all of the things that the river is carrying.

But then as water recedes back into the main river channel, it brings all of those good things with it, that have spread out on the floodplain, and brings nutrients, and brings animals, and brings, you know, invertebrates and plankton, and all of those things back into the river channel, that then the things living directly in the river are relying on as well.

And so, the Illinois was a tremendous example of that.

It was this relatively small stream with this really large floodplain because of its geologic history.

And so, a lot of that was lost, and that was contributing to the overall degradation of the river over, you know, decades or even centuries.

- So how has it changed now 25 years after the purchase?

How has it improved the health of the area and the river health?

- I'll start.

- Sure.

- So, in 2016, The Nature Conservancy completed a water control structure that we connected the backwater lake, the backwater area of Emiquon to the Illinois River, but it's a managed connection.

Because of the changes in the river system, you can't just take the levee out.

There's different water management issues in the river, which really prevents you from just removing the levee.

A lot has changed in 80 years.

And so, so what we are doing is we are looking at what we can let water in from the river and we can let water out from Emiquon into the river.

And one of the things we were looking at is, what is leaving Emiquon and entering the river?

Because historically, like Randy said, there was this exchange between the river and the floodplain, and that's why it was such a healthy system and a diverse system.

So one of the things we're looking at is, when we let water out of Emiquon, what is it contributing back to the river in terms of algae and zooplankton, which are little-bitty critters which fish all feed on.

So it's very important.

There's not a lot of them in the river, and a lot of these backwater areas are really productive.

So, that's one of things we're measuring.

But in general, in the bigger picture, we see hundreds of thousands of migratory birds come through this system in a season.

It's not just Emiquon, if we look at the surrounding U.S.

Fish and Wildlife adjacent lands, it's about 14,000 acres of conservation land.

So it really is supportive of those migratory birds, of riverine fish that can come in and out of the system.

What am I missing, Randy?

(chuckles) - Yeah.

It's just kind of a combination of everything.

And the habitat types that are at Emiquon, historically, were relatively common in many of these backwater areas, up and down the Illinois River.

But because of these various forces that have degraded the system, most of those habitat types, or in a lot of places, those habitat types were lost.

So these are things like, simply things like cattails that we think of as kind of like an iconic wetland species.

There's not a lot of cattail growing in many of these existing backwater lakes along the river.

And other things like, a term we use is submersed aquatic vegetation.

So these are the plants that grow, they're rooted in the bottom of the wetland and they grow actually in the water and mostly stay underwater.

They might float on the surface, or at times have a little, their flower might poke above the surface of the water, but primarily underwater.

Most places along the river, especially most places that have some degree of connection to that main river channel, that vegetation type and that entire habitat type has been lost.

So we see a major reduction in the species that rely on that, both fish and wildlife.

And so, we are trying to manage for a very diverse system at Emiquon.

A lot of the wetlands along the river, the existing wetlands have kind of a singular focus, whether that's fish, ducks is a really common one.

We're kind of somewhere in the middle, trying to manage for a whole host of things and provide all of these different types of habitat that have kind of been lost through time.

- I want to talk about the different kind of species in terms of birds is.

Could you say Emiquon is kind of a pit stop on their migratory path?

Is that a good way to describe it?

- Most definitely.

- Yeah.

- Go ahead.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So, I think we're approaching or just add about 300 species that have been identified and documented at Emiquon.

So that's a pretty big deal for a spot in the Midwest.

So both in terms of diversity and numbers, it's a great spot.

We have a really interesting diversity of habitats.

So of course, we focus on our aquatic habitats, so those, you know, those cattails and that submersed aquatic vegetation.

And there are a lot of species, secretive marsh birds and other things that are, that use Emiquon during migration, and also breed at Emiquon.

That's pretty rare, certainly in Central Illinois, and even rare for all of Illinois.

But then we have some great terrestrial habitat as well.

We've got about 600 acres of prairie and approaching 1,000 acres of woodlands.

So those are habitat types we don't really talk about a whole lot.

When we talk about Emiquon, we really think about the wetlands, and those areas are relatively high-quality and support of a lot of interesting birds as well.

- [Mark] Typically, what are some of the birds that use that spot that people might recognize?

- Yeah.

That might recognize?

So that's kind of one of those things.

Like we've got some really neat stuff that maybe isn't everywhere else.

So some things that are maybe more common would be like, like snow geese.

We have really large numbers of snow geese during spring migration.

Our peak count is right at a million birds, estimated.

Lots of different species of waterfowl and all kinds of other water birds.

So things like grebes.

We usually get loons during migration.

Pelicans and herons and egrets.

We've got some of those secretive marsh birds that I mentioned.

So there's least bitterns and American bitterns, which are these birds that have really cool calls but you rarely see.

And then black-crowned night herons, we have, we believe, the second biggest black-crowned night heron breeding colony in the state.

And so you see them flying around a lot too, and they are a state threatened or endangered species.

- [Mark] I was just going to ask, do you have any endangered species that make use of Emiquon?

- Yeah, absolutely.

A lot of those secretive marsh birds are very rare in Illinois, and we have some of the larger patches of habitat of their preferred habitat types.

And so they do make use of the site.

- I'll add in the prairie too, if you drive past the prairie even today, you know, this morning, I saw indigo bunting and goldfinch, and we saw a bobwhite quail running across the road, and you can hear them calling out there.

So if you like to watch birds or wildlife, it's a great place, both at the wetland site and driving past the prairie.

- What kind of animals could we find in the prairie besides birds?

- Oh, we'll see lots of deer.

We have an abundance of rabbits this year, (chuckles) everywhere.

What else do we see?

We've seen, I don't know, lots of different birds.

- Yeah, during migration.

- Snakes.

- Yeah.

- Turtles.

- Yep, snakes and turtles.

- The birds are the big ones.

- I think so.

- Probably, the ones you'll see more likely.

I mean, you know, out in the wild too we have river otter and muskrat and beaver, and you might see those.

But what you're going to notice right off the bat are the great blue heron and the egrets and the really colorful birds flying around the prairie.

- Is there any way of knowing, you know, the species that took advantage of that area before it was transitioned into farming and the species that enjoy it now?

Is there any way to tell is it the same kind of species or as many?

What do you know about that?

- So one of the really neat things about this stretch of the river is that it is one of the longest studied areas in the entire United States.

So, Stephen A. Forbes, who is one of these kind of godfathers of conservation research, started working in the area in like the late 1800s.

And so Forbes Biological Station, which is part of the Illinois Natural History Survey University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is located just across the river from us in Havana, Illinois.

They have a fisheries research station there too, Illinois River Biological Station.

We partner very closely with their scientists.

So those folks associated with those entities have been studying the ecology of this area, you know, for over 100 years, have documented these things, have documented changes from, you know, the early 1900s, or beyond, all the way up through today.

We're still doing a ton of that monitoring at Emiquon, as well as a lot of the surrounding areas.

So that is one of the really neat things.

Because Emiquon has those habitat types that were kind of what we would consider what was historically here, you know, prior to the river's degradation and whatnot, our groups of species, both fish and wildlife, more closely resemble what we think was probably here at the turn of the century compared to what we see at a lot of the surrounding wetlands and other habitats now.

- And I understand from The Nature Conservancy's information that this is one of the most visited preserves that you have in the country.

What do people do when they visit there?

- Well, lots of things.

We have a public use area that has trails and boardwalks and spotting scopes and observation towers.

So we get a lot of traffic through there where you can really just view the wildlife and sit and enjoy the site.

We have fishing, free fishing out there.

There's some waterfowl hunting, that Randy knows much more about than I do.

And I think people just kayaking and canoeing out there.

It's just a beautiful place to really just, you know, get out in nature and get some quiet and see some animals and nice plants.

So, that's kind of what most people do.

I think you could drive past the prairie, like we mentioned earlier too, and stop and look at all the, you know, migratory birds that are flying around that area and just the different plants.

So there's a lot of just, it's more just getting out into nature and just getting some quiet and seeing.

- Sounds pretty serene.

- [Maria] (chuckles) It is.

- It can be.

You know, we're a little bit off the beaten path, but there is a relatively major state highway that runs by.

So I think we get a lot of people that just are like, "Whoa, what's that?"

And then they see that we have some infrastructure that's available for the public, and I think we get a lot of people that just maybe kind of stop by accidentally, especially when there's, you know, a tremendous number of birds, or the wildflowers are in full bloom, or something like that.

But that's maybe a little bit of an outlier amongst The Nature Conservancy's properties.

A lot of our preserves are, you know, we kind of try to keep them maybe out of the public eye a little bit and try to keep them, you know, very much in like a wilderness, pristine condition.

And a conscious decision was made at Emiquon to bring people onto the landscape and try to help people connect with nature at this place.

It's hard to make that connection if you're not experiencing it firsthand.

We can sit here and talk about it all day long, but unless you're, you know, you're out there hearing the sights and the sounds and the smells for that matter, that really seems to make that connection more meaningfully for a lot of folks.

And so we did develop some public infrastructure and things like that to try to bring people in and, you know, and that that's a little bit unique to TNC properties.

- There's also, we've worked with the University of Illinois Springfield, they have a field station right at the site, and we work with them to teach some education.

Like we teach the master naturalist classes out there, and some STEM classes out there, and get people out in the water and collecting bugs, which they think is kind of weird at first, but then you can take them back and look at them under the microscopes in the lab.

It's really fascinating to watch people's perception of the wetland change when they see what's out there.

You can't see it just sitting out there, so there's a lot of that part too.

- It is a neat place to visit.

And a lot of the video that we've been showing you during this interview is from a documentary we did, WTVP did, Nature Returns to Emiquon, that was done a few years ago.

So, lots of good beauty shots in that.

And I'm curious, what is the future of Emiquon?

Is it to keep doing what you're doing?

Is it to grow?

What's the plan?

(Randy chuckles) - Yeah, I mean, on one hand, we want to kind of maintain what we have, right?

So, we never want to lose sight of this tremendous story of ecological restoration, right?

Going from a super high-quality wetland, converting to as intensive of an agricultural landscape as you could, and then back to this wonderful natural place.

We should never lose sight of that.

But going forward, I think we need to think about what kind of influence we can have, what we can demonstrate.

So there's a lot of other wetlands in the Illinois River Valley, in the Mississippi River Valley, you know, throughout the Midwest, throughout the country, throughout the world, that are suffering similar patterns of degradation.

How can we demonstrate some of these management techniques, whether that's water management or vegetation management, wildlife management, fisheries management, whatever that might be?

There's constant stressors on our system, on all of these systems, to move them in a direction maybe you don't want them to move, towards degradation.

We are willing to be the test case for a lot of different techniques to work through some of these challenges.

You know, we kind of joke a lot of the time that zeros are data too.

So if we try something and it doesn't work out perfectly, or doesn't work at all, that's okay.

We would rather be the test case that learns that so that others can learn from what we have found out and apply that at their own sites, rather than a whole bunch of other people having to experience this and then maybe losing faith in the professional management community or the scientific community.

We're willing to try that first, we'll be the guinea pigs.

- I know The Nature Conservancy relies on donations, but what about volunteers?

How important is that to the mission and Emiquon, having folks in the area help out?

- We love volunteers.

I think if anyone's interested in volunteering, I think they can just go to emiquon.org, maybe, or, is that right, the right website?

And inquire about that.

We've talked about developing an Emiquon kind of volunteer database, so when we need, for instance, maybe some trees planted or some prairie work done, we can call up on folks that are interested in that.

So there's a lot to out there.

- We mentioned it is the 25th anniversary of Emiquon and the project, you've got some events coming up to showcase what's going on and invite the public to come onto the property.

Tell us a little bit about what's going on in the next few months.

- Yeah.

So, you know, we are open to the public 365 days a year, from sunrise to sunset, even in the dark during our managed public hunts that we have in the fall.

But we're trying to give folks an opportunity to maybe see some parts of the preserve that are usually close to the public and to spend some time with us, the folks that work there that, you know, have built a career around this or specialize in this sort of stuff.

So we've got some paddling events coming up where folks can come out and either bring their own canoe or kayak or reserve a place in one of our either two-person canoes or we have a large, about 12-person, voyager canoe.

And they'll also hear a lot about the history of the site, the management, you know, and kind of get a running dialogue of what we're looking at and what we're seeing.

We have some different science days coming up.

So learning about our water control structure, that connection to the river, how those things all work together.

And so that's one of the types of science day.

We have another type of science day that's like what Maria talked about, where they're going to get their feet wet in the wetland, collect some samples, take them back to the lab, and look at things under the microscope.

Learn a lot about what's going on under the water.

We have a guided ridge hike, so that's an area that's usually closed up onto the bluff that overlooks the site, learning about the archeological history of the site, which is tremendous.

And a guided birding hike as well with one of our partners with the Illinois Natural History Survey, who is just a spectacular birder, can bird by sight, by sound, and spends a lot of time at the site.

He's also one of our contracted folks that does a lot of monitoring on the site.

Just a walking bird resource, basically.

And we'll go to some other areas that are usually closed as well.

- Very nice.

And Maria, if you had to pick one time of year for people to come out, I guess especially if they want to see birds migrating, when would that be?

- I would say late spring, early summer.

Right now, like I just drove by, like I said, great blue heron and egrets and pelicans, and then all the migratory songbirds are around.

It's just a really beautiful time of year.

The lotus is blooming, and the prairie is blooming.

It's just a really nice time of year.

- We talked a little bit earlier about how things have changed over the last 25 years and, you know, for someone maybe that didn't the before, but have seen the after in the present, how do you judge success?

I mean, what do you point out to them to say, "Hey, this wasn't here before and now we have this," what would you say to them?

- I'll start.

Before we ever turned off the pumps, so this site had to be pumped to stay dry for farming.

Before we ever turned off the pumps, we met with a lot of scientists from around the state and some surrounding states to talk about, a several-year process, on how do you do this, how do you turn a cornfield back into a backwater lake?

And what is it you need to measure to understand if this is successful or not?

And out of that process came a really comprehensive list of attributes for fish, for mussels, for plants, that Randy was talking about earlier, for waterfowl and shorebirds, and different metrics of those animals and plants to understand, to measure, to see how well is this working.

And we've been monitoring most of those working with our partners at the field stations across the river, and others, to monitor a lot of these metrics or these attributes.

And so, we can look out and say, yeah, we've got, you know, 35 or 40 native fish species now that weren't here before.

We've got this many species of plants out here that were not here before.

And this is the condition of the water, and this is how we want it to be.

And this is how the fish are doing.

Like they're healthy or they're not healthy.

So those are some of the things that we monitor out there, the waterfowl numbers, and which waterfowl are nesting out there.

So these are all things we can point out and say, this wasn't here before, and now we can actually give some numbers on this many birds.

Like you're talking about some of the nesting birds earlier that were not there.

We have some of the largest, I think the second largest black-crowned night heron colony in Illinois there, that wasn't there before and they're nesting there.

So, those are some of the things we can point out because we've been really monitoring, getting those numbers since about 2007.

- All right.

Well, congratulations on all your success.

And folks, if you want to find out more about the events going on there, you can go to The Nature Conservancy's website.

Thanks for all the information, appreciate it.

- Thank you.

- Thanks.

- And thanks for watching.

Again, you can watch our documentary, Nature Returns to Emiquon, on the WTVP website.

And you can watch this interview again.

Check us out on Facebook and Instagram.

Have a good night.

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