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- Hello.

Welcome to Illinois stories.

I'm Mark McDonald at the Emiquon Preserve preserved between Havana and Lewiston along the Illinois river.

You just got a look at some of the wetlands here that they're trying to preserve.

The Nature Conservancy recently celebrated its 20th anniversary of owning this property.

We're gonna take a tour with them and find out more about it.

First, let's go inside and take a look at an aerial.

Doug Blodgett, the nature Conservancy has been out here north of Havana across the river for, oh, since I guess about 2007.

Is that about right?

- Well, we actually started buying property here in 1996, working with Fish and Wildlife Service.

We made this biggest purchase in 2000.

From 2001 to 2007 or 2006 over that six year period.

We did the planning for the restoration and then we actually started the restoration in 2007.

- So you recently celebrated your 20th anniversary out here?

- Yes.

- Okay.

All right.

The whole point was, I think was this was farmland that would flood intermittently and it had not been a wetland in a long time because farmers kept pumping the water back into the river so they could farm it.

Right?

- Exactly.

- The Nature Conservancy comes along and wants to return it to its natural wetland state.

And that's what it was all about, I guess.

- Yeah, this has a phenomenal legacy.

The Illinois Natural History Survey established the first inland river laboratory to study the ecology of freshwater systems in the late 1800s right adjacent to this on the river here.

So here's the Illinois River and they had a field station here where they had boats and they would go up and down the river and they would also come into Thompson Lake and Flag Lake.

So we have a really good idea what was here a century and a half ago when this was natural.

And this was one of the most phenomenal backwater areas along the river.

It was renowned for fishing, commercial fishing, recreational fishing, waterfowl hunting, again, recreational, but also commercial fishing and hunting, excuse me, commercial hunting as well.

So really renowned ha a good history.

We knew what was going on, even better, just around the edge of the bluff here, we have Dickson Mounds State Museum, and the museum has been studying the archeology of this site since the 1930s, 1940s.

And so not only do we know what this was in the late 1800s but they have records, archeological sites, going back 12,000 years.

So we know the plants and animals that were here when the native Americans were here for 12,000 years.

And they were here for the same reason that we're here, the phenomenal biological diversity and the abundance.

They got everything they needed from these backwater lakes.

- Now I'm gonna set the stage here a little bit.

Down here on the cross, the river would be about where Havana is.

Up here, like you said, is where Dickson Mounds Museum is.

- [Doug] Right.

- Okay.

So, and this is the Illinois River.

So this entire piece of property here that we're looking at that looks to be highlighted, that's the Nature Conservancy property called Emiquon, right?

- Yeah.

So we own what's called the Emiquon Preserve, which is mostly this highlighted area with the exception of this area.

And this area belongs to the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

We did own this property, most of this property, and down here a little bit, but we sold it to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

- Okay.

So after 20 years, we're gonna get a view today of what's happened.

How all this has changed.

And you're gonna take us on a little tour, right?

So for the next 30 minutes, we get to see what you've been doing.

- Sure, sure.

We're gonna start at the office and go down the highway and get on the levee.

Go out here to the water control structure, go around the levee.

We'll see some tree plantings.

We'll see the response of the wetland to adding water.

Then in the end, we'll come up here on top of the bluff, which is a phenomenal archeological site.

We'll get a whole view of the valley.

- Perfect.

Thank you.

Well, Doug, we're at the levee at the river now.

And we were talking about this water control structure that the Nature Conservancy had built.

We're standing on that structure.

This used to be where the pumps were when this was farming ground, that the farmers would pump the water out of where Thompson Lake is now.

But you've replaced it with this.

What's the advantage of this?

- Yeah.

So when this was in agriculture, it was all ditched and drained, right?

And all the water came here and they had electric pumps.

Early on, they had coal fired generators that ran electric pumps, and then they had diesel pumps.

And then in the end they had electric pumps that pumped the water out so that this could be farm.

And because of the ditching structure, this was a good location for us to put in what we call a water control structure and our water control structure functions in two ways.

That we have two culverts that go, they're concrete culverts that go through the levee into the river.

And those culverts are seven feet tall, eight feet wide.

And they allow us to gravity flow water into Emiquon or out of Emiquon.

With everything the water carries, fish, plankton and so on.

The river doesn't get as low as it used to.

So we can't drain Emiquon to the levels that it drained historically.

So over there in the distance, we also have a couple pumps.

We gravity flow water out during the growing season so that the plants can grow on these moist soil areas.

We get it down as low as the river will allow us to gravity flow.

That's very cheap.

Then we turn on the pumps and we can pull it down a little bit further with the pumps.

- [Mark] When the river's up, does that cause a problem because you really don't have anywhere to go with it.

Do you, when the river's up?

Can you still pump it out?

- Oh yeah.

We can still pump out.

The pumps work.

You'll see on the other side, they dump high into the river.

And even if the river's over the exhaust, they still pump.

Just not as efficiently.

- You have some screens here too.

And I'm wondering what, what are these used for?

- Yeah.

So the main use of these screens is to keep fish we don't want coming into Emiquon from coming into Emiquon when we're gravity flowing.

So we draw the water down.

We grow a bunch of plants with a lot of seeds.

And then in the fall, during the fall migration and for the spring migration of waterfowl, we like to have that flooded.

An easy way to do that is to get water from the river.

But we have fish in the river that we don't want in here, non-native fish things like big head carp, silver carp, grass carp.

And so we monitor the fish in the river and know how big they are in the fall.

And then we can put screens in that are finer than the fish to keep those fish we don't want from coming in.

- [Mark] Gotcha.

- [Doug] And if the fish are so small they can get through the screens, then we shut the water off.

We don't bring it in with those fish we don't want.

- Let's go up, walk over the levee and see the other side.

We'll also see the river from there, I think?

- [Doug] Sure.

Certainly.

- Well, Doug, that's a pretty steep climb.

That levee felt like it was about 20 feet straight up.

That keeps the river out.

- Yeah.

They started building that levee in 1919.

And again, the idea was to isolate this from the river, use pumps to dry it down and put it in agriculture, phenomenally productive flood plain lands are if you can keep the water off of 'em.

- And I said that we were gonna get a chance to look at the river.

I mean, we're right on the main channel of the Illinois River right here.

Aren't we?

- Yep.

Just a hundred yards out there to the main channel.

We may see a barge coming by.

Now the other side, not much of a structure, because naturally the river fluctuated 12 feet, maybe 15, 17 feet a year.

Now it's more like 25 feet in a big year.

And so on that side, we're trying to recreate that natural fluctuation.

So we want the water levels to change seasonally.

And we want them to change year to year because that keeps this wetland in the healthiest state and the most diverse.

So over there not much fluctuation.

Now we only allow nine and a half feet at the very most.

So that structure isn't very big, not very tall.

Over here, the river is what it is.

We get whatever the river does.

So this side it's very tall, the structure.

- This structure, there wasn't anything for you to go by on this.

You had to develop, engineer this thing, sort of invent it, didn't you?

- Yeah.

Usually these types of structure are built primarily and only for controlling water levels.

We also wanted this to control the movement of organisms.

So fishes, especially, macro invertebrates, things like that.

We also wanted to do great science here.

So we had to design for a structure that the core said, here's the type of thing you could use for managing water.

And then we got scientists in our organization and some of our partner organizations like the Natural History Survey to help us think about what features we need to put in so that we can do great science here and really understand better the connection between rivers and their flood plains.

The Illinois River, you know, was the most productive muscle stream per mile in north America in the early 1900s.

It was renowned for its waterfowl hunting for both recreational and commercial markets.

And it was the most productive inland commercial fishery in north America.

It had almost nothing to do with the river and everything to do with the flood plains, with the backwater areas.

You can see it.

The water's very turbulent when the river's flowing in flood stage and at other times too.

And so there's not much sunlight penetrating down to the bottom.

You don't get much growth.

If you look at Emiquon, our water is clear.

It's not as deep and it's managed so it doesn't go up and down unnaturally.

It does go up and down seasonally and from year to year, but it doesn't go up and down every day.

And so you get plants growing out here and it's that primary productivity that really fed the river.

That diversity of habitats provides what many, many species of fish and birds and amphibians and reptiles.

It provides a lot of different habitats for them.

Whereas when you look over here, it's kind of a river.

- [Mark] Yeah.

- [Doug] And that's it.

- [Mark] One type.

- So the productivity of this river is dependent.

It was dependent on the backwaters and Native American cultures evolved in ways that allowed them to take advantage of the flood plain.

So they weren't fishing out in the river.

They weren't hunting ducks out in the river very much.

They were on the flood plain where they could get into the shallow water, high diversity.

The more ducks there are, the easier it is to catch 'em.

And so on same way with the fish.

And a lot of the organisms that live in the river, you know, the big channel cat fish, the muscle communities, they're fed by what's coming outta places like Emiquon when they were in a healthy state.

- [Mark] Doug, we briefly mentioned hunting and fishing, and that's not why this was designed.

And it's not why it was built, but it's open to hunting and fishing, isn't it?

- Sure is.

Yeah.

We have a boating and fishing program here that's free to the public.

They're allowed to be out on Thompson Lake.

So they've got about five miles long and almost a mile across that they can boat on and fish.

We do restrict it to, we restrict it, no gas motors, not even on the boat for the public.

So it's either paddling or electric motors are allowed and people have adapted to that.

Seem to be getting along with that just fine.

To fish and boat here, you have to have a permit.

The permit is free and it's good for the whole year.

And you can pick those up at Dickson Mound State Museum.

They're open from, I think, 10 to 4:30 on Tuesdays through Sundays, I think.

- [Mark] And they get that through the Nature Conservancy.

It's a Nature Conservancy permit.

- [Doug] Yep.

It's our permit and allows you, you also have to follow them the state rules.

So you have to have a state fishing license.

If you're using your boat here, you have to have it registered with the state and so on.

But we give out, you know, around a 1,000, maybe as many as 1500 permits a year, and we've done some phone calls to follow up on that.

And we find out that on average people come back about seven times a year.

- Wow.

- Certainly some people come once.

- They're catching fish.

- Yeah.

Some people, once they figure it out, they catch fish out there.

- Now there's hunting too.

And you tell me that in the fall you'll have over a million birds, just stopping by here on their way to wherever they're going, right?

- Yeah.

This part of the Illinois River valley is key to migrations of waterfowl.

So we have Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge across the river.

It's an in-violent refuge.

They don't allow hunting on the refuge over there.

And then we have our complex here where we allow hunting.

It's limited.

Usually we set it up every year and we change it a little bit some years, but it's usually three days a week and it's open to the public and it's free.

It's mostly walk-in hunting.

So we have spots out there and you put in on your chest waders and carry couple dozen decoys and head out there.

And we provide, I would say an average of 900 hunter day experiences a year, some years, much more, some year less.

And if people are interested, look at our website, we have a drawing usually in September for the days.

So you put in, you tell us the days that you're available, that you wanna hunt, and then we do a drawing and hopefully you get a day or two that you can hunt Emiquon.

- [Mark] I imagine it's very good too.

If you've got that many birds and I mean, we're talking about, of course we're talking about mostly you'd be duck hunting, of course, 90% of the people, but you've got all kinds of birds stop in here.

You told me you'll have a half of a million snow geese in here at one time.

- [Doug] Yeah.

It's phenomenal.

It's things that I grew up in Havana.

And I used to hear from the old timers about being so many geese and ducks in the air that it'd block out the sun.

I heard a lot of stories from the old timers.

And I found out a lot of 'em weren't true.

But in fact, one day I was coming back from town on the highway and we had about 200,000 snow geese 10 o'clock in the morning.

So the sun was right there and that whole flock got up and I could not see sunlight coming through it.

So that was one of the stories that were true.

We have about 20 species of ducks here every year.

One of the things that the hunters remark about that they really like is the diversity of waterfowl here.

Many places up and down the river, you're hunting mallards and you kill your four Mallard limit.

And that's it.

But here oftentimes people hunt and kill no mallards.

There are mallards here, people harvest mallards, but just a whole diversity of lesser scaup and red heads and canvas backs.

And just the whole gamut, blue wing teal, green wing teal, we have 'em and we have an abundance of 'em.

And at times we'll have a hundred ducks alone, a hundred thousand, excuse me, a hundred thousand ducks alone at Emiquon.

The birding here is phenomenal.

We've documented about 300 species of birds on the property.

Eagles, we saw a few Eagles today.

- Well, on the levee coming back, three immature bald eagles.

- We, two years ago on an aerial survey, flying a plane over, they counted 323 bald eagles on our property.

So that's in the wintertime when they're stocked in here.

- [Mark] And of course you got, I can see a Swan right out here.

About 11 o'clock.

There's a bunch of them.

- [Doug] We do have mute swans during the nesting season, during the migration in the spring and fall.

We also have Tundra swans and trumpeter swans.

Sometimes a couple thousand of those will be here for a few weeks.

- And this water right now is a little low.

Isn't it?

And oftentimes it'll come up and it'll actually come up to where, this is a wetland, of course, but it's not wet right now, but it would be covered.

Wouldn't it?

In many cases.

- That's exactly right.

It'll be, at times we've had the water about three to four feet higher than it is right now.

And so it would be right up here on the rocks.

And it pretty much, the wetland turns into one big lake, more like a reservoir.

And we like to do that once in a while to stress some of these plants and make it better for wetland plants instead of the terrestrial plants.

But in general, we like to keep the water level lower so that we have a lot of moist soil plants because they produce a lot of seeds for the migratory waterfowl in the spring and summer, or excuse me, spring and fall.

- Doug, this is a great viewing area.

We're on a ridge over overlooking Emiquon and it really gives you a scope of what we have here.

People mostly what they see is the water.

And of course, that hasn't always been here, 'cause this was an immense farm before the Nature Conservancy took it over.

Tell us about this farm, 'cause this was, was probably known nationwide for the size and is contiguous farm and nothing else was that big around here.

Wasn't it?

- Yeah.

So historically these soils were very fertile.

You know, some of the best soil in Illinois gets washed out of the watershed and comes down on these flood lines.

And so it's really great soil.

Always was productive.

Native Americans we know were here from the archeology that's been done here.

We know what the plant and animal communities were.

We know that there was a real abundance here at that time.

So people, the settlers, as they came in, they found that these soils were fertile.

And so they would put fields out there and if they didn't get flooded out high productivity, but they got flooded out.

So it was kind of put and take with the advent in the early 1900s of large machines, drag lines and bulldozers especially, they were able to build a wall around this fertile soil.

So they pushed up an earthen berm, levees as we were on before.

- [Mark] Yeah.

- To isolate this from the river.

And then they used large pumps to pump the water out into the river.

And then they had this really fertile farm field out there or farm fields once they removed some of the timber and vegetation and so on.

When this was first farmed, they were averaging about 60 to 65 bushels of corn per acre.

That's poultry compared to 200 bushels today.

- Right.

- But we have hybrid seed corn.

We have fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and so on.

Back in the day in the early 1900s, the prairie soils averaged about 30 to 35 bushels of corn an acre.

So this was twice the harvest provided, but you had to build the levee and you had to fight off the water and so on.

So this levee was built primarily by Joy Morton of the Morton Salt family, Morton Arboretum.

- That's who owned the property?

- In Chicago, yeah.

- Oh, okay.

- And it was a hunting club.

He was a member.

He bought out the other members and he went to court and he got a verdict that allowed him to isolate this from the river.

Probably wasn't legal, the local lore is- - He had a lot of friends.

- So money went under the table.

- Important friends.

- And so this was a meandered water, so it belonged to the people, but for some reason they let him build the levee and it became a very productive farm over the years.

It was said to have been the largest contiguous farm at one time in Illinois.

- And we would have been talking then about what, maybe 13 to 15,000 acres.

- Yeah.

13,000 Acres or so.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

We have bought 9,000 acres here.

We currently own about 6,700.

The rest of it we've sold to the Fish and Wildlife Service and they've bought some of the properties too.

And we continued to own the most.

It's called Thompson Drainage and Levee District.

We bought the majority of this from one owner in 2000.

We bought about 7,600 acres that year.

And it was from a corporation out of Florida.

And it was the largest private conservation purchase in the history of Illinois.

The purchase price was about $18.4 or 5 million.

- My goodness.

And the Nature Conservancy is a not-for-profit.

And you do have international reach, but your point, the Nature Conservancy's goal is to work with other conservation groups in order to preserve and keep and keep, in this case, wetlands wet.

- Exactly.

This is a model for flood plain restoration and long term sustainability of the wetland.

We've got wetlands out there that have degraded and they have a lot of problems.

And so we're trying to figure out how we can not only restore a high quality with a lot of vegetation under the water on top of the water, not only restore it, but how can we sustain that long term?

That tends to be the challenge.

And so we think that this is a model that's great in and of itself.

You know, we invite the public out here.

We have the public hunting program, look on our website in August and we'll get you signed up to draw for that.

Public fishing and boating on Thompson Lake.

You have to have a permit.

It's free from Dickson Mounds, but it's good for the whole year.

So it's not a big inconvenience to get that.

There's a walking trail.

The birding here is phenomenal.

So we think Emiquon's great.

In fact, in 2012, it was designated as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention.

The 32nd one in the United States, joining a very prestigious group that includes the Everglades, Okefenokee Swamp, Horicon Marsh, Chesapeake Bay.

Some of the big hitters that that people have heard of, we're in there with them, with the Emiquon complex.

- Excuse me for cutting you off, but you told me something interesting earlier.

I wanna make sure we mention it.

- Sure.

- This year alone Nature Conservancy and the volunteers planted 27,000 trees on this property.

- Yes.

- Wow!

- Yeah.

We're doing reforestation and we've planted close to 350,000 altogether here since the get go starting in 2007 and these phenomenal soils, we have some trees down there on the flood plain that in 15 years, they're 30 feet tall.

It's just been amazing.

And so we think, you know, Ramsar Convention is a pretty big deal.

They say, this is a wetland of international importance.

At times we have 10% of the American cots.

The continental population in one day will be here at Emiquon just in one day.

- Wow.

- We have, you know, a half a million snow geese or more at times.

So we think Emiquon's great, but it'll be the best it can be when we can use what we learn here to help other organizations build other Emiquons.

The Nature Conservancy's a big organization.

We have a lot of capacity, but we can't build enough of these as we'd like.

So instead we'll continue to try to build more Semiquinone but if we can learn here and share the lessons learned with other people that have more capacity, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Corps of Engineers, then we think we can get those critical numbers of high quality wetlands up and down the river that we need for the plants and animals that were native to this area.

- And we also mentioned, and we don't have time to go into this at length, but we're standing on, this is also an interesting archeological area.

We're standing on burial mounds that maybe between 10,000 and 15,000 years old.

And we know this because Dickson Mounds, of course, was excavated.

And these have been very, very carefully studiously excavated.

So we know that these were Native American burial mounds that overlook Emiquon.

- Yeah.

On this Ridge alone, we have 16 identified burial mounds that are here.

People have been on this landscape.

We have evidence of people here 12,000 years.

And it was the Woodland Indians and later, so it's not 12,000 years of the mound builders, but the mound builders have been here for a shorter period of time.

But yeah, there's evidence every place.

We can't dig a fence hole, a fence post hole without having an archeologist standing there because it's so rich in archeological resources.

And we've learned so much about what this landscape was 1,000 years ago, 500 years ago.

And then with the Illinois Natural History Survey, we have a really good idea what was here in the late 1800s.

We can't put it back exactly the way it was, but we've put it back closer than when it was in corn and soy.

- Yeah.

Doug Blodgett, thank you so much.

It's been a great tour.

- My pleasure.

And I encourage people to look at our website and come out.

The public use areas, open sunrise to sunset every day of the year.

And then if you want a boat and fish, go to Dickson Mounds and get a permit and you're welcome to do that.

- Thank you.

Like he said, it's open to the public.

In November, he told me is if you're a fanatic bird watcher, that's the time when you see the most birds here just as the geese is coming and pushing the birds to the south.

They're open dusk to dawn every day.

You're welcome out here at the public use areas.

With another Illinois Story near Lewiston, I'm Mark McDonald.

Thanks for watching.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Illinois Stories is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

Thank you.