Mike Lunsford, For The Tribune-Star
We live on one of the highest points in our county, a blessing when we want a breeze, and a curse when we don’t. Our wooded hillsides are dotted with buckeye and ash and wild cherry, and small outcroppings of sandstone show themselves in the washes and gullies, seen best when they’re covered by a light snowfall.
Yet, not far below us, a soggy wetlands spreads out a half-mile to the north and south as if a door to another world opens for us. We may very well gaze out across the treetops from our back deck, but it takes only a few minutes of walking to put my feet in the muck of a swamp that would look at home in the Louisiana delta.
Before Indiana ever became a state, much of it was a land of bogs and quag; a full quarter of what became the Indiana Territory in 1800 consisted of wetlands and marshes. Today, only about 4 percent of them remain because long before we earned statehood, white men were already digging ditches and cutting trees to re-shape the land that Native Americans simply used as it was.
To be certain, the draining of wetlands in Indiana grew out of social and medical concerns nearly as much as it did from a thirst for farmland. The swamps were considered health hazards as early settlers were certainly victims of malaria, and a variety of other fevers, including typhoid.
Many pioneers took hold of the “miasma” theory that was steeped in the belief that wet ground and decaying vegetation made people sick, that even breathing the air over such places could be deadly. Combined with a desire for tillable land, farmers and road builders began draining the rich dark soil as best they could.
Just a mile or two from where I live, as the crow flies, huge tracts of mushy land were drained with the digging of deep channels cut toward both Big and Little Raccoon creeks; I have walked many of those ditches in both spring and summer, watching them fill from trickling old clay field tiles and newer plastic pipe. At one time, I have been told, the Big Raccoon ran one of its branches south toward Vigo County, but steam shovels and dredges turned it back to the north in a mostly successful effort to leech water from the rich loam that before had held it like a sponge.
In many ways, I am sure, there are those who wonder what good the remaining wetlands are to us now; surely the stink and mosquitoes and dampness of such places hold little value.
“These numbers [of declining wetlands] are really catastrophic when you consider all the ecosystem services that have been lost along with these marshy areas,” says Indiana Wildlife Federation Executive Director, Emily Wood. “Wetlands are known not only to support reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and a vast number of migratory and resident birds — but also provide floodwater storage, water filtration, nutrient filtration, and recharging the underground water aquifer,” she says.
For me, it is the wildlife in such places that I enjoy most; bearing the welts of buffalo gnats, the grabbing claws of wild roses and briars, and the sometime near-noxious smells of rot, all come with the territory. As an explorer of wetlands himself, Henry David Thoreau felt the same way. In “Walden” he wrote:
“I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place.”
I too have been amply rewarded in the wetlands with the poise of frog-gigging herons, the sight of statuesque egrets atop the dead trees, the poker-faced calm of camouflaged bitterns among the reed grasses, and the quacks of itchy-triggered wood ducks that are in the air and gone at the snap of a twig.
There, I’ve also seen huge snapping turtles mating in the mud, sunning red-eared sliders as they rest on decaying logs, the fidgets of blue-gray gnatcatchers as they communally build their nests, and the wondrous aerodynamics of green darners and common whitetails as they flit between the horsetails and cattails and milkweeds. It seems to me as if the wetlands is a living organism in itself, one that carries the threat of harm in its deer ticks and snakes, but mostly innocent beauty in the colorful bluebirds that nest in the cavities of hollow trees and the warblers that come each spring to chatter in the budding leaves of young oaks.
Certainly, much has been done in our state to preserve what is left of our bogs and marshes. Goose Pond, just outside of Linton, is a magnificent success story with its 9,000 acres, as is Kankakee Sands, a Nature Conservancy gem of 7,200 acres near Morocco, in northern Indiana. Prior to the 1850’s, the wetlands in that region — the Grand Kankakee Marsh — took up a half-million acres, the second largest fresh water wetland in America, after the Florida Everglades.
Once, the great Limberlost Swamp covered 13,000 acres, but only through a unique partnership and initiative of private owners and public entities do about 400 acres of it remain. There are other success stories from other regions too, such as the 2,700 acres of our own Wabashiki Fish and Wildlife Area. From one end of the state to the other, dunes and floodplains, flatwoods and seeps, sedge meadows and swamps promote the diversity of life itself.
“Recently, a number of challenges to existing wildlife and environmental protections have placed wetlands and the wildlife that depends on them at even more risk,” Wood says. “The weakening of safeguards to the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act has compounded these threats immeasurably.”
That trend, I hope, will end soon, for if we treasure the most beautiful of spaces, our hardwood forests and clear lakes, our state parks and hiking trails, we too need to value the low places, the dreary bog and all it has to offer.