Summer 1999

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: SUMMER 1999.]

Soggy Places
The Natural History of Mucky Muck

By Peter Friederici

It doesn't take an expert eye to realize that Chicago Wilderness is a rather soggy place. With its fens and marshes, bogs, seeps, and wet meadows, the area is a veritable catalog of the ways in which fresh water interacts with soil and sunlight and topography to create a multi- farious array of living spaces.

"Northeastern Illinois has the largest concentration of individual wetlands in the entire state, thanks to the area's glacial history and its complicated topography," says John Rogner, field supervisor for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and chair of the Chicago Region Biodiversity Council, aka Chicago Wilderness. In addition, Chicago Wilderness owes some of its remaining wetland wealth to the irony that infuses its name because the urbanization and industrialization of the Chicago region contributed to less drainage of local wetlands for agriculture.

Fifteen percent and more of the Illinois-Wisconsin border region consists of wetlands, with other concentrations occurring along the Des Plaines River valley and along glacial moraines. But you can find wetlands pretty much throughout the Chicago Wilderness. Whether marsh or wet meadow, they act as sponges that soak up rain and snowmelt and recharge underground aquifers. Their plants filter and clean water, trapping pollutants and excess nutrients. And their often-dense vegetation supports an amazing web of life, from highly visible beavers and ospreys and herons to noisy frogs and blackbirds to entirely inconspicuous fishes, snakes, and invertebrates.

To view wetlands merely as nature's high-powered kidneys is to make the mistake of focusing on a single function rather than understanding them as a vital complex system — the lowest element, altitudinally speaking, of a much larger system that starts at the top of a hill and moves down.

To understand the condition of wetlands in Chicago Wilderness, it's important to try to unearth what the place looked like 200 years ago. That's not easy to do, given the enormous alterations that have occurred in hydrology. Much of the area, like much of the Midwest, consisted of wetlands that were viewed as useless and unhealthful places — and that were relatively easy to drain. The creation of drainage districts in the mid-1800s enabled farmers to dry up their lands by burying interconnecting networks of drainage tiles. Other wetlands were destroyed by simply filling them, raising the soil above the water level.

Throughout the Midwest, the effect of draining wetlands was profound. By the 1980s only 10 percent of Illinois' wetland acres remained, and 15 percent of Indiana's, the majority of the rest having been drained for agriculture.

Some soil scientists have estimated that about half of northeastern Illinois was once sodden, meaning that even considerable concentrations of wetlands like those in western Lake County or at Lake Calumet are only remnants of what was. At the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie near Joliet, a recently completed soil inventory identified 130-odd areas of wetland soils, but most of them today look just like any other field of corn or beans or pasture grass.

Thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972 and to an improved understanding of the importance of wetlands, filling and draining has slowed to a trickle, so to speak. But relations between people and water remain uneasy. That's apparent nearly every year in the early spring or summer, when runoff from winter snows or summer storms floods basements and swamps underpasses. Many of the landscape's natural sponges are gone; huge areas that once absorbed water are covered with pavement, buildings, or lawns laid over impervious clay. As a result, runoff becomes floods, damaging human structures and waterways alike. Without sufficient natural lands acting as filters, sediments and pollutants pour into lakes, streams, and rivers.

The results are apparent on endangered species lists. Lake County has 66 species of wetland plants on the Illinois endangered species list. Many animals fussy about the quality, size, or type of wetlands they can use have grown scarce, such as the king rail, state-endangered black tern, and spotted turtle; the majority of the state's endangered birds, mammals, and reptiles dwell in wetlands. And that's not even to speak of the numerous fishes, mussels, and other aquatic animals that rely entirely on watery places.

But even protected areas are at risk. That's because wetlands are highly sensitive to what goes on in their surroundings. Upland vegetation around them serves as a buffer, absorbing runoff and sediment and pollution. When those buffers are lacking, or too small, wetlands can be overwhelmed with sediment or with pollution from roads.

"You can do things to areas quite removed from a wetland and still have an effect," says Rogner. "Diversion of runoff, sedimentation, introduction of pollutants such as oil and salt — these are all harder problems to get at than direct impacts."

"There are places along area tollways where you can find salt-loving species you'd expect in a salt marsh," points out biologist Charles Paine of the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation in Dundee.

Roads near wetlands have other impacts, too. Rare species such as Blanding's turtle and the massasauga rattlesnake sometimes need to move from one wet area to another, and if there's a road in the way they're often killed outright. Frogs and salamanders are regularly flattened in large numbers when they cross roads at night during their breeding season.

Consider the case of the Hine's emerald dragonfly, found only in Door County, Wisconsin, in Michigan's upper peninsula, and at a few sites along the lower Des Plaines River. Here it lives where clean groundwater seeps out over bedrock and forms small marshes and meadows. "We don't know yet how to protect the recharge areas that are the source of that water," Rogner says. "We don't even know the extent of those areas yet."

As in prairie or forest, invasive species can leave native wetland species with no room to live. Purple loosestrife and reed canary grass are lovely plants, but both clog marshes, choking out native species and providing little food for wildlife. The Illinois Natural History Survey is trying to control loosestrife in the region with imported beetles — an experiment that shows some promise.

Also effective, though, is recruiting lots of volunteers to pay sweat equity in grubbing out small infestations of those plants. As is true of other ecological communities in the area, public support and involvement are essential if such problems are to be controlled and reversed.

The main legal shield protecting wetlands is the Clean Water Act, which requires anyone who wants to fill a pond or marsh or wet meadow to acquire a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. Describing the machinations of the permitting process (or relating why the Army ended up as one of the nation's top environmental cops) could fill a series of articles. What's most important is this: a developer who wants to fill or substantially alter a wetland is often allowed to do so — on condition that he 'mitigate' the loss by creating or restoring a wetland elsewhere.

In the early days after passage of the Act, mitigation often meant little more than digging a hole out back of the new shopping center and letting it fill with runoff. Most of the newly created wetlands were small and poorly designed; many were built in places that nature hadn't intended to be wet. Some went dry. Others turned into biologically barren ponds filled with dirty water and rimmed with a few hardy cattails.

"Historically, the report card for these projects is not that good," says Rogner. "The overall success rate was less than 20 percent. Wetlands were not sited in ideal places, but rather in nooks and crannies of development sites."

In the 1980s, some engineers, hydrologists, and biologists began looking for better solutions. In cooperation with the Lake County Forest Preserve District and state and federal agencies, a research organization called Wetlands Research, Inc., began restoring more than 500 acres of forest preserve land in the floodplain of the Des Plaines River along Route 41 and Wadsworth Road. Water was pumped from the river into a series of marshes built on what had been abandoned farmland. Within a few years, new marsh vegetation was absorbing more than 80 percent of the nutrients and sediments that entered the system; the number of migratory waterfowl using the site exploded by 4,000 percent; the number of breeding wetland bird species doubled. Among the new nesting birds were at least two state-endangered species, the least bittern and yellow-headed blackbird.

"We found that the environmental factors, such as water quality, sediment trapping, and nutrient cycling, can be accomplished in a restored wetland very quickly," says Albert Pyott, who worked with Wetlands Research and now heads the Chicago-based nonprofit The Wetlands Initiative. "The critters will to a large extent just show up. They swim in or fly in or walk in. Sure, we don't have every microbial interaction going that would be in an undisturbed wetland, but over time that'll happen. We just don't know what the time frame is."

Research at the Des Plaines River Wetlands Demonstra-tion Project continues. In the meantime, the site has imitators in a new type of restoration project that's cropping up all over the Chicago Wilderness region: the mitigation bank. The idea is simple. Say you're a developer whose plan requires filling in five acres of wetlands. Rather than building a new and probably inadequate wetland on your property, you buy a number of wetland "credits." The credits constitute shares in a larger restoration project typically designed and built by a private firm in collaboration with a government agency that will ultimately own and manage the wetland. You might have to pay for restoring 7.5 acres to make up for the five acres destroyed.

The first privately operated mitigation bank in the region — indeed, in the nation — is in St. Charles. Here a 52-acre swath of old farmland along the Fox River was turned into a mosaic of marsh and wet prairie, with a surrounding buffer of upland prairie. The Otter Creek project isn't complete yet, but most of its credits have been sold (at prices around $45,000 an acre), and it generally has received good reviews. A hundred native prairie and wetland plants live there.

Children lose one of the best parts
of youth when wetlands disappear
from our neighborhoods.

That's not to say it looks like a wetland that's been around for centuries. "You shouldn't even try to compare with Mother Nature," says John Larson, an ecologist with Applied Ecological Services, one of the companies that designed and built the project. "You'd be comparing a five-year-old wetland with one that's a thousand years old. In a hundred years Otter Creek might look completely different."

Mitigation banking does have a number of obvious advantages. It's permitted only in places that once were wetlands and that can easily be converted through excavation or the removal of drainage tiles. It results in large-scale restorations (mitigation banks in the Chicago region must include at least 25 acres). And it's done under strict monitoring by the Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protec- tion Agency, and Fish and Wildlife Service.

Still, mitigation banking does abet the destruction of small wetlands, and that concerns some biologists. Charles Paine points out that wetlands exist in a mosaic. "Wetlands are very dynamic places," he says. Many dry up in drought years or flood during wet periods. When conditions change, it's important to have other wetlands nearby so that plants and animals can recolonize newly suitable habitat.

"The problem becomes, do we have enough wetlands left for bad conditions, and for recolonization when good years return?" he asks. "Maybe the little wetlands are important on a local scale for herps (reptiles and amphibians), or fish, or birds in migration."

"Mitigation banking is one of many interesting approaches, and as an environmental community we must keep an open mind about restoration practices," says Jean Sellar, a biologist with the US Army Corps of Engineers, "but these are experiments and we don't know yet what will work." Sellar also points to research demonstrating that scattered small wetlands high in the watershed contribute more benefit than large wetlands further downstream.

There's also the matter of human contact with nature. Otter Creek is a beautiful and species-rich place to visit — it's now a valued part of the St. Charles Park District — but it's centralized. It replaces a number of smaller wetlands that probably gave many adults the chance to hear red-winged blackbirds and children the opportunity to catch frogs. Too much destruction of small local wetlands, in other words, could reduce the opportunity to experience nature on a neighborhood level — a major element in instilling real appreciation in children.

Fortunately, restoration projects in various sizes are cropping up all over the area. At Midewin, the US Forest Service wants to restore most of those 130 former wetlands that were recently identified. At the new Prairie Crossing development in Grayslake, a pond close to backyards has become home to reintroduced endangered fishes. Other animals are coming home to Chicago Wilderness on their own: after a long absence, ospreys and sandhill cranes are back in the area as nesting species.

Restorations can involve children and adults in direct and delightfully squishy ways. Consider, for example, Prairie Wolf Slough, a 40-acre restoration project along the Middle Fork of the North Branch of the Chicago River in southern Lake County. Mobilized by the Friends of the Chicago River, hundreds of volunteers, including many schoolchildren, planted over 51,000 native plants on the site. It was a mucky experience.

"Some days the students really got a taste of what hydric soils are," says the Friends' David Ramsay. "I literally had to pull out a couple who were stuck in the mud."

The volunteer program has continued, as adults and children monitor plants and water levels and try to weed out purple loosestrife and buckthorn. Alan Pilgrim, who acts as the site's volunteer steward, says the ongoing once-a-month workdays have been deeply instructive.

"We did some more planting recently," he says. "It had been raining like mad, and this time I didn't sink in mud. The plant life had taken hold and the root systems supported our weight. It was a striking confirmation that we're helping nature heal."

Peter Friederici is a freelance writer and field biologist who prefers to have mud between his toes.