The Natural Bloomington Blog

The biannual sandhill crane migrations through Indiana attract a variety of superlative descriptors from those who pay attention.

Majestic and surreal are how The IndyChannel described flocks of these long-legged, knock-kneed waterbirds at the Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area in October – “like a scene from a from a wildlife documentary.” Prehistoric appears three times in a piece on the 2011 spring transplantation in the Times of Northwest Indiana.

The DNR’s Division of Fish & Wildlife, which is charged with managing Jasper-Pulaski reserve’s 8,142 acres, says the fall and spring sandhill passages are among “Indiana’s greatest wildlife spectacles.” The National Audubon Society says: “Virtually the entire eastern population of this subspecies stages at this site during fall migration.”

If the past couple of weeks are any indication, the Natural Bloomington compass has resumed its natural southern pull. Three new photo albums posted in the past couple weeks document two hikes through Hoosier National Forest’s backcountry and brushes with Forest Supervisor Mike Chaveas and prehistoric Native Americans who lived in the woods 700 or so years ago.

On Sept. 16, I led an intrepid group of wilderness champions on our third annual Sierra Club hike with Hoosier Supervisor Mike Chaveas. This year’s trek took us a couple miles into Nebo Ridge, one of the Hoosier’s most rugged and remote areas in southeast Brown County, and the same two miles back out.

Eight days earlier, I bushwhacked through the Charles C. Deam Wilderness with an ad hoc cadre of rock lovers along the Mt. Carmel Fault just south of Monroe Lake. The next day, en route to a high school marching band competition in Salem, we took a short stroll along the Lick Creek in the Hoosier, past the remains of a walled, 14th century Indian village.

What’s left on the Northern Indiana guidebook project requires nothing more than a computer, a circumstance that, like the journey itself, has powerful upsides to balance the downs –  perspective, to name but one. For example, exploring the Kankakee Fish & Wildlife Area as one of six natural areas in a single day – one of 14 in three days – leaves little time to reflect upon its once-dominant ecosystem that has nearly vanished.

Before the Americans finished channelizing and straightening the Kankakee River in the early 20th century, swamp occupied nearly a million acres of Northwest Indiana from the Illinois State Line to Michigan City. Officially known as the Grand Kankakee Marsh (or Grand Kankakee Swamp), this vast mass of saturated landscape was also known as the Everglades of the North, even though it was the biggest wetland in North America.

In the early 1800s, navigating the Kankakee River – the great marsh’s liquid spine – required more than 2,000 turns on a 240-mile journey from its source five miles southwest of South Bend to the Illinois State Line. By 1917, the Kankakee’s Indiana path to the Illinois River had been ditched, straightened and shortened to 85 miles, the grand swamp converted to agriculture and industrial-urban areas.

So, barreling through rush hour and construction on Interstate 80/94 between Gary and Hobart, via Hammond, isn’t the way I envisioned the last leg of my Natural Indiana guidebook journey. Neither was photographing a Queen Anne’s lace with an egret calling overhead, while the PA of an industrial packaging plant reverberated from across a chain-link fence.

But ending it in Indiana dune country always was the plan. Aside from the hill country I’ve lived in for 45 years, of the 12 Indiana natural regions explored in the past four years, the dunes were most familiar. And in every relevant way – history, nature, geography, demography – the Hoosier sand hills are one of the nation’s most spectacular natural environments and conservation stories.

"To the Midwest," Carl Sandburg wrote in 1958, the Lake Michigan dunes are what "the Grand Canyon is to Arizona and the Yosemite to California. They constitute a signature of time and eternity."