NRCS Illinois Soil Scientist Restores Wetland Habitat

BRADFORD, Ill. - Where some people saw only a marginal piece of farmland, Steve and Mary Anita Zwicker saw acres of marsh habitat waiting to be restored.

Six years ago, they bought a 30-acre parcel of property southeast of Bradford and started transforming a soggy soybean field into a wetland wonder.

Their reward: sightings of sandhill cranes, 15 species of ducks, sandpipers, yellow-headed blackbirds, hawks and owls. Nine bird species endangered in Illinois have also found the Heron Marsh since the Zwickers moved in and started improving the habitat.

The Zwickers built a new log home overlooking the central Illinois marsh. They use a telescope to get close-up views of the birds that stop off at the marsh on their way to the Arctic or the tip of South America.

Steve Zwicker, a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, now keeps daily records of the weather and the birds he sees.

"We're living our dream," Zwicker said.

The marsh is 12 miles from the Illinois River and offers a prairie ecosystem that some species prefer over the river ecosystem.

Plants native to the marsh such as sedges and water plantains responded first to the newly wet low ground. But Zwicker didn't plant them. Their seeds, dormant for decades, revived naturally.

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Then the birds began swooping in to dine on small clams, snails, crawfish and worms that soon appeared. A range of frogs showed up, singing their songs to announce their presence.

"They came back the first year," he said of the migrating birds that use the marsh, which is actually a very shallow lake surrounded by mud flats.

The migrations each year begin in February with geese, followed by ducks. April brings the shore birds, Zwicker said.

Upland species such as songbirds and meadowlarks land on the neighboring prairie, which Zwicker seeded. Predators including the marsh hawk have also appeared.

Mammals also have followed. Skunks, mink, opossums, weasels, raccoons, foxes and coyotes feast on birds and the eggs of the nesting birds.

Sandhill cranes have also been spotted at the marsh. Once native to Illinois, the cranes are now very rare.

Zwicker said others can do what he has done if they own marginal areas without full drainage. Even a small site of less than an acre could work if strategically located near other natural resources, he said.

Several federal programs pay farmers to develop conservation projects such as the marsh, Zwicker said, so this type of project is not prohibitively expensive. When he bought the land it already was enrolled permanently in a program.

Associated Press story in the Belleville News Democrat.