RESTORING THE OAK GLADES
In the late afternoon, following Robbins’s advice, I visited Cane Ridge, northwest of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, to look at an oak savanna restored by the U.S. Forest Service as part of local JV activities. In the protected landscape of southern Missouri, there is a heavy predominance of closed-canopy oak woods that shut out open-country birds. Here, west of the Black River, the managers of Mark Twain National Forest were opening up patches of oak forest to provide breeding habitat for American Woodcock, Red-headed Woodpecker, Blue-winged Warbler, Prairie Warbler, and Yellow-breasted Chat, among other open-country migratory birds.
This area was restored through selective clearing followed by managed fire to open the canopy and allow grassy understory to attract early successional bird species. Historically, this process happened naturally through the action of fire and large grazing ungulates (such as Bison and Elk), but these days, the management happens largely by mechanical means and follows a strict plan of intervention. At Cane Ridge, the plan had worked—I saw all the birds listed above. Such a prescription is needed in many more places.
While I walked the heavily altered habitat, an Olive-sided Flycatcher sang out its quick-three-beers. This rare migrant species was headed north to some boreal bog in the North Woods—and it was the first Olive-sided Flycatcher I had seen on my road trip. It was a reminder both that I was soon to begin the northern half of my journey and that active habitat management can provide benefits for passage migrants as well as a wide range of breeders.
I added two new quest species at the Cane Ridge oak glades that I visited in Missouri: the Prairie and Blue-winged Warblers. The Prairie Warbler, which specializes in open, gladelike formations and old fields with scattered small trees, is a handsome bird with a breeding range almost entirely confined to the eastern United States. All yellow below and olive above, it is enlivened by black flank markings, a patterned face, and reddish streaks on its mantle. Its song, a rising series of buzzy musical notes, sounds like an energetic version of the song of a Field Sparrow, a species with which it can often be found. The Prairie is a partial migrant, with both breeding and wintering birds resident in Florida and the remainder wintering in the Caribbean.
The Blue-winged Warbler, a specialist of old field regrowth and shrubby clearings in disturbed woodlands, is a typical Neotropical migrant, wintering in the Caribbean and Central America and breeding in the eastern and central United States. Interestingly, the yellow and blue-gray Blue-winged hybridizes with its rare sister species, the Golden-winged Warbler, where the two species meet. The by-products of these crosses, informally called Brewster’s and Lawrence’s Warblers, are quite rare and create considerable excitement when they are encountered by birders. These two hybrids were originally described as novel species but now are understood to be the product of mixing of two closely related species.
Both Blue-winged and Prairie Warblers are uncommon because of their reliance on ever-changing early successional habitat. Breeding populations of the two species have to shift over time to track the movement of successional habitats across the landscape. Moreover, early successional habitats are becoming less common in the twenty-first century because of intensifying land-management practices.
CACHE RIVER
From Missouri, I head east across the Mississippi to southern Illinois, passing through the historic riverside city of Cape Girardeau (pronounced “Jer-AR-doh”), Heggemann’s home town. The bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio, Cache, and Mississippi rivers converge, includes the northernmost bottomland swamp forest that retains a Mississippi Delta accent. Here in the last of the great southern swamp country, I plan to meet Mark Guetersloh, natural heritage biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, who provides management guidance for the Cache River State Natural Area.
I was first introduced to this area by ecologist Scott Robinson in May 1993, when he and I, along with conservationist David Wilcove, did a Warbler Big Day based out of Robinson’s field station at Dutch Creek. Traipsing high and low through many sectors of southern Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest in search of wood warblers, we finished with thirty-two species, the highest single-day count of warblers I have ever been party to. During that incredible day in this little-known, wetland-rich world, I was amazed by how verdant it is, and how filled with birds and snakes and other wildlife. This is the case, of course, because southern Illinois is where the Ozarks meet the northernmost reach of the delta. This rural landscape also features a long list of conservation lands. I planned to spend three days in the area, reacquainting myself with the wonders of this “last of the South,” where Bald Cypress trees grow in swamplands rich with water-loving Cottonmouth snakes.
In the early afternoon, I met up with Guetersloh, a visionary forester and ecologist who knows a great deal about the ecosystems of southern Illinois and who works on restoring the hydrology of the swamps and wetlands of the Cache River basin. Together we toured Heron Pond and Big Cypress, two wetland areas featuring cypress. During our travels through the Cache environs, Guetersloh told me that there are serious challenges to protecting the health of the Cache River ecosystem, including management of water levels, damming, and the presence of a canal cut to drain the Cache into the Ohio back in 1915. Different local interest groups—farmers, conservationists, and hunters—have disparate visions about water use, and the future of the Cache seems to be in the hands of the courts.
The natural places I saw here remain impressive to the visitor from outside, with their imposing stands of Bald Cypress and patches of old-growth bottomland hardwood. Walking the boardwalk at Heron Pond, Guetersloh showed me two Cottonmouths in the dark water and pointed out the lovely high, musical peeping of a Bird-voiced Treefrog—bright green–backed, with lichen-patterned gray and white on its sides. Late in the afternoon, he took me to see a state champion Cherrybark Oak with a diameter of more than seven feet that stands some 100 feet tall, with a spread of 113 feet. The Cache River wetlands are home to ten other state champion trees as well as the national champion Water Locust, and the lower Cache is home to trees more than a thousand years old. John James Audubon, passing through here in the winter of 1810, wrote about these forests with admiration:
Though the trees were entirely stripped of their verdure, I could not help raising my eyes towards their tops, and admiring their grandeur. The large sycamores with white bark formed a lively contrast with the canes beneath them; and the thousands of parroquets [Carolina Parakeets, now extinct] that came to roost in their hollow trunks at night, were to me objects of interest and curiosity.
Guetersloh made clear that conservationists have to fight the good fight to conserve all the natural benefits that these places offer migratory birds and native plants and animals. It is not simply a matter of determining the right path forward for nature, but also one of ensuring that the best intervention is undertaken even in the face of opposing political forces.
WARBLERS OF PINELAND, OAK GLADE, AND CYPRESS SWAMP
My visits to the piney woods and cypress swamps had delivered close encounters with breeding wood warblers as well as their passage migrant counterparts. As I reviewed the warblers I’d seen in these lands before I departed for the North, I recalled that many of the tall pinelands I visited had rung out with the sweet slurs of the Yellow-throated Warbler, which I first saw on its breeding ground at Caddo Lake. One of the southern breeders, in some places it prefers pines and in other places prefers bottomland sycamores and cypress. The Yellow-throated is an unusual warbler because it is a partial migrant. In most warbler species, the bird’s breeding habitat is distant from its wintering habitat. But in the northern parts of the Yellow-throated’s breeding range, populations of the species entirely depart south in winter. In contrast, in parts of the coastal Deep South, some Yellow-throated populations breed and winter in the same site. In many pine stands, I’d also heard the soft trill of the Pine Warbler, the pinelands specialist that I first found at Felsenthal National Wildlife Refug
e. Another partial migrant, it is a summer visitor to northern North America but a year-round resident in the southern pinelands. And I’d seen the partial migrant Prairie Warbler in the Missouri oak glades, along with the fully migratory Blue-winged Warbler. My warbler count was now at fifteen, thanks to the advice of Mark Robbins.
I am now about to leave the South and embark upon the second half of my journey. I’ll trade my zig-zagging route through the South for a northward-trending route up the big river, bound for the Mississippi headwaters, the Canadian line, and the Great North Woods. There will be little lingering and much more movement. As with the songbird migrants themselves, the northern half of my journey will carry me northward faster and via a more direct route: straight up the main stem of the river.
SIX
From the Confluence to the Headwaters
Early to Late May 2015
Canada Warbler
April is promise. May is fulfillment. May is a time when everything is happening, when life rises to a peak. May is the birdsong month.
—EDWIN WAY TEALE, A Walk through the Year
I travel to eastern Missouri and Trail of Tears State Park, which sits atop a bluff on the western bank of the Mississippi River, fifteen miles north of Cape Girardeau. Encompassing 3,415 acres of hilly upland oak woods with an understory of Redbud and Sassafras, the park marks the spot where bands of eastern Native Americans, uprooted by government mandate, crossed the Mississippi on the way west to a reservation in Oklahoma in the winter of 1838–39. This tranquil place memorializes a tragic story, which I have come to learn, as well as to check in on spring migration at this important patch of green along the river.
As I walked to the visitor center, a Wood Thrush and a Kentucky Warbler sang from the woods just behind the building. Above the road to the campsite, three Mississippi Kites—the slim blue-gray raptors of riverine lowlands—circled in the clear blue sky. Another Kentucky Warbler sang down in the glen, a species that here outnumbered its vocal counterpart, the Carolina Wren. Woodland thrushes overran the park and foraged beside the narrow forest roads. A Chestnut-sided Warbler—a passage migrant—sang its cheerful song, and the camp hostess told me she had been hearing a Whip-poor-will calling most nights. I chose a ridgetop campsite that was woodsy but bug-free, graced with an oak canopy from which a Great Crested Flycatcher on territory sang out wheep! over and over in the evening light. Migrant songbirds—both breeders and passage migrants—were here in force.
First thing the next morning, I biked out to the high, rocky Boutin Overlook. In the river below, a pusher tug guided a long barge upstream amid considerable river traffic. East across the Mississippi were the expansive, forested hills of Illinois, including the towering summit of Bald Knob, with its giant cross. Aside from the cross, there was minimal sign of habitation, merely a vista of rolling green forest. Much of that green space was Trail of Tears State Forest—the next stop after my stay here at this state park.
Here on the bluff top, I was greeted by various passage migrants: Northern Parula, Tennessee and Chestnut-sided Warbler, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, and Scarlet Tanager. The Mississippi Kites continued their display flights preparatory to nesting, and several thrushes appeared: Swainson’s and Gray-cheeked (passage migrants) and Wood Thrushes and Veeries (local breeders). I wondered what this spot had been like during the Trail of Tears exodus, almost two hundred years ago.
THE TRAIL OF TEARS
In 1830, President Andrew Jackson lobbied for passage of the Indian Removal Act, which called for the forced relocation of populations of Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River. American settlers were pressuring the federal government to remove Native Americans from the lands of the Southeast; many white pioneers filtering into Native American territory wanted the government to make these lands available for their own settlement. Although the effort was vehemently opposed by many, including Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee, Jackson was able to gain Congressional passage of the legislation, which authorized the government to extinguish Native title to lands in the southeastern United States.
The ensuing Trail of Tears exodus was a series of government-mandated relocations of remnants of various Native American nations from their ancestral eastern homelands to an area west of the Mississippi River that was designated as Native Territory (now Oklahoma). At the time of the forced migration, a few Native Americans living in the Southeast managed to remain on their ancestral homelands; for example, today some Choctaw still live in Mississippi, some Creek in Alabama and Florida, and some Cherokee in North Carolina; a small group of Seminole moved to the Everglades and were never uprooted by the U.S. military. But Jackson sent the vast majority of Native Americans west.
In 1831, the Choctaw became the first Nation to be dislodged. Their removal served as the cruel model for all future relocations. After two wars, many Seminoles were removed in 1832. The Creek removal followed in 1834, the Chickasaw in 1837, and last the Cherokee in 1838. By 1839, forty-six thousand Native Americans from the southeastern states had been forced from their homelands, thereby opening twenty-five million acres for white settlement.
The term “Trail of Tears” originated from a description of the removal of the Cherokee Nation. While some Cherokee migrated voluntarily, more than sixteen thousand were forced out of their homeland against their will and made to march to their destinations by state and local militias. In the winter of 1838–39, a long procession of wagons, riders, and people on foot traveled eight hundred miles west to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Most of the Cherokee made their way through Cape Girardeau County, now home to the state park. Floating ice stopped some of the attempted Mississippi River crossings, so the Cherokee bands had to set up camp on the riverbank. While waiting to cross, the Native Americans endured rain, snow, severe cold, hunger, and disease. Many women, children, and elderly people died; it is estimated that more than four thousand Cherokee lost their lives in this march of tribal decimation. Trail of Tears State Park, part of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, preserves the native woodlands much as they appeared to the Cherokee as they passed westward. These Native Americans had a special reverence for the animals that shared their land. My own travels encountering birds and mammals intersected at a number of places with those of Native Americans past and present, but how different my trek was from their tragic journey over the past two centuries.
OAK FOREST MANAGEMENT
A bit northeast of Trail of Tears State Park, and across the Mississippi, lies little-known Trail of Tears State Forest, in Illinois, which I reached after crossing the river at Cape Girardeau and wandering backroads beset with migrating turtles of various species. I set up camp on a sharp ridge cloaked in oak forest, much like the Ozark forests I had seen west of Mingo in Missouri. In fact, the Ozarks ecological region spans five states, including slivers of easternmost Oklahoma and southeasternmost Kansas, good chunks of northwestern Arkansas and southern Missouri, and a portion of southern Illinois.
Trail of Tears State Forest comprises more than five thousand acres of hilly upland forest, and I was probably the only person camped in it at this time, because it was midweek in spring. I saw Sugar Maples growing in the woods—a botanical signpost telling me I was easing into the northern half of my journey. Barred Owls hooted in the dark, and a long train rolled by in the distance at around 10 p.m. It must have taken twenty minutes for the string of cars to pass—the loud trundling on the rails and the periodic tooting of the locomotive’s whistle brought on musings of a time in my childhood when railroads ruled and I heard the sound of trains every night.
In this state forest, I planned to learn about the challenges of midcountry forest management. Tracy Fidler, of Shawnee Resources and Development (a local nonprofit), had agreed to show me around, with guidance from Illinois state foresters David Allen and Ben Snyder. The trio are dedicated to the foresighted management of the forests of southern Illinois. It turns out that the mature oak-hickory forests that have long dominated the central hardwoods
area of the country are reaching an ecological dead end, neither regenerating nor properly supporting an array of threatened migratory songbirds, due to the absence of periodic fire in the ecological regime and the resultant closing of the forest canopy. Smokey Bear perhaps has been too successful in halting fire in America’s forests.
Hunters and birders love oak-hickory forests, which attract both game birds and songbirds. The problem is, in the absence of natural regimes of fire and canopy disturbance, these mature oak-hickory woods will slowly but inexorably transition to less productive maple-beech woods. Expert forest managers such as Allen and Snyder manage these forests to foster the healthy recruitment of new generations of oak and hickory to replace those in the canopy today. This forest needs active disturbance to bring about the succession of young oak and hickory seedlings into canopy trees. This seemed counterintuitive, but these eighty-year-old forests are not replacing themselves. That’s why the foresters need to step in and take action.
Here is the true story of these oak-hickory forests. Recall that after the Civil War, southern Illinois probably was entirely deforested because of the chronic impacts of widespread agriculture, charcoal production, and the cutting of remnant woods for timber. Slowly, over a number of decades, farmers abandoned the unproductive hilly lands, which regenerated to old fields, then scrub, then woodlands, and finally forests. What stands here today is a direct result of this single historic cycle of succession from bare fields to mature forest. In earlier generations, recurrent fire events, small-scale agriculture by Native Americans, and other patch disturbances generated a mosaic of woodland and oak savannas that supported a wide array of habitats. Today, closed-canopy forest dominates, without the fire or patch dynamics that would keep it a diverse mosaic. Larry Heggemann and the Central Hardwoods Joint Venture seek to create a mosaic of woodland types, from the sunny and savannalike oak openings I’d seen at Cane Ridge in Missouri to the mature oak-hickory forests I saw here at Trail of Tears State Forest in Illinois.
North on the Wing Page 13