Natural Land Institute to protect Q-C wildlife area
It’s a hot, sultry afternoon as Rick Lawrence tromps through knee-high brush and vines, ducking branches of silver maples, leading visitors to a hidden wild area nearly in the heart of the Quad-Cities that few people know about.
He stops and the quiet is breathless. Listen, though, and you start to hear things. There’s the buzz of a dragonfly’s wings, the splash of a muskrat and the bubbling of a stream flowing over a dam built by beavers.
This land, he explained, is a portion of the so-called Milan Bottoms, a roughly 3,450-acre stretch of “bottom” land on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River downstream from the Interstate 280 bridge to near Andalusia that includes farm ground as well as one of the largest floodplain hardwood forests left on the Upper Mississippi.
“It is hugely important for birds and mammals, including threatened and endangered species,” Lawrence said of the land. It is home to bobcats and river otters, provides a critical night roost for wintering bald eagles and harbors a large heron rookery, he added.
The specific piece he is showing off is 93 acres recently purchased for $470,000 by the Natural Land Institute, a nonprofit regional land trust based in Rockford, Ill., that seeks to preserve, manage and restore natural areas.
The purchase is important because it will help buffer the wetland/timber portion of the Bottoms that is under increasing pressure from development, especially with the new Jumer’s Casino Rock Island scheduled to open nearby in December, said Lawrence, who works for the institute.
About half of the Bottoms is owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and managed for wildlife, while half is in private hands. Much of the private land immediately north of Andalusia Road is planted in corn or soybeans and could potentially be filled in for development.
In addition to buffering the core wetland/timber area, the purchase will allow access and patrolling by wildlife managers who otherwise have to come in by boat or across private property. Also, it may someday allow access by the general public, Lawrence said.
The latter idea, however, is “on hold” because of the state’s budget impasse, said Jerry Paulson, executive director of the institute.
The institute’s goal is to donate the land to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and use the donation to leverage funds for more acquisitions and/or easements for the sensitive area. But Paulson said he does not know “when or if” that will happen because of the budget situation.
A formal announcement of the purchase will be made next week during the Upper Mississippi River Conference at the i wireless Center in Moline.
Development pressure/opportunity
The new casino at the intersection of Illinois 92 and I-280 brings a sense of urgency to bottomland protection, Paulson said.
“Anytime you start to develop next to (natural) areas, you’ve got light pollution and (water) run-off, and you introduce cats and dogs, and we have this conflict,” he said. “The more buffer you can have between development and these core natural areas the better.”
Paulson said he is hopeful that, with careful planning and design, a balance can be struck “in a way that allows development and protects the environment.
“We think it can, but we’re not there yet.”
The Rock Island City Council is interested in fostering development in the area to grow the city, said Greg Champagne, Rock Island’s community and economic development director.
Two spots that would particularly lend themselves to that are city-owned parcels on the northwest and northeast corners of the intersection of the Rock Island Parkway (Centennial Expressway) and Illinois 92 (Andalusia Road), he said. The city purchased the parcels, 20 acres and 14 acres, respectively, from the Illinois Department of Transportation some years ago so there would be more control over how the land developed, he said.
“We haven’t really marketed it,” he added. “We’re waiting for the casino to be finished.”
Another concern for the institute is that ground immediately west of the parcel it purchased has been used for several years for automatic weapons testing by a Quad-City region gun manufacturer. That creates high-decibel noise that could be disturbing to wildlife, Paulson said.
“It’s a very good example of why we need a buffer,” he added.
The land is owned by Charlie Brandt of Brandt Construction Co., Milan, Ill., who said he gave permission for the testing more than 10 years ago. He disagrees with Paulson that the noise is disturbing to wildlife.
“They’re wrong,” he said. “That (doesn’t) bother (those) birds. I have a blind in my field, and I hunt geese and ducks. People that think that are thinking nuts. The trouble with people today is that they don’t know how to mind their own business.”
Brandt also supports commercial development in the area; that is why he invested in 125- and 165-acre parcels north of Andalusia Road about 35 years ago. He figured Rock Island would grow to the south and west, and “that’s what I had in mind,” he said.
“I think they’ve got enough wetlands and stuff right now,” he added.
About the purchase
The institute land was purchased from Harold Bayne, a retired maxillofacial surgeon from Taylor Ridge, Ill., with grants from three sources:
- The Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation, a nonprofit endowed by Commonwealth Edison with an office in Chicago, $300,000.
- The Grand Victoria Foundation, an Illinois nonprofit established by the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin, with offices in Elgin and Chicago, $115,000.
- The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, a national trust with offices in New York, N.Y, $80,000, via the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation and Ducks Unlimited.
Money above the purchase price went for associated costs, such as an appraisal, a survey, title insurance, recording fees and staff time and expenses, Paulson said.
Other entities having a role in the purchase are the Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Audubon Society, the Quad-City chapter of the Audubon Society, River Action Inc. and Augustana College, Rock Island.
Bayne said he hopes his former land and the parcels around it are conserved and that those in charge of managing it know what they are doing. Bayne added that he has seen well-intentioned government plans that did not work as they were supposed to.
“We have to preserve the wetlands, or we are not going to have the wildlife we’ve had,” he said.
He has fond memories of the time spent on his land and the adjoining national wildlife refuge.
“In the spring, during migration, it’s almost overwhelming, the birds in there,” he said. “There are tens of thousands of birds that are just sitting in there.
“I used to cross-country ski and ice skate on the lakes in the winter. It’s beautiful. It’s pristine. There are no people. The only tracks you’d see are your own tracks.”
Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com.
So that’s Milan Bottoms!
If you’ve ever driven south on either Interstate 280 or Illinois 92 toward Milan and looked to the west, you’ve seen it: swampy ground with trees, some living, some dead.
This is part of the land referred to as the Milan Bottoms; other parts of the Bottoms are generally dry and are being farmed.
The part that naturalists want to protect is that which is wetlands and timber. The reason some of the trees have died is, because of changes in hydrology brought about by human activity, they have found their roots underwater year-round.
Birds depend on the Bottoms for survival
The Milan Bottoms is important because it provides habitat for numerous threatened and endangered species, particularly birds, and it is one of the few such places left, said Jerry Paulson, executive director of the Natural Land Institute, Rockford, Ill.
Certain birds whose numbers are declining need large tracts to avoid predators and forage for food, and the Milan Bottoms is one of the largest such tracts remaining along the Upper Mississippi as an area that is still connected to the Mississippi River and not cut off by levees or road and railroad embankments.
The Bottoms is also home to many mammals, including river otters and bobcats.
Here are some of the area’s highlights in terms of birds:
- The black-crowned night heron and the yellow-crowned night heron breed here. Both are on the Illinois endangered species list.
- The bald eagle uses the area as an important winter night roost; as many as 800 eagles have been documented using the area in a single night. Kelly McKay, a field biologist from Hampton, Ill., who has been conducting the eagle count for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said the high numbers “make the Milan Bottoms the largest documented night roost on the Mississippi River.” If there are others, he does not know of them.
- The cerulean warbler breeds here. The bird is on the Illinois endangered species list and has suffered an 80 percent population decline throughout its range since 1966.
- It’s a heron rookery; aerial photos from 2002 show more than 200 active heron nests.
- Also breeding here are the yellow-billed cuckoo, the red-eyed vireo, the Eastern wood peewee and the great-crested flycatcher. All have suffered regional population declines because of habitat loss and degradation.
- It’s the largest documented breeding population of brown creepers in Illinois.
- Red-shouldered hawks roost here.
In terms of biodiversity, wetlands are disproportionately important in relation to their size, sustaining ecosystems over a scale that ranges far beyond the wetlands themselves, according to The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit international conservation group.
Wetlands also help purify the water that flows through them.
Since European settlement, an estimated 85 percent of all wetlands in Illinois have been lost, according to the conservancy.
IF YOU GO
The Upper Mississippi River Conference will be Aug. 21 to 23 at the i wireless Center, Moline, with the theme of how
to weave multiple uses into sustainable river communities.
The conference is geared toward registered participants, but the public is invited to a free presentation from 11 a.m. to noon Saturday, Aug. 23, by Richard Louv, author of the bestselling “Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder.”
In conjunction with the conference, there is the free RiverWay celebration that will include a lighted trail bike ride along the Mississippi River, sand-castle building, water screen movies, canoeing and kayaking lessons and the annual Taming of the Slough competition.
For more information, call River Action Inc.
at (563) 322-2969 or
visit the Web site
riveraction.org.