Restored, Revisited Goose Pond Area is Redrawing the Routes of Indiana’s Migratory Birds
By SHARON SORENSON, Courier & Press correspondents
Restore the habitat and birds will come. Nowhere is that more evident than at Goose Pond, Indiana’s newest fish and wildlife area.
Situated near Linton in Greene County, Ind., the area once known as Blackwater Marsh has been drained for agriculture since early 1900. Despite herculean efforts, a century’s worth of crop failures forced landowners to concede: Marsh would return to marsh. Here was an opportunity to restore 8,000 acres of marsh and grasslands and to re-create a natural migration corridor.
The opportunity attracted federal, state and private dollars to purchase and restore the habitat. In 2005, the land became the state’s largest acquisition since 1948. Restoration began.
Now, two years later, according to Dr. Lee Sterrenburg, who monitors bird populations at Goose Pond, the project is redrawing range maps for Hoosier birds.
This spring an astonishing 23 migrating shorebird species rested and refueled here; and last winter, birders totaled a record- breaking 93 species on the annual Audubon count.
Sterrenburg frequently refers to birds with strange-sounding names – soras, moorhens, rails, bitterns. But with 85 percent of Indiana’s wetlands gone, most Hoosiers have had little or no cause to hear marshland bird names.
That’s all changing at Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area.
Once-common birds nearly extirpated by habitat loss have now burst back on the scene. Indiana’s largest breeding population of Least Bitterns has made the place home.
Black-necked stilts nest here, one of only two breeding sites in Indiana. About 3,500 sandhill cranes, the longest-living birds still alive, bugle across winter marsh. Sedge wrens brighten prairies with song. Great egrets, the National Audubon Society’s symbol, grace the skies and water’s edge with long legs and wide, white wingspans. Lesser yellowlegs fill the shallows, sometimes by the hundreds. Yellow-crowned night-herons boast their highest numbers in 25 years. The list grows.
Three highly endangered birds have made homes at Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area:
* King rails, absent from the area since 1914, now nest here, the site currently boasting, says Sterrenburg, “the largest known breeding population in the state, (larger) than the rest of Indiana combined.”
* American bitterns, at the southern end of their breeding range, appeared in the area last winter for the first time in the 107-year history of Indiana Audubon counts.
* Whooping cranes, the rarest birds in North America, wing in to Goose Pond in small numbers both fall and spring.
Whether or not we’ve ever heard these bird names, the phenomenal results of habitat restoration make astounding news. Birds at Goose Pond, desperate for habitat, quite simply have returned to their ancestral feeding and breeding grounds.
“Because this property is so successful, it is becoming a model for other wetland restoration,” said Brad Feaster, property manager at Goose Pond.
“In fact, (Goose Pond) might well be the best-studied restoration process in all of North America.”
And birds, the keystone species signifying flourishing habitat, verify the success story.
* * *
GOOSE POND FISH AND WILDLIFE AREA BY THE NUMBERS
85
Percentage of state wetlands gone
8,000
Acres in Goose Pond FWA
5,000
Acres restored marsh
1,200
Acres restored prairie
500
Acres replanted forest
1948
Last time state acquired this much land
$7 MILLION
Cost to preserve habitat in perpetuity
$8 MILLION
Final purchase price for Goose Pond
30
Miles of earthen dikes to restore marsh
2010
Anticipated restoration completion date
BIRDS BY THE (BIG) NUMBERS
Highest numbers seen in a single day at Goose Pond
In the marsh
700
Lesser yellowlegs
270
Great egrets
300
Wilson’s snipes
3,500
Sandhill cranes
450
Snow geese
250
Greater white-fronted geese
3,900
Canada geese
5,670
Ducks, multiple species
On the prairie
450
Song sparrows
470
Swamp sparrows
150
Savannah sparrows
680
American tree sparrows
2,700
Tree swallows
250
Northern cardinals
Map – LARRY FINK
(c) 2007 Evansville Courier & Press. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.