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The Return of Bird Spring Swamp How one man's idea restored wildlife habitat.
STORY BY WILLIAM McCLAIN After a long keelboat ride down the Ohio River to Illinois in the year 1824, the Marshall family left Shawneetown in search of a suitable homesite along the Cache River. Eventually, they purchased two sections of property that included a wetland comprised of huge cypress and tupelo trees. This wetland, now known as Bird Spring Swamp, was fed by a spring that flowed from the base of a hill through an unusual stone arch. The river was wider in those days, and steamboats traveled upstream as far as Belknap. Because of the fresh water and abundant wood for fuel, the Marshall family thought that this area would be an important site for a steamboat landing. The swamp received its name from the Bird family, which had lived on the uplands. During their times, the area was sparsely inhabited, and Mr. Bird liked it that way. It was generally acknowledged that he made his living stealing horses, so he didn't want any close neighbors. The Cache By most standards, the Cache is a small river. After flowing through the uplands, it meanders across the bottomlands to the Ohio River. Along the course of the lower Cache are cypress and tupelo swamps, including Deer Pond, Little Black Slough and Cypress Pond. Though the river is small, these swamps are huge, comprising thousands of acres. These wetlands are unlike any others in the state. In addition to having giant bald cypress and tupelo, they are havens for ducks, song-
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birds, plants, fish, reptiles and amphibians. In fact, going to the Cache River is like taking a trip to the nation's deep south, except the bald cypress trees don't have Spanish moss hanging from them, and there are no alligators in the water. While highly valued today for the habitat it provides for plant and animal species, at one time the swamp was seen by some as a waste area and by others as a hazard.
During times of high rainfall, the Cache River overflowed its banks, and the floodwater filled the swamps along the lower portion of the stream. This was life-giving water for the swamps. Without it, they would have dried out and the plants and animals dependent upon the water would have died. But those individuals who viewed the swamps as wastelands harboring disease and pestilence wanted the water drained and the lands made productive. Their pleas for help were heard by a group of engineers that proposed the construction of a new lower channel along the course of Post Creek, a small tributary that flowed northwest from the uplands of southeastern Johnson County to join the Cache. The proposed channel would shorten the river by 53 miles. Most of all, it would provide a way to drain swamps. Crews set about the work of digging and blasting along the course of Post Creek, and by 1915, the annual floodwaters were flowing along the new channel. Soon, the waters of the lower Cache began to flow into the recently created ditch, appropriately named the Post Creek Cutoff. The river was flowing backward! At first, the Post Creek Cutoff was a relatively small ditch. But the waters of the upper part of the Cache were moving swiftly when they hit the new channel, causing tremendous amounts of soil to be washed downstream into the Ohio River. As the decades passed, the once small ditch grew into a deep, wide gorge.
Then the erosion began to move upstream. The bed of the Cache started to erode away, causing the river to fall deeper within its channel. This process, called entrenchment, continued to deepen and widen the river upstream, eventually reaching the swamps that long had been nourished by the annual floodwaters. With the channel enlarged, the water no longer flowed into the swamps. Instead, water from springs and heavy rains began to drain underground into the deepening bed of the Cache through holes left by decayed roots. These drainage holes eventually collapsed
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to form gullies big enough to cause all of the water in the swamps to drain into the Cache. The swamps Bird Spring Swamp went dry in the early 1970s. But the loss of the water was just one of a series of changes that had taken place. Several years before, hunting dogs had cornered an otter in the rocks deep within the stone arch of the spring. When the otter wouldn't budge from the rocks, the hunter threw a stick of dynamite into the spring, blowing the arch to pieces. No one knows what happened to the otter, the dogs or the hunter. Heron Pond and other swamps farther upstream now were threatened with the same fate as Bird Spring. It was alarming news. Various procedures were tried on the Cache to prevent the loss of Heron Pond. One involved placing wire baskets filled with large stones (called gabions) along the banks of the Cache to prevent additional erosion. This procedure seemed to work. Heron Pond would not suffer the same fate as Bird Spring Swamp. It was safe for a while. It was at this time that Mark Guetersloh, a DNR district natural heritage biologist, developed an idea. By using a small bulldozer, some piping and a water control valve, he found it might be possible to create a dam across the gullies, causing the water to remain in the swamps instead of draining into the Cache. The idea was first implemented at Hook Pond, and the results have been more than Guetersloh ever hoped to achieve. The water is back, and so are the mud snakes, bird-voiced tree frogs and wood ducks. The prothonatary warblers that could never raise young in the shrubs of the old pond bed due to high predation, now are experiencing great success at rearing young. The restoration of Bird Spring Swamp was completed last September. Within three weeks, the swamp had water in it for the first time in nearly 30 years. By the second week in October, large numbers of wood ducks and other waterfowl were already using the site. Bird Spring Swamp has returned!
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