Photograph courtesy of the Missouri Department of Conservation and Danny Brown
Four hundred million years ago, warm seas covered what’s now the Mississippi River Valley, slowly depositing the limestone that became the bluffs. The seas’ tiny creatures are now petrified in that rock. Catfish, carp, buffalo fish, drum fish, bass, gars, saugers (cousins to the walleye, and more common in our stretch), and all sorts of sturgeon (including the federally protected pallid and shovelnose sturgeons) dart and
glide through the river. At its edges, delicately whiskered river otters squat in the vacated homes of muskrats and beavers, nibbling on mussels, frogs, turtles, or long-pincered crayfish, with slender, drab bodies brightened by red piping and dark blue-green pincers. Raccoons make themselves cozy in big old hollowed trees, muskrats in the river’s quiet backwaters, mink in the root-tangled cover along the shore.
The wildflowers that grow in the bluff forests, ravines, and bottomland make a Whitmanesque catalog: black-eyed Susan, bloodroot, prairie phlox, mayapple, jack-in-the-pulpit, white wild indigo, wild ginger, butterfly weed, milkweed, smartweed, sunflower, arrowhead, and the extremely rare decurrent false aster, a flower scarcely found anywhere else. There are morel mushrooms and a slew of sedges; sand dropseed and purple lovegrass on the sands; ripgut in the muck; and in dryer soil, native stands of big bluestem that probably date back to the Lewis and Clark days. Shrubs and trees include swamp privet, which is rare, as well as buttonbush; swamp dogwood; sandbar willow and black willow; and cottonwood, hackberry, persimmon, silver maple, sycamore, box elder, and pawpaw trees.
The river life continues in midair: 40 percent of all North American birds migrate using the Mississippi River as their GPS. Geese and ducks lately have been joined by trumpeter swans and white pelicans. When the Melvin Price Locks and Dam opened in 1990, it created shallow ponds that made the perfect rest stop for egrets, herons, and other wading birds, then pelicans and other, rarer birds.
So many birds came that in 1998, the Corps created a 1,200-acre Environmental Demonstration Area to protect and restore the new habitat. In 2006, the Audubon Society declared the refuge an Important Bird Area, in much the tones Christopher Robin might use. Expanded to 3,700 acres, it was renamed the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary.
The Riverlands sanctuary includes Ellis Island (no one checks passports) and several ponds, freshwater marshes, and trails. Bald eagles nest in trees along Ellis Bay. The interior least tern, an elegant white bird with a black cap and pale gray wings, hadn’t been back since the late 1960s, so in summer 2009, the Corps made a nesting area on two barges, covering them with sandy gravel, just so, and sprinkling the tern’s favorite food, and setting up tern decoys, and using a solar-powered call box to broadcast the tern’s mating call. The terns came back.
This spring, the Audubon Center at Riverlands opens. It was built to accommodate human visitors, who are far less rare.
Background provided by Mike Arduser, natural-history biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation, Patricia Hagan, executive director of the Audubon Center at Riverlands, and Janet Mifflin, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers natural-resource specialist. See more Missouri wildlife photography by MDC fisheries biologist Danny Brown at dannybrownphotography.com.
