Around 100 years ago, broad floodplains were disconnected from the Illinois River by earthen levees, primarily for agriculture.
Now, some of those floodplains have been returned to their natural state, including one in Brown County called Spunky Bottoms.
“It is well off the beaten path,” said Randy Smith, the Illinois River Project Director for The Nature Conservancy.
He said that’s great from a management and a flexibility standpoint, but perhaps not so great in terms of promoting some of their wetland management and river conservation efforts.
‘A wetland habitat nerd’
TNC hopes to eventually make Spunky Bottoms more easily accessible to the public for paddling, birdwatching, and the like. Right now, they don’t have an ideal spot for people to get down to the water’s edge.
However, on a warm and pleasant early summer day, several of us managed to set out in an 18-foot, metal flat-bottom boat with a small motor to take a look at Spunky Bottoms.
“I am a wetland habitat nerd,” Smith said.
He enjoys mucking around in shallow water and watching for birds. He spotted a least bittern. That’s the smallest heron in North America and a state-threatened migrant bird in Illinois.
“They are what we would call a secretive marsh bird. They're kind of cryptically colored. They tend to not take off and fly too much. They kind of stay in the vegetation,” Smith said.
“They love places like this. These are the types of spots they're looking for. So really happy to see them here.”
During the tour, we also saw cormorants, a hooded merganser, and a beaver lodge, along with a variety of vegetation including American lotus, hardy hibiscus, and water smartweed.
Managing the wetland
The Nature Conservancy acquired the roughly 1,300-acre Merwin Preserve at Spunky Bottoms in the late 1990s and allowed the site to return to being a floodplain wetland.
That has not come without challenges. The earthen levee continues to separate the site from the Illinois River. But a breach in 2013 allowed river water to pour into the wetland, affecting the fish and plant communities — and not in a good way.
Smith said the Illinois River has changed in the past century. As a result, he feels wetlands connected to it are degraded.
He said they have poor water quality and the water levels are shallow. Sediment in those wetlands does not allow rooted vegetation to take hold. The fish and wildlife communities are not diverse.
After the breach, The Nature Conservancy saw these problems arise in Spunky Bottoms, so they’ve been working to get the wetland back into shape.
While the levee has now been repaired, Spunky Bottoms is not entirely cut off from the river. Smith said they have a managed connection to it.
“Where we can make decisions about when water enters and leaves to try to replicate some of those historic things that we’re not getting now if we let the river come and go on its own,” he said.
This is done through a six-foot concrete culvert with a gate that TNC can open and close as it chooses. By managing it, Smith said they hope to create what a typical, historic wetland might have been like in terms of water levels.
“We do a lot of science and monitoring of any time we're moving water, trying to measure as many different things as we can, which helps and forms our decision-making going forward and hopefully helps other managers make decisions about what they want to do with their wetlands”, he said.
The water levels are important because, for example, a shorebird migrating through in the spring or fall can’t wade in the mudflat if the water is too deep. Conversely, if the wetland is too dry and the water levels are too low, there might not be the ideal habitat for fish that are breeding in the spring.
For the most part, though, restoration of Spunky Bottoms involves just allowing the site to return to its natural state.
Dormancy and resiliency
Smith said that during the past quarter century of studying Spunky Bottoms, they’ve found that as long as the soil was not tremendously disturbed, such as being removed during those years the site was farmed, the plants will come back, even after being dormant for decades.
“These wetland plant species seem to be especially resilient just because of the biology of their seeds. They have very, very hard seed coats that do not degrade very easily at all. They will last a tremendously long time,” Smith said.
“And the plant communities and seeds and all of the things are able to survive in the soil through all of that agriculture and all of the herbicides and pesticides and everything else and come roaring back when conditions are right.”
Denim Perry sat at the back of the boat, steering us through the wetland. He’s an Illinois River Project deputy director with TNC. A native of Brown County, he lives adjacent to Spunky Bottoms and spends a lot of his time on the site.
“I love living along the Illinois River and the communities that call this place home. It's special to me and Spunky Bottoms has always been a special place to me as well,” Perry said.
There is no clear-cut explanation for why the wetland is called Spunky Bottoms.
Smith said old U.S. Geological Survey maps refer to the bluff along the river as Spunky Ridge, so he thought perhaps the bottoms became known locally as Spunky Bottoms.
Perry added a further thought.
“Another definition of spunky: it can be resilient. And so it could have been referred to the folks that inhabited this landscape years ago, and thus an awesome name for a wetland like this, too. Its resiliency,” Perry said.
Challenges ahead
While Spunky Bottoms has shown resilience, Smith said work remains.
“We have some challenges ahead of us, but we certainly have an opportunity to increase the quality of the system, and that's going to benefit a lot of things from fish and wildlife to people and just makes a better system overall,” he said.
Smith said there should be both some high-water points and some low-water points in a wetland. He said that keeps things in a high-quality state and kind of keeps things evolving and moving.
Smith said there have been many changes on the Illinois River, including construction of a lock and dam system. In addition, the floodplain wetlands were altered. In some cases, they were farmed for decades.
But the big takeaway, he said, is that through it all, wetlands continue to demonstrate how resilient — and spunky — they can be.
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