Scoping the Mississippi

Great River Birding Trail

By Laura Erickson

Below the bluff where I was standing along the Great River Birding Trail, the Wisconsin River joined the Mississippi at Wyalusing State Park in Wisconsin. I was mesmerized by cumulus clouds reflected in the dark waters where the two great rivers become one, hundreds of miles downstream from the Mississippi’s headwaters in Minnesota’s Lake Itasca, and hundreds of miles upriver from where Huck and Jim discovered friendship.

Even as I gazed, my ears were focused behind me, where a red-shouldered hawk’s shrill call roused some blue jays. In the swamp below, a prothonotary warbler’s steady, gentle sweet sweet sweet rang out, and in the shade trees overhead, a cerulean warbler sang its cheerful tribute to laziness. White-breasted nuthatches, red-bellied woodpeckers, tufted titmice, and a dozen other birds added to the chorus. Suddenly, a red-headed woodpecker swept into view, its white wing patches and red head glowing in the sunlight. It flew across the river and disappeared into Pikes Peak State Park in Iowa.

The Mississippi River, long associated with riverboat gambling, Showboat, and childhood spelling lessons, is also a haven for birds, providing them with bountiful food and shelter. More than 300 species migrate along the Mississippi. Each autumn about 400,000 canvasbacks collect in its backwaters, along with 20,000 tundra swans. In summer, hooded, Kentucky, and prothonotary warblers reach the northern limits of their ranges in its riparian forests, and in winter, bald eagles are hard to miss over any open patch of water.

As birding-trail coordinators, Bonnie Koop and Jon Stravers, of the Audubon Upper Mississippi River Campaign, have worked with Audubon chapters and natural resource agencies on both sides of the 1,366-mile Upper Mississippi River in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, compiling more than a dozen illustrated birding maps. The Great River Road, the “spine” of the trail, connects parks, overlooks, and other spots where birders can view a diversity of species in a variety of habitats. Eventually the trail will extend through the five states along the Lower Mississippi River, to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Getting people to understand the ecology of the river is helpful [to its conservation],” points out Fred Lesher, past president of both the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union and the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, “and the trail is one of the few efforts to do so.” Its success will encourage government agencies, businesses, and landowners to protect the region, curbing the flow of pesticides and sediments from farms, and runoff from city streets and parking lots, into the river and its tributaries. Emphasizing the watershed’s value grows more urgent as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers evaluates expanding the lock-and-dam system on the Mississippi and its Illinois River tributary, a plan that could significantly increase barge traffic and compromise valuable habitat (see“Rolling on the River”).

Late one November I visited the river at Alma, Wisconsin. Thousands of swans swam like ghosts amid tendrils of rising mist. The fall gave way to winter, then spring, and warblers once again gleamed like gold pieces in the swampland. Economically and ornithologically, the Great River Birding Trail glows with hope—in Emily Dickinson’s words, “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”

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