Wing Dams, the Mississippi, and Clean Renewable Energy

 
South of Alton, Illinois the Mississippi is an open river, unencumbered by dams. Here, Congress requires the St. Louis District of the Corps of Engineers to maintain a nine-foot navigation channel. It does so with channel-training devices, wing dams or dikes, which speed up the current, direct it to the center of the river, and [...]

The Stimulus: Ecosystem as Infrastructure $3.16 Million for Habitat Restoration in Midwest

 
 The Midwest Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will get $28.5 million for its refuges and facilities. Of that $3.16 million will go to habitat restoration.
The Mingo NWR will get a $2.8 million visitor center, which will be handicap accessible and energy efficient.

Twenty thousand years ago the Mississippi River flowed along the western [...]

MRGO and the Manchac Landbridge

 
Six streams flowed to Lake Maurepas including the Amite River and Bayou Manchac, a distributary of the Mississippi until Andrew Jackson built an earthen dam across its head in 1814. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville discovered that the Bayou could be a shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico in 1699. Before its closing overflow from the [...]

Earth Day: MRGO Closed

 
It’s Earth Day 2009 and MRGO is closed to navigation, but it’s still there, still conveying salt water into the intermediate and fresh wetlands of the Pontchartrain Basin. Until it is truly closed and filled in, it is not really gone.
We have already seen the damage it caused to Bayou Bienvenue in the the immediate [...]

Midweek sojourn in the Shawnee Hills

The Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Wabash border the Shawnee Hills, a region in southern-most Illinois. Today, 2,000 runners will brave light rains and conduct an 80-mile relay race along the River-to-River Trail. They will start at McGee Hill on the Mississippi and finish at Golconda, Illinois on the Ohio. Each team member will run [...]

“The weeds and grass in this portion of the bayou point to the fact that, if but let alone, its entire closure is but a matter of a short time. It was noted that during a falling tide the current was very slight, and this slight current flowed towards Bayou Barataria instead of, as would [...]

Spring Migration at the Confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers

 
 Confluence Greenway posted its schedule for April and May, a celebration of the spring migration in the St. Louis area.
Confluence Greenway started in 1998, when the McKnight Foundation, based in Minneapolis, suggested that five groups it was funding with small grants, each with an interest in the Mississippi, pool their resources and form a bigger organization, [...]

Grand Isle and the Spring Migration

 
Spring is here and its wet in Waterloo, Illinois. Robins and grackles are bathing in the puddles in the grass.  The ganders are jousting, their necks extended like lances, vying for who gets which nesting place on which pond. They will continue this behavior until the fledglings are out of the nest and swimming in [...]

The Black River in Missouri and Arkansas

 
What to do with the water come flood time has been an issue for the Corps of Engineers since the 19th century. Levees kept it off the fields until the levees broke, and the levees broke massively in 1927.
After the Flood of 1927, which inundated the Lower Mississippi Valley from valley wall to valley wall, [...]

Barataria Preserve–The Jean Lafitte National Park and Preserve

Congress authorized the formation of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in 1978 and designed the park to preserve the Louisiana’s history as well as its natural history. It is located at different sites. across southern Louisiana.
The Prairie Acadian Cultural Center at Eunice interprets the culture of the Acadians who settled in [...]