A Correction: The Genesis of Riverlands

“I noticed with some anxiety inaccuracies with your earlier postings.
I stumbled across this one when searching for new images on the least tern nesting project.
“Your statement that suggests the sanctuary was the result of mitigation is wholly wrong.  Mitigation to the States of Missouri and Illinois attendant to the replacement of Old L/D 26 at [...]

Pike’s Peak, Iowa and the Mississippi

When a fast moving stream meets a slow moving stream or a still body of water, it deposits its load of sediment in the slow moving stream. This is how the tributaries to the Upper Mississippi built its floodplain. Rivers, like the Wisconsin, deposited sediment eroded from its uplands in the slow moving Mississippi, creating [...]

New Years Day at Riverlands

 
Riverlands is the Corps of Engineers’ gift to birders. Actually, it’s Congress’s gift to birders. Congress required that the Corps mitigate acre for acre the wetlands lost to the construction of Lock and Dam #26 at Alton, Illinois. Riverlands is the largest and most accessible of several mitigation areas. It is, in essence, the overflow [...]

The Flood of 2008–December

It happened again on Saturday: Warm moist air hit a cold front and dumped inches and inches of rain, two inches in two hours in west-central Illinois, melting ice and snow and bringing flooding once again to the  Midwest. The Mississippi rose 2.83 feet at St. Louis on Saturday, 9.68 inches on Sunday, and 4.o5 [...]