The river Dora remembers with such nostalgia is the Illinois. The wetlands she remembers along that river are mostly farmland today, producing the ubiquitous corn and soybeans. The river landscape she remembers from when she was a girl growing up in the small river town about halfway between Springfield, Ill., and Hannibal, Mo., disappeared many years ago.

Beginning in the 1920s, all along the Illinois, and along most other Midwestern rivers as well, the rich bottomland was drained by building earth levees and installing pumps so row crops could be planted.

"The sad part of it was, often they didn’t get a good crop off it. Still, they went ahead and farmed it," Dora remembers.

But Dora and others can now see time turning backward in a few places along the Illinois. Spunky Bottoms, 1,157 acres not far from Meridosia, is already beginning to find its old rhythm as a wetland, thanks to the Nature Conservancy. This organization is dedicated to restoring natural communities by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. Funded almost entirely by private contributions, its motto is "Saving the Last Great Places."

The conservancy bought the 1,157 acres of farmland on the west bank of the river back in 1997, spent several years researching what the land was like a century ago and then began restoring it. They called it Spunky Bottoms because it was just below a place historically known as Spunky Ridge. "Spunky" in this context means an area that has a lot of springs and other natural water.

Volunteers from neighboring high schools and colleges, 350 strong, helped the conservancy plant about 6,000 trees, including burr oak, linden, black walnut, sycamore, pecan, chinquapin, river birch and Kentucky coffee trees, all species that had once grown in the wetlands along the river.

The volunteers also helped plant hundreds of pounds of prairie seeds, all gathered within 150 miles of Spunky Bottoms so the plants would be the local species that once grew here.

But many of the plants that are returning are doing so without the help of humans. The seeds of natural vegetation that were lying dormant in these soils for as long as 75 years, like big bluestem, Indian grass and wild ryes, are coming back on their own.

The essential element to bring it all back is water. Because the water table is so high, the conservancy didn’t need to take down the levees to begin wetlands restoration, explains Douglas Blodgett, Great Rivers Area director. Just turning off the pumps was enough to produce shallow lakes and waterways, which this year provided a stopping place for an estimated 16,000 migrating ducks. Water lilies are growing where corn used to be.

An upland prairie, where Indian grass and rudbeckia (black-eyed Susans) grow instead of soybeans, attracted at least six rare Henslow’s sparrows, which require this very specific environment to survive. Bald eagles, white pelicans, and the shy and secretive black rail have returned to the area.

Not only birds, but fish and amphibians are also returning. John Tucker of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources showed visitors a collection of turtles that can live in the area — painted turtles, red-eared sliders, common and the false map turtles, both smooth and spiny soft-shells (the spiny one always bites, he notes), the stinkpot and the endangered Blandings turtle, which the conservancy hopes to re-establish at Spunky bottoms.

Black bass, white crappies, green sunfish, brown bullheads, carp and bigmouth buffalo are among the fish that will make their homes at Spunky Bottoms. At some point, the levees will be opened in places so fish can come into the bottoms to spawn.

"The Illinois River has been historically very productive," Blodgett told the visitors. "It has a large flood plain, as much as 7 miles wide some places, because at one time what is now the Mississippi flowed through here."

The last glaciers pushed the Mississippi over into its present location, and a smaller river, which became known as the Illinois, began draining the old Mississippi river bed.

"For 500 generations Native Americans lived along the Illinois river and its large backwaters," Blodgett said. "It was a very productive habitat, a good place for people to live."

(To be continued)

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