-
6. of marshes and marshes
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
6, of marshes and marshes Although the northern prairie marshes are mainly of glacial origin, they are not exclusively so. There are also the river oxbows. Much of my own experience with oxbows has been along the upper stretches of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and their tributaries in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota- where ducks are still ducks and muskrats still muskrats despite the differences between glacial and oxbow marshes. At least during the summer months, the ducks of these oxbows run more to the wood ducks that favor such places. The woods bordering the oxbows have the horned and barred owls hooting in the dusk, as do the woods about the glacial marshes of the prairies, but there are usually more of the barred owls about the oxbows. Even in oxbows having the familiar bulrushes, cattails, waterlilies, arrowheads, muskrat lodges, and mink-tracked borders, the plant and animal life of Iowa's big-river oxbows looks a bit more southern-with sycamores and buttonbushes and egrets and turkey vultures and red-shouldered hawks- more like Missouri or Maryland and southward. • • • The real South has its real marshlands, however much they may differ from the marshes of the North. Once, at New Year's, I of marshes and marshes 65 walked the edge of a great Louisiana marsh. It certainly had ducks and muskrats, hunters and trappers, and the unmistakable features of a marsh. But, to me, it had its unfamiliar or not-quite-familiar vegetation, the strangeness of smoke of many marsh fires, nearness of the sea, and talk of alligators, red wolves, and enormous turtles and garfishes. In the late twenties, I spent part of April in southern Georgia and northern Florida with H. L. Stoddard, the ornithologist. I was content to tag along behind him, with confidence that he knew where we were, where we were going, and when and how we would get there. We waded in walking clothes through marshes and swamps, avoiding the cottonmouths and poison ivy on the cypress knees. We lay on the bank where the Wakulla River welled out of the ground, watching the stratification of schools of fishes far, far down in the water of the great spring pool. An everglade kite with its specialized hooked beak fed upon the big snails that are its total diet. There were those large rail-like birds, the limpkins, in the shore vegetation of the flowing river. There were the anhingas , or snake birds, well enough named when they swam with heads out of the water, but, in the air, resembling flying sticks still more. Out on the Gulf sat the same bluebills and ringnecks and redheads and pintails and miscellaneous ducks that would soon be heading northward ; but there were also the egrets and ibises and brown pelicans and, at night, the calls of chuck-wills-widows. No muskrats lived for hundreds of miles in what looked like fairly suitable environment-no muskrats much nearer than the coastal marshes of Mississippi or North Carolina or the foothills of the Smokies. There were the so-called round-tailed muskrats - not really muskrats to anyone who knows muskrats. The roundtails were animals with the same fundamental rights of Iife of other animals. They belonged where they lived-they had what adaptations they needed to maintain themselves, and I was glad that they were there- but they were southerners in a South that I admittedly did not know. The South was genuine, beautiful, and fascinating, but it was not home to one born and apprenticed in a country molded by ice sheets. • • Desert marshes afford great contrasts in life and lifelessness and, sometimes, in life and death. 66 of marshes and marshes [54.157.56.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:05 GMT) In Utah, the Bear River marshes and other marshy areas are formed as fresh stream waters spread out over the flats along the east side of Great Salt Lake, and these have concentrations of water birds. For square mile after square mile, the mid- and late summer scenes are those of wading, swimming, or loafing water birds. On Iowa marshes and sloughs, one may see, on rare occasions, big shore birds like avocets. In the Dakotas and the Nebraska sandhills , these birds may be abundant enough to be of the species characteristic of most places suitable for shore birds. On the Bear River flats and the flats extending southward, they occur in such abundance that thousands are frequently in sight...