Ken Brunswick at the Limberlost marsh (Photo by Sam Hendren)
Biologists say we’ve lost about half
of the number of songbirds we had just 50 years
ago. Part of the reason is the loss of habitat.
Many birds need wetlands. Sam Hendren has the
story of one man’s love of those birds and his
work to save their home:
Transcript
Biologists say we’ve lost about half
of the number of songbirds we had just 50 years
ago. Part of the reason is the loss of habitat.
Many birds need wetlands. Sam Hendren has the
story of one man’s love of those birds and his
work to save their home:
When Ken Brunswick was a kid, he wanted
to study birds. Brunswick grew up near the
western Ohio town of St. Henry in the 1950s. He
says it didn’t take long to read all the books
about birds in the local library.
“I knew exactly where all the bird books were
because at that time that’s what I had my heart
set on, being an ornithologist,” Brunswick says.
One of the books that inspired Brunswick
was written by Gene Stratton-Porter. She was a
popular novelist in the early 1900s. Stratton-
Porter was best known for her fictional accounts
set in and around an Indiana swamp called the
Limberlost. She was also an amateur naturalist
and wrote several books about birds.
“I was in the eighth grade in that little two-room
schoolhouse reading ‘What I Have Done With
Birds’ by Gene Stratton-Porter, and the teacher
walked up to see what book I was reading, and
looked at it and the teacher said, ‘You know that
place isn’t very far from here.’ And I didn’t know
what she was talking about.”
The Limberlost actually was only a few miles
west across the state line. Stratton-Porter
moved to the area in 1888. But to the locals, the
trees were valuable lumber and the swamp was
a waste of land. Stratton-Porter wrote that
commerce attacked the Limberlost and began,
she said, its usual process of devastation. By
1910, two decades of destruction were
complete.
“This Loblolly Marsh was what I consider the
heart of the Limberlost area and this marsh was
actually the last thing that was drained in this
area so the farmers could start farming it,” says
Brunswick.
Brunswick became a farmer himself. He
started a dairy only a mile from the old Loblolly
Marsh. Through the years he learned more about
the swamp and the birds that lived there.
Later he formed the Limberlost
Remembered project. The group’s mission: to
bring Loblolly Marsh back to life. And they’ve
made a lot of headway.
Brunswick, who’s 63, is retried from farming.
He’s now an ecologist for the Indiana
Department of Natural Resources. He oversees
the Limberlost restoration.
We take a look at the changes aboard his ATV.
He’s maneuvering along a path near the edge of
the marsh. It’s thick with prairie cord grass,
switch grass and blue stem. Some of the grasses
have been planted here; other plant seeds have
lain dormant for decades and are now reclaiming
the ground on their own.
Out in the marsh the water is a gentle sea of
green and wildflowers abound around the edges.
But Brunswick’s love of the birds has not gone
away. And he’s thrilled to see them returning to
their marsh home.
“This is the area where we see American Bittern
once in a while. There’s been Virginia Rail, we
hear Sora Rail in here also. Sora is just a real
little bird that has just the dandiest sound when
it makes its call,” Brunswick says.
These birds and others like them are in
trouble. Most of the wetlands and prairies where
birds once thrived have disappeared.
Brunswick’s dream of becoming an
ornithologist never happened. But his work to
save the Limberlost has been his way of doing
something for the birds he loves.
“Actually when I think about this work I’m doing
it takes me back to that dream I had when I was
a kid in that two room schoolhouse. That dream
of being an ornithologist was taken away and
here, about 30 years later, seeing this land
flooding, I’m seeing birds that, some of them, I
never saw before.”
And the work of an old farmer has restored
the wetlands and natural areas that farmers
before him destroyed.
For The Environment Report, I’m Sam
Hendren.