Pat Middleton is the founder/publisher of the Mississippi River Home Page at www.greatriver.com and Great River Publishing which has produced quality river heritage and natural history books since 1987.
I recently stopped at the new observation platform just south of Goose Island to see the tundra swans scattered over the surface of a thin sheet of ice just south of Goose Island, on Hwy 35 in Wisconsin.
They don’t normally stick around when the ice forms, but I guess these knew that a warm front will settle into Wisconsin this weekend! That makes it a great weekend to visit both Wisconsin and Minnesota for swan and duck watching. Volunteers and Mississippi River Fish and Wildlife Refuge personnel will be available weekends with spotting scopes and information until the Tundra Swans leave in mid-December. Alex had a container full of ARROWROOT TUBERS during our visit, which is what the swans are eating in Pool 8.
Yesterday, I met a gentleman, Pete Harmon, who had driven 12 hours from OHIO to come and photograph the swans.
“Creation is so magnificent,” he said, “I just feel priviledge that I can capture one tiny aspect of it in a photograph.”
Had a note yesterday from one of my favorite bird photographers, Alan Stankevitz. He reported the amazing sight of seeing a 1000 Swans or more drop out of the sky onto Pool 8 at Brownsville, Minnesota…
“While spending a splendid afternoon today at the Brownsville Overlook (Hwy 26, 3 miles south of Brownsville, MN) there was a sudden fall-out of well over 1,000 Tundra Swans that dropped from high altitudes and landed on Pool 8. At first, they were just faint white specs way off in the distance, but within a few minutes they were beginning to land. What an incredible sight!
“I would estimate there are well over 10,000 Tundra Swans now on Pool 8 already.”
“I tried to capture the sight of the swans in the photo at left, but it doesn’t do it justice! The entire sky was filled with glittering swans.”
Now is the time to check out Pools 7 and 8 for abundant eagles and Tundra Swans! Swans will leave just before the ice begins forming in the backwaters. Now that leaves are gone, the Bald eagles and their great nests are highly visible in the bare trees.
It’s fall color time once again and we have color alerts for each of the ten river states along the Mississippi River. Visit http://www.greatriver.com/fallfoliage.htm
It’s also the peak season for migrating birds, and vast gatherings of sandhill cranes, Pelicans, geese, herons and other river waterfowl gathering to head down river.
It’s also the first time in 4 years that we can welcome the American Queen back onto the Upper Mississippi! The boat will be docking at Red Wing, La Crosse, Dubuque, Davenport, Burlington, Hannibal and St. Louis. Check the respective Visitor Bureaus for exact dates and time.
Nature’s alarm clock is back on! By 7 a.m. the calls of geese and cranes fill the marsh. Our next waterfowl alert will be the return of the White Pelican.
The pelicans normally follow the melting ice on the river, devouring the fish kill as they move north. Please post your on the comment pages of our Ramblin’ On Blog below!
Spring topics abound in the archives of Greatriver.com… Click HERE for www.greatriver.com birding archives or here for BIRDING archives from our RAMBLIN’ ON Blog. To find a vast array of articles related specifically to Eagles, or Cranes, or other subjects, use our SEARCH engines!
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Though rains and snow were both sparse this year, Spring always means a heightened interest inflood conditions along the Mississippi River. Use our search engine to find interactive flood maps.
Record warmth has also prompted a number of media mentions pertaining to the ICE AGE and past GLACIAL patterns. We’ve done a number of feature stories about past ice ages and the formation of the Mississippi River. Find them here….
With 70 degree days predicted for early next week, we will be seeing more and more of our returning songbirds and waterfowl. Sandhill Cranes, robins, red-winged black-birds, starlings, bluebirds and such are already singing, in addition to Cardinals, titmice and other year-round residents. Sandhills are still very quiet, so they don’t seem to be claiming their nesting territories yet. Send us your comments!! Click here to see our birding archive on the Ramblin’ On blog.
With so little snow this winter, spring flooding is unlikely this season. To see an interactive flood map, as well as past flooding accounts, click here.
The spring 2012 International Festival of Owls was held in Houston, Minnesota, last weekend. It is another harbinger of spring! (Snowy Owl pix, from Alan Stankevitz is left.)
[adsenseyu2]We had a beautiful barred owl in our backyard early one morning last week. Hawks are paired up and bald eagles are nesting. I’ll be watching for the return of white pelicans next… they follow the opening of the Mississippi River… perhaps looking for fish kill as the ice breaks up.
We have featured WHITE PELICANS, EAGLES and other large waterfowl for many years on www.greatriver.com
Please visit our dedicated Birding Index here at Greatriver.com It includes a long history of arrival dates for the sandhill cranes in the Upper Mississippi River valley.
Also, please let me recommend the book recently released by Susan Schneider… DECORAH EAGLES: A Love Story, published by Friesen Press
It follows the three 2011 hatchlings as they mature. One female was electronically tagged and journeyed hundreds of miles her first year!! I found it to be an excellent book which documented not only the first year of these three eaglets, but also the online community that shared their lives on line.
Could an Earthquake Happen in the Midwestern United States? With all the media coverage of the 7.0 magnitude quake in Haiti
in January 2010, interest has shifted to the USA. We all think of California immediately, but could it happen
here in the MIDWEST? Think NEW MADRID FAULT,
right under the Mississippi River!
Scientists suggest there is a 25% chance of a 7.5 magnitude quake by the year 2040. A quake of this magnitude would be felt throughout half of the United States and cause damage in twenty states or more.
by Pat Middleton, Volume 3, DISCOVER! AMERICA’s GREAT RIVER ROAD
Intensity map for the New Madrid Fault
The New Madrid Fault is a major active fault line that runs approximately from Memphis, Tennessee, to St. Louis, Missouri. On Dec. 16, 1811, this area was hit with an estimated 8.6 magnitude quake on the modern-day Richter scale. This was the first of THREE major quakes to rock the Midwest. A second quake on January 23, 1812 is estimated to have been an 8.4. A THIRD shock on February 7, 1812, is estimated to have been the strongest jolt ever to hit the North American continent at somewhere near 8.7 to 8.9.
We pulled some illuminating facts from Volume 3 of DISCOVER! America’s Great River Road…What would an 8.7 magnitude earthquake feel like?
The New Madrid earthquake released energy equal to 150,000,000 tons of TNT. In comparison, the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII equaled 35,000 to 40,000 tons of TNT!!
When the tremors and convulsions of the earth subsided, 30 to 50 thousand square miles of land had undergone vast topographical changes. Most of which are visible today. In the northwest corner of Tennessee, land dropped 10 to 20 feet and caused the Mississippi River to flow back upon itself which formed REELFOOT LAKE. In places along the Mississippi River, I have seen sandboils which still lie barren, or waves of undulating earth frozen into the compacted soil.
The New Madrid fault system extends 120 miles southward from Cairo, Illinois, through New Madrid andCaruthersville, Missouri, following I-55 free way system to Bytheville and on down to Marked Tree, Arkansas. Buried five to to ten miles underground (similar in depth to the Haiti quake), it crosses five state lines and cuts across the Mississippi River in three places.
THE USGS maintains a real time list of tremors along the New Madrid fault. Click map image to see the map for today.
Stories from SURVIVORS of the New Madrid Earthquake of
1811-1812
related in part from “Reelfoot Lake and the New Madrid Fault” by Juanita Clifton, 1980
Witnesses report that about 2 a.m. on December 16, 18aa, the earth around the little settlement of New Madrid, Missouri, began to rise and fall like waves upon the sea. When the peaks of the waves rolled through the Mississippi River, the river bottom heaved up, emptying the river onto its banks, inundating the shores and leaving some boats on dry land. When the troughs followed, the river rushed back into the hollows with such force that entire groves of trees were drawn out by the roots and thrown into the river.
On dry land, trees bent like heads of grain in the wind, their ranches interlocked, until they were ripped from the ground. Cracks formed in the earth that sometimes ran for MILES. The quake’s ground wave created sunken lands, fissures, and domes. Sand blows eruped sand and belched hot water, fumes, and carbonized wood.
Mattis M. Speed, a river traveler in February, 1812, described his experience. “We were awakened about 3 a.m. by the violent agitation of the boat accompanied by a noise so terrible it can best be described as the constant discharge of heavy cannon. The banks were falling into the river and the island to which we were tied was sinking. We cut ourselves loose from the island and pulled as far from the banks as necessary to avoid the falling trees. The swells of the river were so deep as to threaten the sinking of the boat with every minute.”
When he pulled out of the maelstrom at New Madrid, he wrote, “The former elevation of the bank was about 25 feet above common water. When we reached it, it was barely 12 or 3 feet. Scarcely a house was left entire, some completely prostrated, others unroofed and not a chimney standing.”
One man described holding to a tree to support himself during a quake. A fissure opened in the ground and both he and the tree fell in. He was unable to climb out of the fissure at that point and was forced to walk along it until an incline allowed him to scramble out. Fissures as deep as 100 feet ran for miles through the countryside.
New Madrid Earthquake Creates Reelfoot Lake
Both Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee, and St. Francis Lake in Arkansas were formed by the New Madrid Earthquake in 1811, 1812. A citizen from New Madrid, Missouri, wrote in 1816, “Lately, it has been discovered that a Lake was formed on the opposite side of the Mississippi River, in the Indian country, upwards of 100 miles and from one to six miles wide, of a depth of from 10 to 50 feet.”
The epicenter of the quake was about 70 miles southwest of modern Reelfoot Lake and more than 1800 recorded tremors, some of which rang bells on the east coast, followed by the first powerful jolts.
In 1815, Congress passed an act to relieve area inhabitants who found their riverside farms swallowed up or buried in the sand that spewed from the earth. More than 500 earthquake “certificates”, redeemable for up to 640 acres of government land, were allotted. The site of Hannibal, Missouri, was one of the resultant land grants.
The TIPTONVILLE DOME
A dome-like rise in the otherwise perfectly flat land is clearly visible on the west side of Reelfoot Lake, on the road from the Airpark Inn to Tiptonville, Tennessee. The Tiptonville Dome formed when the land around Reelfoot Lake sank during the earthquake. Above the newly formed depression, the Mississippi River appeared to flow backward when the waters rushed to fill the depression–the center of which is now Reelfoot Lake.
The raising of the dome also created a natural dam that, for a short time, forced the Mississippi River to flow back south upon itself. The same dam trapped water in low swampland in the vicinity of Reelfoot Creek and Bayou de Chien, eventually allowing Reelfoot Lake to form.
Great River Publishing is pleased to announce the KINDLE release of Michael Gillespie’s new steam history:
RAILROAD STORIES..True Adventures, Humorous Tales, and High Melodrama from the Days of Steam [Kindle Edition]
Click on cover image to explore a sample edition ONLINE or to download a sample directly to your Kindle!
In this 340 page collection of old railroading stories, Michael applies his generous wit, dry humor, and historical insights to the school of railroading literature at the height of the steam era … journals, press reports, trade magazines all produced stories meant at the time to entertain readers… but which today offer a compelling folk history from the early days of railroads.
It’s fall color time once again and we have color alerts for each of the ten river states along the Mississippi River. Visit 
Also, please let me recommend the book recently released by Susan Schneider… DECORAH EAGLES: A Love Story, published by Friesen Press
