Upper Mississippi River

It's still there

2011-04-14T10:18:00.000-05:00

The Stillwater lift bridge hasn't floated off its foundation, but it is closed to traffic even though it isn't overtopped. The St. Croix was cresting at Stillwater Tuesday when I took this shot and the river is falling slowly. The bridge should reopen to traffic on Monday.

Slow flood

2011-04-14T10:13:00.000-05:00

A long slow melt produced a much more modest flood than expected, but it's lasting a bit longer, too. The water was already dropping Tuesday when I visited Interstate Park (Minnesota) on the St. Croix River.

No melt, no flood

2011-03-29T06:40:00.000-05:00

It's hard to cook up a good flood when the snow's not melting.

Temperatures 20 degrees below normal have produced precious little melting, causing flood crest forecasts to trend down, at least for now. The major rivers are high and fast, but not rising much. The result is likely to be a much longer duration flood, but the crests won't be near as high.

Third day of spring

2011-03-23T09:52:00.000-05:00

Schools are closed, roads are horrible. Don't worry, it'll melt--but it's not supposed to get over 32 until next Tuesday.

Here comes the water...

2011-03-22T09:27:00.000-05:00

Flooding is beginning in earnest now, and conditions are worsening.

It's Tuesday morning and it's raining hard in the Twin Cities, and dumping snow further north. The Mississippi is rising fast in St. Paul: it was at 8.5 feet this morning and is expected to hit 13.4 feet--a five-foot rise--by Thursday morning. And that's not taking into account any rain/snow after 7 a.m. today. It takes serious water to make a river as big as the Mississippi rise five feet in two days, and current precipitation means this forecast is low and will be revised upward very soon.

Streets near the river are closing and the Upper Landing housing project--which should never have been allowed in the first place--is getting ready to evacuate. Long-range flood forecasts are already out of date and will need to be revised, but even the current projection suggests a 40 percent chance of exceeding the record flood crest of 26.4 feet on April 16, 1965.

It's worth noting that the record flood levels are all from mid-April. The northern part of the Mississippi and St. Croix watersheds still contain lots of old snow, and new snow is piling up quickly.

On the St. Croix, the much-discussed Stillwater bridge will likely close on Saturday, if not sooner. The river there stood at 679.15 this morning (Tuesday), and will rise to 686--the level needed to close the bridge--by late Saturday (and that's assuming we don't get all the precipitation we're now getting).

The flood of record on the St. Croix at Stillwater is 694.1, reached on April 18, 1965. The chance of exceeding that currently stands at 20 percent.

Now that our snowpack is melting in earnest, flood forecasting will become a rapidly changing game. But with a significant precipitation event ongoing and another coming over the weekend, the odds of this being a major flood event are rising faster than the river.

No, the dams don't hold flood water back

2011-03-16T15:07:00.000-05:00

Every time we have flooding on the Mississippi I hear people complain that the Corps of Engineers is holding water back behind the dams to reduce flooding downriver, making local problems upriver worse.

Not true.

The lock and dam system on the Mississippi is designed to maintain minimum water levels during a drought. The dams have no effect on flooding and were never intended to be used for flood control. As the river rises, the gates are lifted out of the water and the river rolls on through. During floods, you could run a motorboat right through the dam's gates (if you were crazy enough) because there's really no drop in river level anymore.

For whatever reason, this complaint circulates most frequently on the St. Croix River, where water levels are affected up to a bit north of Stillwater by Lock/Dam 3 at Red Wing. Lock/Dam 3 maintains the river level at 675.0 feet above sea level--thanks to the dam, the river won't drop below that. The dam effectively guarantees the river at Stillwater will be about five feet above the natural low water that would otherwise occur during a drought if the dam weren't there. But most of the time the river is much higher than "flat pool" (675.0) and that's caused by flow from upstream--and sometimes backwater effect from a higher-flowing Mississippi--not by anything that's happening at the dam.

Slow melt helps

2011-03-16T14:57:00.000-05:00

We're experiencing only gradual melting, which should help with flooding on major rivers in the area. We're seeing our first 50-degree temperatures today, and tonight may be the first night without below-freezing temperatures in many months. That will hasten runoff and push rivers up, but cooler weather is returning in a few days.

River ice may be an issue. The St. Croix is rising and there is water over the ice at Hudson, suggesting river ice is still pretty solid and holding fast to the shoreline. If the rivers rise very fast, the ice will break up while still fairly solid, increasing the risk of ice jams.

As recently as Friday, Mississippi River ice on Lake Pepin was largely in excess of 19 inches of blue ice (blue ice is the hard stuff). This won't break up easily anytime soon.

Up the flood total

2011-03-09T18:38:00.000-06:00

The latest flood forecasts suggest things will be more dire than earlier predicted, but that forecast assumed this week's piddly snowfall would be much more. The situation will start to be very fluid now. Additional precipitation and melt speed will be critical. And so far, the weather is holding cold and melting is delayed. The longer the delay, the greater the risk it will all melt at once. Whoosh.

Spring flooding?

2011-03-02T16:18:00.002-06:00

People are starting to compare current conditions with those at this time in 1965, which led to the flood of record for the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers in the Twin Cities area. The following is from the Minnesota Climatology Working Group’s Hydroclim Newsletter issued today:

“There are several factors pointing towards major spring flooding for many of Minnesota's rivers and streams. Saturated soils from an extraordinarily wet autumn, abundant snow cover, and high winter stream base flows combine to produce a high risk scenario. Projections for many Minnesota river communities indicate a greater than 60 percent probability of major flooding. The probability of major flooding exceeds 80 percent at some locations, especially in the Red River basin and forecast points in the vicinity of the Twin Cities. The possibility of record flooding exists for some locales. The National Weather Service produces long-range probabilistic river stage and discharge outlooks. These products are part of the National Weather Service's Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (AHPS). The next probabilistic spring flood outlooks will be released March 4.”

Like in the winter of 1964-65, we received abundant fall rains that left saturated soils. We’ve had lots of snow this winter, and precious little melting has occurred. There is a lot of water in the snowpack—around five inches in your yard. Weather has remained cold and no serious melting has started.

Three things occurred in 1965 that made spring flooding worse. we had a heavy rain in early March followed by more cold weather, which kept that water in the snowpack. We then had abundant snowfall, which is pretty normal for March. Cold weather persisted well into the month, so our spring melt occurred quickly when it finally came. It remains to be seen if those conditions develop again this year.

The last flood forecast, issued in mid-February, suggested a 15 percent probability of record-breaking floods in St. Paul and Stillwater. A new forecast will be issued Friday.

The Season of the Birds

2010-09-09T09:52:00.000-05:00

The Season of the Birds began at my feeder about two weeks ago when sunflower seed consumption suddenly doubled. The birds know the season is changing and they're beginning to bulk up. For those staying the winter, it's time to start adding a protective layer of fat. But for the migrants, it's time to get ready for the big trip downriver.

While this activity is playing out in a small way at backyard feeders everywhere, it's coming together on a much grander scale in the Mississippi Valley. One of the most heavily used migratory bird corridors on earth, the birds aren't moving south yet but are starting to gather at the river.

The media is more interested in water bird migration this year because of fears the birds won't come back in the spring after wintering in what BP has left us in the Gulf of Mexico. Will loons and others die off by the millions, bringing us a new form of Silent Spring next year?

The truth is the experts have no idea. Very bad things may happen. Or maybe not. The earth has a way of recovering from our bad habits (read "The World Without Us"), and scientists were stunned by the speed of recovery from a big spill in a Mexican bay of the Gulf some years ago. On the other hand, the world has never dealt with a spill of this magnitude and the suggestion that the oil has already dissipated is probably folly.

Federal agencies are watching this fall's migration closely, and will watch even more closely next spring. Wish our Upper Mississippi birds luck--they're going to need it.

River otter are returning

2010-08-30T07:58:00.000-05:00

For most of us, some sort of play is part of everyday life. We do a lot of things just for the fun of it and not because it puts food on the table. In the animal world, life seems to be much more focused on eating, sleeping and just staying alive—you don’t often see animals just playing around.

An engaging exception to that is the river otter (Lutra Canadensis), which seems to spend much of its time just goofing off.

You can see them on lakes near the Canadian border, on the Upper St. Croix River and—with increasing frequency—on the Mississippi River in downtown St. Paul and near downtown Minneapolis.

Driven from the river by pollution decades ago, cleaner water and abundant fish life have seen a return of the river otter to the heart of the city. Otter have been seen near the docks at Harriet Island, near St. Anthony Falls, and around Coon Rapids Dam.

National Park Service researchers took to the river beginning in late 2009 to document the presence of river otter and begin to get an idea of their numbers. This work will continue into early 2011 and possibly beyond.

We’ve learned the best places to spot river otter are the Snelling Lake, Crosby Lake and Pickerel Lake backwaters between the international airport and downtown St. Paul. Considering river otter are known to range over 40 miles, these sightings could all be of the same family group moving from one area to another.

We’ve also confirmed river otter in the Coon Rapids Dam area, and it’s likely that’s not the same family group. Sightings near downtown Minneapolis could easily be the Fort Snelling area group. We believe there may be otter in the Grey Cloud Island area, but evidence so far is sketchy. The Vermillion River bottoms downriver of Hastings may also be prime river otter territory, although we haven’t searched that area extensively yet.

Their increasing presence in this area reflects the increasing abundance of fish, since otter love to eat fish and are darned efficient at catching them. With webbed feet and a sleek body, river otter are great swimmers—and they can stay underwater for up to eight minutes. They’re also pretty quick on land—they can run up to 18 miles per hour.

And if they’re good at catching food, they don’t need to keep at it 24/7, giving them more free time to play around. You may see them playing together in the water, or on a slippery river bank, but especially they seem to love sliding down snowbanks. Look for open water areas near shore in winter and you might encounter a treat few imagine they’d see in the heart of the city.

In the wild, river otter typically live 8-9 years. They’re dark brown, almost black, and may be three or four feet long—plus a foot-long tail. They may weigh 11-30 pounds. They’ll eat turtles, crayfish and other invertebrates, but they especially like fish. The presence of numerous bald eagle nests in the St. Paul area in recent years attests to the fact this reach of river contains lots of fish.

Oops, been gone

2010-08-30T07:50:00.000-05:00

I got swallowed by a huge project the last six months that just ate up too much of my life. Things should get back to normal now, whatever normal is.

The spring floods are coming...

2010-03-08T10:40:00.000-06:00

Spring flood season is fast approaching and with it will come some media hype. Here's what to expect in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area.

Ignore the media hype about the Red River at Fargo/Moorhead, since the Red is in the Hudson Bay watershed.

Also remember that what the weather looks like here has very little to do with flooding here.

Weather events between now and mid-April will have a significant effect on flooding and on the flood forecast.

The snowpack in north central and east central Minnesota isn't unusual, so you can expect flooding from the main stem of the Mississippi above the Twin Cities will be fairly moderate. The Sauk River enters at St. Cloud and may bring considerable water, so flood risks go from pretty low above there to a bit higher. There is also risk of fairly significant flooding on the Crow River, which enters the Mississippi at Dayton in the northwestern suburbs. Generally, though, the flood risk above the mouth of the Minnesota River isn't great. The St. Croix also will not see significant flooding since it's snowpack isn't great, although the St. Croix will see backwater effect from the Mississippi as far north as Stillwater.

The Minnesota River is another issue.

The snowpack in west central Minnesota--near the headwaters of the Red, Sauk, Crow and Minnesota river watersheds--currently contains about nine inches of WATER (not snow, water). As a result, significant flooding may occur on the Minnesota River and that in turn will affect the Mississippi downriver of Fort Snelling.

Once in the Mississippi, the impacts at St. Paul should be visually interesting, but not threatening. Lilydale Regional Park will flood. Harriet Island Regional Park will probably flood. Warner Road may close. This will be the first flood experience for the Upper Landing housing project in St. Paul, and I suspect the sales people didn't tell the condo owners their lower level garages were designed to flood. I don't know if it will get high enough to affect those garages, but if it does we'll probably hear the folks whining.

It doesn't look like flooding will be significant enough to have a lot of effect at Hastings. Some low-lying areas between St. Paul and Hastings will be affected.

The current forecast is based on weather averages for the next six weeks and variations from normal will change things. With snow cover currently extending into central Missouri, the storm track for wet weather that usually brings us high school tournament blizzards this time of year has shifted way to the south. If our fairly dry weather continues, that will help. Also watch closely for fast or slow melting--in western Minnesota, not here--and for any unexpected heavy rains.

Don't be taken in by the media's obsession with "flood stage." Those levels may have meant something when they were established 100 years ago, but they mean little today. "Flood stage" at St. Paul means minor flooding in Lilydale Regional Park, but pretty much nothing else in St. Paul gets wet then.

Also pay attention to the media's other flood obsession, the "hundred-year flood." That just means there's a one percent change and it should have been called the "one percent flood." We had a big flood in 2001 and that doesn't mean we're set for another 90 years; there's a one percent chance it could happen in EACH year. You're better off watching cyclic patterns: our big floods in St. Paul came in 1951, 1952, 1965, 1969, 1993, 1997 and 2001. See a pattern there?

Coal ash remains a problem

2009-12-20T10:09:00.000-06:00

The coal ash issue remains in the news a year after the TVA debacle.

http://wvgazette.com/News/200912190281

I think we have a better handle on the issue in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but it's instructive that even an environmentally friendly EPA is dragging its feet. And Pawlenty's MPCA is perhaps less friendly.

The issue here is a proposed new coal ash disposal facility near the St. Croix River, 16 miles upstream of its confluence with the Mississippi. The St. Croix is a National Wild and Scenic River and although the ash site is outside the riverway's boundary, groundwater flow at the site is toward this high-quality resource.

Local legislators got the landfill stalled last year by requiring MPCA to write statewide rules to cover ash disposal, but the rules are slow to emerge and don't necessarily reflect the highest standards.

Farmers in pain for river's gain

2009-11-26T09:03:00.000-06:00

Farmers are being asked to reduce their nutrient loading to the river to help ease pollution. And after years of seeking voluntary compliance, government is about ready to make it mandatory.

Sound sort of familiar? The headline--"Farmers in pain for river's gain"--caught my eye, as did the content of the story. Of course, there are no plans to make nutrient reduction mandatory in the Mississippi River basin. In fact, Big Agriculture seems to be shifting into denial mode--it's not them polluting one of the world's great rivers and creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that's as large as some eastern states.

The story, though, came from the Dominion Post in Wellington, New Zealand, where nutrient loading has fouled the Manawatu River. After many years of trying to get farmers to reduce their impacts and farm more sustainably, government agencies are frustrated by the lack of progress and are turning from carrots to sticks. What's bothersome, of course, is that agricultural experts say the farming practices that are messing up the river are also not sustainable and farmers are going to have nothing left to give to their children.

Some of that sounds familiar to those of us who work in the Mississippi basin. Farming practices here are also not sustainable in the long term, forcing the use of more and more fertilizer every year. That doesn't bother Big Agriculture, since they're the ones selling the fertilizer to farmers trapped in a vicious cycle, who must turn to larger and larger government bailouts to stay afloat.

I am bothered by the recent head-in-sand approach to nutrient loading in the Mississippi, though. That message was loud and clear at a conference in Illinois in August, despite clear evidence about what's causing the river's problems and the Gulf's dead zone. This shouldn't be about finger-pointing, since it's not THEM, but US.

Us. As a society, we've demanded greater production from our farmers. As a society, we've forced nonsustainable agriculture on the very families that once made farming work just fine for over a hundred years. Those folks are caught in the middle and it's all of us who are at fault. We should be focusing on solutions and finding ways to share the pain. We need to stop thinking about finger-pointing and use those fingers to grip a pencil instead.

Jolt 'em, poison 'em, carp still coming

2009-11-14T09:23:00.000-06:00

The electric barrier built in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes and in the Mississippi River system continues to cause problems. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported today officials plan to poison all fish in the canal--the upstream end of the Illinois Waterway--so they can shut down the electric barrier for maintenance.

Silver and bighead carp are found on the Mississippi from Iowa south, but haven't penetrated north into Minnesota yet. The invasives, released from fish farms in the South during the 1993 flood, are spreading up the river system and have devastated the Missouri River ecosystem. They're up the Illinois River to Chicago and have been seen within a mile of the electric barrier that's designed to keep invasive aquatics--and all fish, actually--from passing between the Great Lakes and Mississippi systems.

The electric barrier has been controversial and its effectiveness has been questioned. In order to conduct maintenance on the barrier, it will need to be shut down for a few days and officials plan to use Rotenone to kill all fish in the river. Rotenone is poisonous to fish for a couple of days before it starts to break down, so it will drift down the Illinois River. Officials are confident they can add a chemical at the next dam downstream that will neutralize the Rotenone.

I'm not confident the electric barrier works, and I'm not at all excited about dumping poisons and other chemicals in the river system.

Minnesota DNR Commissioner Mark Holsten has proposed building a similar electric barrier in the Mississippi near the Minnesota-Iowa border, or possibly a similar barrier that uses acoustic bubbles to scare fish away. But barriers in a river as vast as the Mississippi are unlikely to work, especially given the marginal success so far in the much simpler canal in Chicago.

Thus far, the existing dams on the Mississippi have slowed the northbound movement of the silver and bighead carp. It's probably helped that we haven't had a big flood since 2001, since it's during high-water periods that fish movement through the river system is greatest. That's when dam gates are opened to allow the river to flow naturally, and open gates make it easier for the fish to move about.

The next big flood might bring the invasives north into Minnesota waters and then we, too, could face the problems folks downriver are already dealing with: collapse of a diverse fishery and injury to boaters from the large, leaping fish.

The great flyway lives up to its name

2009-11-11T08:41:00.001-06:00

The Mississippi flyway, one of the most important migratory bird corridors in North America, is a very active place right now.
On September 30, there were about 23,000 ducks on the river between St. Paul and Rock Island, Illinois. By November 3, that number was approaching 710,000.
The birds aren't yet showing signs they're moving downriver, probably in part because we've had a run of very mild weather.
Want to enjoy some impressive birdwatching? Travel to Pool 9, which straddles the Minnesota/Iowa border south of La Crosse. Last week that pool alone contained about 280,000 canvasbacks. The same pool has almost 80,000 scaup. Not being stupid, most are hanging out in areas that are closed to hunting.
If you don't want to leave the Twin Cities--or even your car--drive down Red Rock Road in the industrial southeast corner of St. Paul. Red Rock Lake is easily visible just to the east of the road, and yesterday it contained almost a thousand Canada geese, hundreds of mallards and coot, and a smattering of goldeneye, bufflehead and mergansers.

PFCs raise cholesteral?

2009-11-07T09:40:00.000-06:00

"Living on Earth" is carrying an interesting story on research showing an increase in cholesteral among people with higher levels of PFCs in their blood. The story is at

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=09-P13-00045&segmentID=4

We are seeing very high levels of PFCs in fish in the Mississippi River and in the blood of young bald eagles found in nests along the river. It is not clear what the health effects of PFCs might be, if any, but this new study adds an interesting wrinkle.

The ducks keep coming

2009-11-04T21:37:00.000-06:00

The Mississippi River remains one of the world's great flyways for migratory birds. This fall, the ducks are still coming to the river from all over the region, although they haven't really started moving south yet in great numbers.

In late September, there were a little over 17,000 ducks on the river between St. Paul and Rock Island, Illinois. By the third week in October, that number was over a quarter million.

And they arrived quite suddenly. Pool 9 lies where Minnesota and Iowa meet in the river and cleaerly has excellent habitat for ducks. Diving Ducks include redhead, canvasback, ringneck, scaup, goldeneye, bufflehead, merganser and ruddy ducks. Pool 9 contained no diving ducks on September 30, only twenty on October 5, but a week later had 22,655. By October 20, the pool contained 98,700 diving ducks.

You can track duck numbers in Pools 2 through 14 at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's website, http://www.fws.gov/midwest/UpperMississippiRiver/

There's a little lag time before each week's numbers get posted, but it's interesting to follow. This is the first year numbers are being collected for the reach between St. Paul and Lake Pepin, but the FWS website does contain links to data from previous years for the area from Wabasha to Rock Island.

USDA's big promises

2009-10-03T09:08:00.000-05:00

USDA Secretary Vilsack recently announced a $320 million program to clean up the Mississippi River, primarily nutrient loading from agriculture. Considering the enormity of the problem, $320 million doesn't sound like a lot of money.

Details have been slow to emerge, but it looks like a cobbling together of existing programs rather than something really new. And the programs will be voluntary, which means targeting the most vulnerable areas won't necessarily work.

Buffer strips present a good example. Stream health depends on vegetated buffer strips--it's not good to plant corn right up to the stream bank. In Minnesota, buffer strips are required, but that requirement is almost never enforced. Under the new USDA program, farmers can volunteer to leave vegetated buffer strips--and get paid for it.

And this is going to clean up the river and shrink the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico?

This may look better as more details emerge, but I'm not optimistic.

Hastings: bridge, or monster?

2009-09-12T13:44:00.000-05:00

MnDOT is rushing to build a new Highway 61 bridge over the Mississippi at Hastings, since the existing bridge has problems and Minnesota is keenly interested in bridges following the Interstate 35W collapse two years ago. Engineers are looking at two designs: an arched structure similar in appearance to the bridge they have now, or a cable-stay bridge with a single, huge tower.

Cable bridges raise concerns about bird-strike issues, although there hasn't been much research on the subject. Birds are an issue here, since the Mississippi sees 40 percent of the migrating birds in North American every spring and fall.

But as design work has moved forward, the bridge's single tower has moved up and up, raising concerns about visual impact on two scenic resources of national significance: the Mississippi Valley itself, and also the nearby St. Croix Valley. Both river valleys are components of the National Park System and both were designated by Congress in part for their scenic character.

How big? The tower would top out at 314 feet above the river and more than 120 feet higher than the blufftops to the north. A digital elevation model shows it would be clearly visible from the still-new visitor center at Prescott, as well as from the blufftop portions of Kinnickinnic State Park and other parts of the St. Croix Valley. It could be seen from South St. Paul, and would be really visible from Pine Bend Bluffs Scientific and Natural Area, Grey Cloud Island, Spring Lake Regional Park and a host of other public places. It could also be seen from parts of Hudson, although it would likely be little more than a dot in the distance from there.

How visible? From a lot of places within a few miles, it would be as obvious as a radio tower near Somerset that drew a firestorm of complaints when it first went up years ago. From farther away, you'd probably see little more than a blinking light.

MnDOT hasn't decided yet whether to light it (beyond the blinking light on top that would be needed to warn airplanes away), but engineers are likely to want to draw attention to this eye-catching structure.

And for the people of Hastings, there will be no escaping this monument. Some will like that, some won't. But in almost every part of that city, all you'll need to do is look up. Way up.

Another zebra mussel threat looms

2009-09-07T19:32:00.000-05:00

There was a news report this weekend that zebra mussel populations in Lake Mille Lacs have grown by ten times over this time last year. This exponential growth is a clear threat to the Rum River, which drains Mille Lacs, and the Mississippi River below Anoka, where the Rum meets the big river.

Once zebra mussel populations have become well established, this kind of stunning growth seems to be fairly common. Once numbers reach enormous levels, they tend to stabilize. The impact to Mille Lacs, many Minnesotans' sacred walleye lake, won't be very clear for several years.

Meanwhile, though, serious numbers of zebra mussels are heading toward the Twin Cities reach of the Mississippi. The metro area has long had zebra mussels, but never in big numbers. But with established populations in the Mississippi at St. Cloud (see my August 31 post) and in Lake Mille Lacs, things are beginning to look grim for the metro area.

Fish farms in the Gulf

2009-09-04T09:24:00.000-05:00

The government has opened the door to industrial-sized fish farms in the Gulf of Mexico.

Submerged pens will be anchored three to 200 miles offshore in the Gulf to rise amberjack, red snapper and other species. Environmental groups are outraged at the potential for pollution and impacts on wild fish populations.

Even more offensive is the NOAA's decision to allow big fish farms wasn't really a decision at all, but a lack of action. NOAA allowed a deadline to pass and simply chose not to oppose fish farming, leaving environmental groups and fishing groups with no government action on which to base an appeal.

The Dead Zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River is unlikely to see any industrial fish farms, of course, since no fish can survive there. Thanks to shifting winds that stir the Gulf, the dead zone is actually smaller this year--but stacked more deeply from top to bottom.

45th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act

2009-09-03T14:34:00.000-05:00

45 years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law. Many wild places have been protected since, thanks to the vision of Olaus and Mardie Murie and some of their friends. They wrote the law in a log home at Moose, Wyoming, which is now the Murie Center within Grand Teton National Park. Olaus died before the act was passed, but Mardie went on to be a powerful force in the conservation movement for the rest of the century.

By the early 1970s, federal agencies were looking around for areas that might qualify for protection as designated wilderness areas. At least two places on the Mississippi River were studied and found qualified for wilderness designation. They were the Nelson-Trevino Bottoms between Nelson, Wis., and Wabasha, Minn., and the Reno Bottoms along the Minnesota-Iowa border.

For political reasons neither was ever designated, but they remain largely unchanged as wild, beautiful places.

Zebra mussels in St. Cloud

2009-08-31T16:17:00.000-05:00

The City of St. Cloud this afternoon announced it has positively identified the presence of zebra mussels in that city's drinking water intake structure on the Mississippi River. This is not good news for our park, although not totally surprising considering the discovery of the invasive mussel in the river in the Brainerd area a year ago.

What does this mean for the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area? We can expect a gradual increase in zebra mussel abundance throughout our park, especially in areas just above the dams where flow is reduced and young zebra mussels have a chance to fall out of the water column and attach to hard substrate.

In the past, areas upstream of the head of navigation in Minneapolis had no zebra mussels, and areas downstream of that point had only small populations. As adults spew their young into the water column, they tend to float free for some days before they are large enough to sink to the bottom and attach to something. In the metro area, that often meant the young produced here were in Lake Pepin before they settled out.

In the future, mussels will come down from upstream and settle out within the Twin Cities river corridor. I wouldn't be surprised if zebra mussels were found in the Coon Rapids Dam area next year.

Of special concern is the mussel refuge area near Hidden Falls, where the federally endangered Higgins Eye and Winged maple leaf mussels have been introduced, along with state-listed species. No one is sure what may happen to this area, but it remains an area of sufficient flow below Lock/Dam 1 that it may not get heavily infested with zebra mussels. The area will likely see more zebra mussels in the future, but it may not get infested to the level found in downriver areas where all natives were killed.

The naked bald eagle nest

2009-08-30T13:40:00.000-05:00

The Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) would like to get rid of a few of our national bird, but since the bird is protected they've done the next best thing: ensure that the most prolific nest in the region isn't used any more.

My August 13 post tells the story, but now that the trees around the Pigs Eye Island nest have been cut, it's clear that MAC may have gone too far. Whether this is a violation of the Bald Eagle Protection Act is for others to determine. But clearly they've done serious harm to this nest. If it isn't blown down in the next big wind, its level of exposure will probably cause the birds to abandon it.

This photo was taken Friday, August 28.

Too much atrazine?

2009-08-23T10:27:00.000-05:00

The New York Times yesterday reported that atrazine concentrations in drinking water can affect human health in lower levels than previously thought.

Concentrations that meet current federal standards may be associated with birth defects, low birth weights and menstrual problems.

Studies are also finding that atrazine concentrations in municipal drinking water in some areas spike seasonally, but those short-term spikes aren't being reported to the public. Government regulations don't currently require frequent monitoring for seasonal fluctuations in atrazine.

Is this how I got cancer?

2009-08-23T10:13:00.000-05:00

For years I drank water every day from a plastic bottle. Only last year did I learn that bottle contained, and leached into my drinking water, small amounts of bisphenol A, or BPA. The chemical industry claims BPA is harmless, but studies have linked it to a variety of problems, including prostate cancer.

I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2005 and had surgery in early 2006. I have been cancer-free ever since.

I'll never know if I got cancer from my favorite water bottle or a hundred other possible sources. Doctors say that virtually all men will get prostate cancer if they live long enough. But the situation has made me more interested in the BPA issue.

Nalgene, which makes and markets lots of water bottles, sides with the industry in claiming BPA is harmless. But just to play it safe, Nalgene shifted to BPA-free bottles last year. And last Christmas, all my family members had BPA-free Nalgene bottles under the tree--I even gave myself one.

Yesterday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an interesting report on the BPA industry, which has hired Big Tobacco's lobbyist and is using some of the same marketing techniques. The newspaper also revealed that government reports concluding BPA is safe came largely from industry-sponsored studies. The chemical companies that make BPA are also using Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube and others to produce independent-sounding reports claiming BPA is OK.

Interesting.

The river's sediment load

2009-08-19T15:25:00.000-05:00

The Mississippi has always carried a sediment load, and some of that load drops out in Lake Pepin. The lake--a wide spot on the river formed by a giant sandbar at the mouth of the Chippewa River--has been gradually filling in for thousands of years.

Sediment core studies show that before European settlement in the region (and our resulting dependence on row-crop agriculture), the Mississippi dropped 80,000 tons of sediment in Lake Pepin every year. Currently, the sediment load into Lake Pepin is 865,500 tons per year.

Lake Pepin--three miles wide and 22 miles long--will disappear completely in 300 years.

The rate of sediment deposition into the lake has increased spectacularly in the last 35 years, reflecting the active tiling of much of the watershed. Drain tile accelerates the movement of water off the landscape and into the river's tributaries, pushing far more sediment into the Mississippi.

Cutting trees to haze eagles?

2009-08-13T16:15:00.000-05:00

The Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) has received permission from Metropolitan Council Environmental Services (MCES) to cut a bunch of large cottonwood trees on Pigs Eye Island, just south of Holman Field and near the wastewater treatment plant. MCES owns the island, so that's the only permission MAC really needs. They can't cut the tree that has a bald eagle nest in it, but by cutting trees around it MAC may be pressuring that nesting pair to move elsewhere.

The most prolific nest on the river, the nest on that island produced four young in 2006 and four young again in 2009 (although it's doubtful the fourth bird survived this year). The nest had three young in it in 2007 and 2008.

MAC has a problem with juvenile eagles hanging out on and near the runways at Holman Field. A juvenile eagle was ingested into a jet engine earlier this summer. Hazing the birds with fireworks and other distractions hasn't worked. Two eagles were captured and physically relocated to northern Minnesota, but the one relocated in 2008 returned to the area this past spring. The second bird was relocated in 2009 so we don't yet know what its migration pattern will be next fall/spring.

The problem is real and doesn't have an obvious solution. Airplanes and bald eagles don't mix well, and we were lucky no humans were hurt in the June incident. But our national bird is also protected and cutting down large cottonwood trees isn't an environmentally appropriate solution.

Young eagles aloft

2009-07-27T06:08:00.000-05:00

We were on the river Friday in the Hastings/Prescott/Diamond Bluff area and saw eagles almost constantly. We saw a number of young birds that are just learning to fly/land. You don't usually associate the words "bald eagle" with clumsy, but like people learning to walk, learning to fly--and land--takes a bit of practice. Most could fly OK, but their landings were clutzy things to behold.

I got a few pictures, but they were universally lousy.

We did get a good look at the hydrokinetic project below Lock/Dam 2. It is out of the water and not operating. Are the having mechanical problems? This doesn't seem like a successful way to generate electricity, at least so far. Here's a shot of the turbine out of the water.

The future of journalism?

2009-07-18T07:42:00.000-05:00

The future of journalism looks pretty bleak. What passes for news on TV is all about visuals, and even they can't seem to make money. Daily and weekly newspapers are dying like flies, and what's left has a lean staff and tiny news hole. The public needs in-depth reporting on a variety of issues that affect us all, including but not limited to the environment.

A model for the future might be www.environmentalhealthnews.org

Led my Marla Cone, who covered environmental health issues for the Los Angeles Times for 18 years, this website is backed by a foundation-funded nonprofit that first exposed the BPA issue and is in the lead on such issues as the concentration of contaminants in the Arctic and the feminization of male fish.

Pay attention. Feminization of male fish in the Mississippi River is quietly becoming a very large issue. It appears to be coming from personal care products that sewage treatment plants can't remove. It's in the water. And if it's affecting fish reproduction, what's it doing to humans? Scientists are paying close attention to this issue, but the current state of journalism means the rest of us will likely not find out.

A use for Asian carp?

2009-07-16T09:01:00.000-05:00

Someone at Auburn University has developed a tool now in development in Havana, Illinois, to produce a marketable product from the tons of Asian carp now invading the Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway.

The machine uses flash desiccation to instantly remove 90 percent of the water content in fish, venting off a little steam and leaving behind commercially marketable fish meal and fish oil. I hadn't thought much before about the source of that fish oil in the little pill I take each morning, but if we can justify netting out a few million tons of invasive carp, I'm all for it.

Another riverlong adventure

2009-07-12T12:38:00.001-05:00

I've lost track of the number of adventurers I've encountered who are trying to run the length of the Mississippi. Some are better-prepared than others. The prepared ones usually accomplish their goal if they can start early enough in the season. Some end in tragedy, like the two young women a few years ago who started out on a makeshift raft and got pulled under a parked barge. One of the more entertaining adventures was the Miss Rockaway Armada. Mostly New York City folks, they started in north Minneapolis a few years ago and still haven't made it to St. Louis. www.missrockaway.org is still an active website, but I think their assorted craft haven't moved since they all headed back to NYC last fall.

This year's adventurers are two guys in inflatable kayaks. You can keep up with them at www.11visions.com

They were in the Brainerd area a couple of days ago, so have made it through most of the small-river northern area. The river will start to get bigger for them now, and will get much bigger yet once they hit St. Paul.

World's cutest baby update

2009-07-12T12:31:00.001-05:00

Jahzen Stiv Olaf Wandag just celebrated is six-month birthday. He likes water, and enjoys his Jumparoo.

How long is the river?

2009-06-23T10:52:00.000-05:00

This is such a simple question, but the answer is anything but simple. Various sources will give different answers:

A. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources posts a sign at the outlet from Lake Itasca, where the Mississippi River begins, stating the river is 2,552 miles long.

B. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website says the Mississippi is 2,320 miles long.

C. The U.S. Geological Survey’s website says the Mississippi is 2,300 miles long.

D. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains most of the river’s length for navigation, and its charts say the river is 2,310 miles long. This number is probably the most accurate right now.

Other sources provide other numbers. At one time or another, they’ve probably all been right. Like all rivers, the Mississippi is a living, changing thing, with a channel that shifts and moves with every drought and flood.

For thousands of years, the Mississippi flowed as it wished, changing course regularly, cutting off bends and making new ones, shifting its length by perhaps hundreds of miles at a time. The “natural” Mississippi had no specific length, and the river’s length changed perhaps as much as once or twice a year.

Beginning around the time of the Civil War, the Corps of Engineers began modifying the river to stabilize a channel for steamboat navigation, and later for larger craft. Today, this means the commercially navigable river between Minneapolis and the Gulf of Mexico has pretty much a static length. The 500 miles of river upstream of Minneapolis remains largely natural, but the river there is small and changes in length are less common, generally minor, and precipitated only by large, infrequent floods.

Mark Twain had a few things to say about the length of the Mississippi, noting it had shortened itself by 242 miles in 176 years. Any good scientist could use that information to conclude the Mississippi had once been 1.3 million miles long, and in just 742 years in the future will be only a mile and three-quarters long.

“There is something fascinating about science,” he observed.

Other Large Rivers

The whole length-of-the-river question led, logically, to questions about other rivers. The Missouri River shows up in a quick search with five different lengths, although most sources use 2,565 miles. That makes it even longer than the Father of Waters. You might have more trouble guessing the longest river in North America, which is neither the Mississippi nor the Missouri, but the Mackenzie in Canada, which is 2,635 miles long, more or less, on any given date (although that number includes a tributary with a different name, so that’s kind of misleading).

The world’s longest river is the Nile, which is either 4,180 or 4,145 miles long, depending on what week you measured it. Second is the Amazon, which is either 3,912 or 4,050 miles, depending again on who you ask.

Other big rivers include:

Yangtze, China, 3,602 miles
Ob, Russia, 3,459 miles
Yellow, China, 2,900 miles
Yenisei, Russia, 2,800 miles
Parana, Argentina, 2,795 miles
Irtish, Russia, 2,758 miles
Congo, Zaire, 2,716 miles

About the photo: the mouth of the Mississippi is near the top right corner of the picture, which includes southwest Louisiana and a portion of the Gulf of Mexico. It was taken from the space shuttle.

The river of life

2009-06-20T21:48:00.000-05:00

The Mississippi River is a great river of life running through the heart of North America, and much of that life passes through the metropolitan area. Some of that life stops here for a season, some stays all year, and some passes through on its way to and from somewhere else.

Forty percent of the migrating birds in North America use the Mississippi Flyway, from tiny warblers to Golden eagles. Perhaps the most charismatic of animals in the metropolitan area is the Bald eagle, which winters along the ice-free river and nests here in the summer. Thirty years ago, Bald eagles were a rarity here. Today, there are upwards of two dozen nests in the metro Mississippi’s 72 miles, and there are more every year. Despite frequent contact with humans, cars and airplanes (a nest on the Minnesota River just under the final approach to the international airport has been there for more than a dozen years), Bald eagles seem to be thriving on the Mississippi, especially between Fort Snelling and Lake Pepin. Bald eagles were removed from the federal endangered species list in 2007, but remain protected.

If you’re looking for Bald eagles, look in winter anywhere the river is ice-free, especially near downtown St. Paul. They often roost in the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary on sunny mornings. Prescott is also a good place to check. In spring and summer, look near the mouth of the Crow River and between Coon Rapids Dam and Interstate 694, but especially look near the mouth of the Minnesota River, in the Pigs Eye Lake area, and around Lower Grey Cloud Island. Downriver of Hastings—all the way to Lake Pepin—you’ll find lots of them.

Possibly the least charismatic animal in the corridor is the Higgins eye pearly mussel, a lowly filter-feeder that lives partly within the gravel river bottom, and that most people have never seen. A federally endangered species nearly driven to extinction by invading zebra mussels, they have been successfully reintroduced in the Hidden Falls-Fort Snelling area where zebra mussels have never taken hold. Reintroduced in the same area in 2008 was the Winged maple leaf mussel, an endangered species even more rare than the Higgins eye. Mississippi River biologists have learned much in recent years about the life cycles of mussels and have put that understanding to work reintroducing rare and threatened species.

Of more interest to recreational boaters is the river’s fish life, which remains very diverse and reflects a remarkable comeback in water quality. The river between St. Paul and Hastings contained no dissolved oxygen—and therefore no aquatic life—in the 1960s. With profound improvements in sewage treatment in the Twin Cities, the area has seen fish life return in abundance. The river downstream of St. Paul is managed as a trophy walleye fishery, although persistent contaminants in bottom sediments work their way up the food chain and limit how often these fish should be consumed.

We still see over 200 species of fish in the river here, although some are far more rare than they once were. Migratory fish—like the skipjack herring and American eel—find it hard to migrate this far north since construction of the locks and dams in the 1930s, although they do reappear in flood years when the dams all raise their gates.

Whitetail deer, raccoon, Canada geese, wild turkeys and coyotes have adapted well to the quasi-urban environment along the river here. Coyotes are hard to spot, but are more common than you think. Opossum can’t handle harsh winters and the fact they’re far more common here today than 30 years ago tells us something about our changing climate.

An emerging drought

2009-06-02T15:57:00.000-05:00

River flows are down, and that's especially unusual this time of year. We seem to be heading into a period of drought, although it's always bad to predict the future based on the past. It's even dicy to predict the future based on computer models, and May was a good example. The Minnesota Climatology Working Group, a collaborative of the University of Minnesota and Minnesota DNR, predicted in early May that computer models leaned toward a wetter-than-normal May. We've just finished the third driest May in history.

A long period of dry weather began in eastern Minnesota in June 2008 and is now becoming obvious as crops aren't growing, lawns are turning brown and river levels are dropping. The eastern metro is now considered in severe drought and much of the rest of the area is experiencing moderate drought.

Flow over Lock/Dam 1 was 6,790 cubic feet per second (cfs) this morning and even the influence of the Minnesota River only brought the flow to 8,900 cfs at Lock/Dam 2. Flows might not mean much to you, but water levels do. The river this morning dropped 1.94 feet between the Ford Dam and Hastings, a distance of 33 river miles. That's less than an inch a mile. From Hastings to Red Wing the river drops about an inch every six miles, despite adding flow from the St Croix River. The St. Croix is actually contributing to the problem, since its east metro location is even drier than everywhere else. The St. Croix today was dropping only three inches between Stillwater and Red Wing, a distance of 39 miles.
Minnesota DNR regulates water withdrawals for irrigation, etc., and cuts off those withdrawals entirely when the river reaches its "protected flow," a minimum flow needed to maintain aquatic life. As of yesterday there were two river segments in the state that had fallen that low: Elm Creek in northern Hennepin County, and the St. Croix River near Danbury. The Vermillion River is also very low and nearing its protected flow limit.

For more information from the climatology group, check http://climate.umn.edu/

Bald eagle killed at Holman Field

2009-06-02T15:47:00.000-05:00

An immature bald eagle was killed May 28 when it was partly ingested into one engine of a Lear jet on the runway at Holman Field. The jet aborted takeoff and no humans were injured.

This particular bird was fledged from a nest in the Pigs Eye Lake area last year.
The National Park Service has been involved with a project associated with eagles at Holman Field for several years. Juvenile eagles for whatever reason have developed a fondness for hanging out on and near the runway at Holman. There have been a number of near-misses in recent years, in addition to yesterday's collision. APHIS (part of USDA) has had a crew of biologists hazing these birds for several years to try to get them to avoid the area, but they have not been successful.

APHIS has developed a fairly complicated protocol for relocating problem birds. This is an experiment that has drawn national attention, especially among agencies that manage airports. The study involves relocating up to five birds. In Spring 2008, the first bird was captured and relocated to an area near the Minnesota/Ontario border. "Eagle 66" had fledged from one of the Pigs Eye Lake nests and had been banded as part of a National Park Service eagle study. When captured at the airport, it was fitted with a small backpack with a satellite tracking device in it. The bird stayed in the border area all summer last year and in the fall migrated south past Duluth and through western Wisconsin. It hit the Mississippi River near the downstream end of Lake Pepin and migrated another 400 miles downriver. It spent the winter near the southeast corner of Iowa. This spring it followed the river north until it came to Pigs Eye, where it remains today.

This might suggest relocating the birds doesn't work, or perhaps they should be relocated to another watershed where their annual migration wouldn't take them near here (Cleveland, anyone?). We don't know yet, but a second eagle, "Eagle 67" was captured this spring. This bird had also fledged from a nest near Pigs Eye Lake. It has its own backpack and is now hanging around the edge of the BWCA. It will be interesting to see what migration pattern it follows next fall and spring.

Photo by Charles Wandag

Dredging in St. Paul

2009-06-02T15:44:00.000-05:00

I noticed the Corps of Engineers' new dredge was working this week at the bend in the river near Holman Field. I'm not sure how much longer it's going to be there, since it has been there several days already. If you are in the Mounds Park or Warner Road areas, this is your chance to see the dredge in operation.

There are two kinds of dredging in the Mississippi: hydraulic and mechanical. This dredge is hydraulic, which means there's a spinning cutter head on the river bottom that stirs things up, then a series of pumps and pipes that suck up a slurry of part sand, part water and spit it into a site on shore. The water ponds to let fine materials settle, then runs back into the river. Main channel dredging like this rarely involves much fine sediment--it's mostly coarse sand.
The disposal site is at Southport, an industrial area just south of Holman Field. This is an approved disposal site. Once dry, the sand will be trucked away and used for construction fill. Every regular dredging location on the river has a related disposal site that has been approved (unanimously) by the Corps, FWS, NPS, DNR and others.

This particular job will involve about 62,000 cubic yards of sand. This site gets dredged frequently and was last dredged in 2008. It's a point where the river widens out and slows down, allowing some of its bed load to drop out.

Mechanical dredging is done with a backhoe on a barge. The backhoe digs a hole in the riverbed, bringing up scoopfuls of sand and dumping the sand in a second barge. When the barge is full of sand it is pushed to shore and the sand is removed with a front-end loader, usually.
Mechanical dredging is scheduled to start this week just below the Lower St. Anthony Falls Lock/Dam. The only approved placement site in Pool 1 is just below the Interstate 35W bridge, on the left descending bank. This dredging job will involve about 1,000 cubic yards of sand. This sand will also eventually be trucked away.

Interestingly, the river is sufficiently turbulent there that the Corps' sounding equipment was unable to determine the river's bathymetry (bottom contours) and the crew had to revert to the old-fashioned method--using a pole. This site was last dredged in 2001. The work should take about five days.

Island 112

2009-04-29T23:13:00.000-05:00

It doesn't have a very sexy name, but Island 112 at mile 828 has a new beach built by the Corps of Engineers late last fall and recreational boaters will love it when they start discovering it this spring. It's part of a long-term restoration project that has included removal of much of the buckthorn that turned the island into a jungle too thick for camping. We'll be planting willows on the new sand beach this spring to help hold it in place, and we'll be asking the public to help keep the willows watered during dry weather--and don't cut them for wienie sticks! The willows will keep the beach from eroding away.

Where did the barges go?

2009-04-29T23:07:00.000-05:00

Barge traffic on the river is down this spring, following a trend developed over the last year or so. Part of the issue is ethanol and biodiesel: more corn and soybeans are being processed in Minnesota instead of being shipped down the river. Part of the issue is Asia: more corn and soybeans are going west by rail to the coast and on to Asia rather than down the river. A third part of the issue is barge rates: barge companies are charging more to come this far north, since they can make more money turning a barge around twice between St. Louis and New Orleans instead of a single trip to St. Paul. Barge rates used to be cheaper than rail, but that's evening out.
Commercial navigation has gone through hard times on the river before: the logging industry died out, then coal came in its place. When coal died out (southern coal from Illinois is high in sulfur, compared to cleaner coal by rail from Wyoming), grain took its place. We're headed into another lull.

One superlative park

2009-03-22T16:16:00.001-05:00

I've seen something like 102 of the nation's 391 National Park System units, and most aren't a whole lot more spectactular than the Mississippi River in our own back yard. But Yosemite clearly stands out. The landscape there rivals anything I've seen outside the fjords of western Norway. I was lucky enough to spend a week in Yosemite this month, when there's still snow on the mountaintops and the park isn't yet overrun with tourists.

Stunning.

Spring is just a bit downriver

2009-03-22T16:12:00.000-05:00

Ice is thinning on Lake Pepin, and commercial towboats are heading in our direction, more or less. Traffic coming upriver has been slowed by high water in Iowa and Illinois, although flooding there hasn't yet closed any locks. Pepin is down to nine miles of ice (from 22) and none of that was hard blue ice as of the last survey on March 18. Nobody wants to burn the fuel to bust through the ice on Lake Pepin, so towboat traffic from the south is taking it easy and hoping someone else will come along and do the work. Look for the first tow of the season to reach St. Paul about March 28 or so.

There's more ice...or less...

2009-02-18T20:22:00.000-06:00

With a colder than normal January you'd expect more of the river would be frozen, but that may or may not be the case. I'd heard reports that ice in the immediate Minneapolis-St. Paul area was greater than normal, which would be consistent with colder weather. But it also could be caused, some suggest, by the conversion of the Riverside and High Bridge power plants from coal to natural gas, enabling them to cycle on and off more quickly in response to power demand, leaving them shut down more frequently. With the plants down, there's less hot water discharge and more ice.

Maybe. But the bald eagles haven't been impressed by that logic. The eagles seem more scattered this winter, suggesting more open water areas for them to feed in. That was consistent with our eagle tour to Wabasha and back in early February, when we found more eagles in random locations and a marked decline in eagle concentrations in typical wintering locations like Reads Landing. The eagle in the photo was near Prescott, and we actually saw more eagles along the highway between Diamond Bluff and Prescott than we did in Colville Park in Red Wing, or at Reads Landing.

It's Grandpa time

2009-01-05T22:09:00.000-06:00

Hey, I don't get to become a grandpa all that often, and the first time is of course special. It's a boy!

So here is Jahzen Stiv Olaf Wandag (pronounced "jazzin steve"), born this morning (January 5, 2009) in St. Joseph's hospital in Lewiston, Idaho, to Megan and Charles Wandag. He weighs 7 pounds, 10.5 ounces, is 20 inches long, his head is 13.5 inches around, and he has black hair. His eyes might be blue, but everybody starts out with blue eyes so it's a bit hard to tell.

Megan and Charles are a bit tired out from some sleepless time and hard work bringing the little guy into the world, but are otherwise fine and happy.

About the name: Jahzen is Charles' father's nickname. Stiv is the Norwegian spelling of Steve. Olaf was my father's name. Olaf is the middle name, and Jahzen Stiv is his first name.

Grandma Debbie got to help with the delivery, which was quite the thrill for her. Uncle Brendan and Grandpa were there, but down the hall at critical moments. Labor was long and slow on Sunday and after a late night trip from Orofino to Lewiston (40 miles) late Sunday night, but picked up speed about 10 a.m. Monday and he was born at 11:19 a.m. PST. There was a little karma about the time: Megan's birthday is September 11 and Charles' birthday is September 19.

At the age of two hours, Jahzen Stiv was already probably the most photographed baby on the planet.

Enjoy. And yes, I'll come back to work someday. But first comes the grandpa thing.

It's Christmas...

2008-12-25T11:19:00.000-06:00

So it's OK to write about something other than the river. Like being Uncle Santa for my sister's grandkids, including her first great-grandchild, Hunter, who found Christmas quite interesting but did nod off in his own Santa suit. It was the Christmas of the table-runner. And a deep, cold Christmas morning in Minnesota....

Happy holidays, everyone!

How clean is clean energy?

2008-12-22T10:56:00.000-06:00

Coal-fired power plants affect air quality, nuclear plants have thousand-year waste issues, and hydroelectric plants require dams that permanently change rivers. The newest "clean" energy source is hydrokinetics, a turbine that spins in moving water (rather than falling water).

Hydrokinetics has been tried in tidal flows and an open ocean wave environment, without much success. For the first time, it's about to be tried in a river environment. The turbine will be installed below Lock/Dam 2 at Hastings, where it will operate at run-of-the-river speed and generate electricity to be sold back to the grid.

This all sounds fine, but with a turbine spinning 21 times a minute, will it become a fish-grinder? No one knows, but the area just below the dam is where fish concentrate, especially before spawning in spring. Will the turbine's scour affect impact mussel populations? No one knows, and there are state-listed mussel species in the area.

It shouldn't impact recreation directly, since the initial turbine array will be located in the 300-foot zone below the dam where boats are banned. But the plan is clearly to add more turbines on more barges, and as they get strung out downriver there is certainly the potential for conflict with an angler in a fishing boat, or a passing recreational boater.

The photo shows the turbine sitting on the barge before being moved into place and lowered through a hole in the barge. Once lowered into place, the turbine will begin spinning.

The carp are coming

2008-12-02T20:45:00.000-06:00

One silver carp and one bighead carp were pulled from the Mississippi last week in Pool 8 near La Crosse. A few stray bighead have been found in Lake Pepin in recent years, but this is the first time a silver carp has been identified north of Lock and Dam 13 at Clinton, Iowa.

Both are prolific plankton feeders and have already out-competed all native fish in the Missouri River. Both are known to get agitated and jump into the air when they hear the sound of a motorboat. River researchers in Illinois and Missouri wear hockey pads and full helmets to avoid dislocated shoulders and broken cheekbones. The silvers are even more prone to jump than the bighead, and both grow to 50-60 pounds--big enough to knock out a lot of teeth or rock you right off the back of the boat.

A few stray fish don't make a breeding population, but it is a sign of things to come. They'll make boating more hazardous and virtually eliminate personal watercraft.

Minnesota DNR Commissioner Mark Holsten wants to build a fish barrier, but the technology isn't reliable in a huge river during spring flooding, which is when these fish are most likely to travel long distances. And as Ron Benjamin from Wisconsin DNR pointed out this week, that's likely when these migrants moved north from Iowa.

The river goes quiet for the winter

2008-11-27T09:59:00.000-06:00

The Corps of Engineers will shut down all its locks from Minneapolis to Winona on Sunday, November 30, effectively ending the 2008 navigation season. The river is starting to ice up, and the navigation industry has been shy about pushing the season since several tows got stuck for the winter a number of years ago.

Aggregate Resources runs a tow and two barges between Grey Cloud Island and the Childs Road area in St. Paul as long as the weather allows, since that run doesn't involve going through any locks.

I haven't talked to industry folks to see how business was this year, but traffic has been declining in recent years because much more grain is staying in Minnesota to produce ethanol. There's also been more grain moving west by rail to feed Asian markets rather than taking the long way around through New Orleans and the Panama Canal.

Coldwater Spring--restore it, but to what period?

2008-11-25T13:05:00.001-06:00

Planning will begin soon aimed at restoration of Coldwater Spring, but there's likely to be some disagreement about the period to which it should be restored.

The spring was used by American Indians for a very long time, although its spiritual significance is a little uncertain. The U.S. military used the spring as a water source when building adjacent Fort Snelling in 1820-23. The spring supplied water to the growing fort until sometime in the 20th Century, and by 1884 it had a Victorian formal garden appearance. Today there remains a spring, pond, wetland vegetation and the remnants of the 19th Century spring house. It may be the last flowing spring in Hennepin County.

The spring remains on federal land, which until the mid-1990s was managed by the now-defunct Bureau of Mines. The site's management future will be decided soon, leading to a public discussion of restoration of the spring. Do we restore it to its period of historical significance, which is probably the 1880s? Do we restore it to presettlement conditions, even though we don't know exactly what that looked like? Should it be some combination of the two, retaining the stone spring house but largely restoring the spring to natural conditions?

It's not clear just where this discussion will end up, but the spring generates lots of public interest and there will be no shortage of strong opinions about the outcome.

The crumbling Rock Island bridge

2008-11-25T12:49:00.000-06:00

A section of the old Rock Island bridge between St. Paul Park and Inver Grove Heights has collapsed, but it's not the section proposed as a trailhead and it was built differently.

The 1895 bridge has been closed since 1999 and the eastern approach in St. Paul Park has been blocked off since the Homeland Security folks got nervous about the adjacent oil refinery following the 9/11 attack. The eastern approach is scheduled for demolition, as is the swing span in the river. On the west side, the approach could be demolished or it could be repaired and used as a trailhead to get visitors out to experience the heart of the river in an otherwise inaccessible area. Nearly a thousand people visited the west approach October 25 and most expressed support for saving it.

The media is playing up the collapse of a section on the east side, and demolition-minded folks are using the publicity to press for removal of west section, as well. But they are structurally different and it's clear restoration of the west segment would cost about the same as removing it.

Friends of the Mississippi River

2008-09-27T19:03:00.000-05:00

Friends of the Mississippi River celebrated its 15th birthday this year, first throwing itself a party at the Guthrie Theater on July 14 and more recently hosting a celebration at the Minnesota Boat Club on Raspberry Island in St. Paul this past Thursday night.

I deal with dozens of nonprofits so don't go lightly to the term "great," but FMR is indeed a great organization.

And I remember when the Mississippi River didn't have many friends.

The Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, which runs from Wabasha down toward the Quad Cities, always had lots of friends and supporters. The great river is indeed an outstanding resource there and is everything you think of when you see the words "Mississippi River."

But from Lake Pepin upstream through the Twin Cities, the Mississippi was a sewer in the 60s and 70s, and had been for as long as anyone remembered. It took a great lady named Dorothy Hill to call attention to Lake Pepin's problems when PCB contamination of the river first went public in the mid-1970s. She formed the group Save Lake Pepin and printed a thousand bumper stickers with the memorable phrase, "We can't ALL live upstream!" As a young journalist in Winona I got to know and admire Dorothy, and when my career turned to environmental protection a few years later I carried Dorothy Hill in my heart and still do.

But you can't save Lake Pepin without cleaning up the Mississippi in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, and in the 70s this clearly was a section of river in need of friends. The urban area had turned its back on the river, giving it up as a sewer, shipping dock and scrap yard.

There WERE people here with vision, even then. Naomi Loper of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, Shirley Hunt, Ray Black, Peter Gove (who worked for Governor Wendell Anderson at an important time and later played a key role in the Carter Administration--and has played more than a few key roles since), Senator David Durenburger, Congressman Bruce Vento, St. Paul Park and Rec Director Tom Kelly, and I'm probably forgetting more than a few. These folks saw the potential in America's greatest river and they weren't going to be ignored.

They and others established the Mississippi River Corridor Critical Area in 1976 and saw to it that Congress created the Metropolitan River Corridors Study Committee in 1980. That committee recommended creation of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, and Congress established that National Park System unit--the only one dedicated to the country's greatest river--in 1988.

When the National Park Service demonstrated it could only move at the speed of government (which isn't surprising), Peter Gove single-handedly gave birth in 1993 to the Friends of the Mississippi River. I've known few people with that kind of energy, and I'm proud to be working with Peter now to create a similar organization on the St. Croix River.

FMR started small and after a few years remained so. But FMR got lucky when Whitney Clark became its only employee and in the last dozen years or so has built the organization to something like 20 employees and a $1 million annual budget. It's not the staff or money that's exciting, though, it's that the Mississippi really has friends--thousands of them--and FMR has grown with the challenge and become an organization that everyone else wants to emulate.

Happy birthday.

Traveling western rivers

2008-08-21T16:06:00.000-05:00

"Slow and easy like a dreamer
Winds the river to the sea"
--Kate Wolf

Driving across Montana and Idaho means following rivers, because that's where the roads go. The Yellowstone River is reputedly the longest undammed river in the U.S., and Interstates 94 and 90 follow the beautiful and winding Yellowstone for hundreds of miles. From Livingston to Glendive you're never far from this great river as it winds from the mountains to the Missouri River in North Dakota. The great rolling grasslands of eastern Montana have their own appeal, as well.

A huge contrast to the sweeping landscape of eastern Montana are the Lochsa, Selway and Clearwater river valleys of northern Idaho. Hemmed in by mountains, there's just you, the road and the roaring, rock-strewn Lochsa River winding down from Lolo Pass west of Missoula. The Selway tumbles out of a wilderness area to the south and where it meets the Lochsa, the Clearwater River is born. The Clearwater isn't the torrent the Lochsa and Selway are, but it is fast and remains hemmed in by mountains its entire length as it winds across Idaho to the Washington border. U.S. 12 from Lolo Pass on the Montana border to Lewiston, Idaho remains one of the prettiest drives in North America.

So much for my vacation. Now it's back home to the Great Mississippi.

Remembering pumped storage

2008-07-27T11:21:00.001-05:00

I think it was about 15 years ago that a coalition of small electric power generators got together and proposed a pumped storage hydroelectric facility on the bluffs above Lake Pepin. It would use enormous 36-foot diameter pipes to pump water up the bluff from Lake Pepin (near Maple Springs, on the Minnesota side) into a gigantic man-made pond on the blufftop. Water would be pumped up into the pond at night, when electric power was cheap, and would run down again to generate power during the day, when the price was higher.

It was a goofy-sounding idea that actually used more power than it generated, but it could make money based on the cheaper-at-night electric rates. When agencies questioned the environmental impact of such a project, the proposers pointed proudly to a similar plant on Lake Michigan just south of Ludington, MI.

It turned out the Ludington plant was actually a giant fish-grinder, and that began to turn the tide on the fate of the Lake Pepin project. Lake Michigan is pretty big water, but these giant pumps on Lake Pepin would have lowered the level of the lake at least six inches every night (and this is a 22-mile wide spot in the Mississippi we're talking about) and caused the Chippewa River--which enters the Mississippi at the downstream end of Pepin--to actually flow backwards into Lake Pepin every night. Consider the thousands of fish killed every night, and top it off with the artificial pond being atop fractured limestone (karst topography) and the project was doomed.

I finally got a look at the Ludington plant this past week (pictured) and can appreciate what an important bullet we dodged on the Mississippi back then. Ludington itself is a really nice town, by the way, and worth the visit of you want to avoid driving through Chicago and opt for the ferry between Ludington and Manitowoc, WI. The pumped storage project is south of town and is easy to ignore unless you're looking for it, as I was.

We've faced down many odd development battles over the years, and the ones we lose stare at us every day, making us cringe a bit. But winning means looking at no change at all, and sometimes it's hard to remind ourselves that we really have won a few fights over time. This was an important one.

The Pigs Eye Landfill

2008-07-15T05:56:00.000-05:00

On the surface it's a nice looking site, with tall grasses and scattered trees and Battle Creek winding through it. But the Pigs Eye Landfill site in St. Paul--perhaps the least visited public land in the metro area--is arguably the most polluted place along the Mississippi River upstream of St. Louis.

St. Paul and Ramsey County officials have long tried to figure out what to do with the site. Access is difficult to a site hemmed in by railroad yards and industry on three sides, and the ever-shallow Pigs Eye Lake on the south. The land floods when the river does, but is adjacent to some of the best birding in the region. The site could support a few passive trails and a bird-watching blind, but bridging the railroad tracks could cost a fortune.

And you DON'T want to dig in the dirt here. Under a couple of feet of cover--and still hydrologically connected to the river--lies an industrial soup of stuff we'd probably rather not know about. It's a vestige of the day when wetlands--even river backwaters--were things you filleld when you can with whatever was available, and when local governments and industry didn't know that dumps like this could become killers.

It would cost more than $100 million to clean up the site, and no government agency has that kind of money. It will probably remain like it is, and will likely remain little-used unless someone can come up with an access plan that can get bird-watchers into the site.

Meanwhile, it's the best wood tick habitat I've ever seen. During a site visit yesterday, officials in light-colored pants looked polka-dotted with ticks. I've picked 72 ticks off myself in the hours since yesterday's visit. And ticks should be gone by now, dessicated by dry, hot weather. Our late spring and lack of really hot weather has left us with a late-running tick season.

The Great Minnesota Bird Killer

2008-07-08T23:06:00.000-05:00

The University of Minnesota is planning to replace the "temporary" science classroom building constructed in the 1960s just north of the Washington Avenue bridge, on the east (main campus) side of the river. The U promised to consult with river interests when they began design work, but somewhere along the way that offer was forgotten.

The Board of Regents in February approved a final design that presents a curved glass surface on the three sides visible from the river. If you thought JLT's building in St. Paul (now labeled by Comcast) was a bird-killer, just wait until this structure is done.

It'll be great for avian ecology students, who can go pick up all the specimens they want every morning, but for the 40 percent of the continent's migrating birds, this isn't going to be a great thing.

Summer means hanging out on the river

2008-07-08T10:43:00.000-05:00

Sure, they weren't there for the ecosystem, or to learn about birds or fish. They were waiting for the Fourth of July fireworks show, and soaking up an evening of fun, beer and music at Taste of Minnesota at Harriet Island Regional Park in St. Paul. But anything that gets 100,000 people to the riverbank on a glorious summer evening can't be all bad. The photo turned out fairly good, considering I took it with a cellphone.

Remembering why I'm here

2008-07-03T13:47:00.000-05:00

You need to get up pretty early this time of year to be on the riverbank at sunrise, but I did manage it the other day. It was one of those glorious moments of dead calm and absolute silence. The river was like a soft mirror, with fog rising into the trees.

A Canada goose flew by and I heard it before I saw it, its wings pounding the air. It's hard to imagine a bird can make so much noise just beating its wings, flying upriver a few feet above the water.

Then it was gone.

I can spend weeks at a time in offices and cubicles and windowless conference rooms, talking about the Mississippi River and why it matters. But when I close my eyes I can hear the bird flying by, and see the mist rising.

It's what makes this so much more than a job.

Counting the plants, one at a time

2008-06-16T21:39:00.000-05:00

This picture shows National Park Service Biologist Nancy Duncan and NPS Botanist Bob Pollock on a goat prairie (so called because it's too steep to graze anything but goats) in Carver County within the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. They were taking part in a "bioblitz" sponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum of Natural History to identify as many species of plants and animals as possible from a single area in 24 hours. The event was held last weekend at the refuge's Rapids Lake Unit in Carver, at the far southwestern corner of the Twin Cities metro area.

The two found about 120 species of plants, including two that had never been found in Carver County before. That's probably because goat prairies--dry, south-facing slopes with their own plant communities--are very rare in Carver County. If they'd been looking in Winona County or anywhere else in Southeastern Minnesota, such plant finds would not have been unusual. The site even includes prickly pear cactus, not something normally thought of in Minnesota.

Watch out for the Great Brown God

2008-06-16T21:26:00.000-05:00

Here in the Twin Cities, the Mississippi is running high and hard. The current is fast and this is no water for novices, especially in a canoe. Power boaters need to keep a sharp watch for floating debris--especially the endless supply of trees that seem to come from the Minnesota River watershed.

But downriver in Iowa, Illinois and beyond, the river is approaching biblical proportions and people had better learn to get out of the way when the great river gets cranking. Things may get far worse before they get better for folks in harm's way.

The Great Flood of 1993 started out this way. In Minnesota, our floods are mostly snowmelt events in the spring, and rainfall this time of year often produces a "June rise" much like what we're seeing now. But in June 1993, a rainy weather pattern set up over the Minnesota River watershed and pushed serious rains into the river system. As those fairly modest flood crests moved south into Iowa, so did that rainy weather, producing rain-event flooding unprecedented in Midwest history.

Unprecedented until now.

Consider that the flood of record on the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was from that 1993 flood. Then consider that the flood crest in Cedar Rapids a few days ago was twelve feet higher than that previous record flood. Not twelve inches--twelve feet. Iowa City was facing the worst of it today, but even more sinister flooding is heading for the Mississippi in Southeastern Iowa and western Illinois.

If the rain pattern follows--and I don't know that it will--you can begin to see what's in store for folks in places like Quincy and Hannibal and St. Louis.

There were a lot of studies following that 1993 flood and a lot of recommendations to change the way the floodplain is managed, especially in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. But once things dried up they went back to normal, and we can expect to repeat those studies--and recommendations--about this time next year.

The river is whatever we feed it

2008-06-08T09:47:00.000-05:00

The Mississippi River—the water itself, and the life it does or does not sustain—is a reflection of what goes in it.

For thousands of years the river’s quality was good and didn’t change much. It nurtured a web of life in the largest and most complex large river ecosystem in the Northern Hemisphere. European settlers changed that, and got rid of pretty much everything we didn’t want by dumping it in the river near the downstream end of town. It’s no accident that the stockyards sprang up in South St. Paul and not Fridley. When the locks and dams were built in the 1930s, our waste no longer flowed downstream and out of our lives (and into the lives of those downriver), and we suddenly got interested in treating our sewage.

Our sewage treatment systems were better than most large cities, but even by the 1960s the river was lifeless between St. Paul and Hastings. Wastewater treatment was vastly improved in the 1970s and 80s and 90s, although in the early 80s we still had combined storm and sanitary sewers—which meant everything went in the river untreated every time it rained or the snow melted. We separated our sewers in the 80s and 90s, and we now have one of the finest large-city wastewater treatment systems in the country. The Metro Plant at Pigs Eye treats 80 percent of the metro area’s sewage and its discharge is often cleaner than the river it flows into.

That’s partly because the river starts out somewhere else. Row-crop agriculture in the Minnesota River watershed sends significant sediment and nutrient problems into the Mississippi at Fort Snelling. Rapidly urbanizing areas between St. Cloud and Anoka mean fecal coliform from human and animal waste is increasing rapidly in the river in the northwestern suburbs—right where much of the metro area gets its drinking water. The rain that eventually all gets in the river contains mercury from power plant emissions.

Some of our problems are old. PCBs and DDT have been banned for decades, but they’re still found in sediment in the riverbed and still work their way up the food chain into game fish and Bald eagles.

Some of our problems are much newer. PBDE, a flame retardant found in virtually everything we use or wear, is turning up the river’s food chain. PFOS, a key component of non-stick coatings, is found in Bald eagles in the Hastings area at levels 4,000 times higher than the acceptable limit for human consumption.

As a society we didn’t put these things in the river on purpose. Some will fade over time, others will need to be addressed. On the whole, we pay a lot more attention to the river’s water quality than we once did. We are starting to understand that we are downstream of problems created for us elsewhere, and we in turn are upstream of the people who must face what we send them.

The river of life

2008-06-08T09:41:00.000-05:00

Possibly the least charismatic animal in the corridor is the Higgins eye pearly mussel, a lowly filter-feeder that lives partly within the gravel river bottom, and that most people have never seen. A federally endangered species nearly driven to extinction by invading zebra mussels, they have been successfully reintroduced in the Hidden Falls-Fort Snelling area where zebra mussels have never taken hold. To be reintroduced in the same area this summer is the Winged maple leaf mussel, an endangered species even more rare than the Higgins eye. Mississippi River biologists have learned much in recent years about the life cycles of mussels and have put that understanding to work reintroducing rare and threatened species.

The quiet leadership of Dan McGuiness

2008-05-26T07:31:00.000-05:00

Dan McGuiness retires this week as director of the Upper Mississippi River Campaign for the National Audubon Society. That's him in a photo I took last week when we were on a bald eagle banding trip along the river.

His career on the Mississippi started banding wood ducks for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Winona in the summer of 1968, while he and I were still college roommates. No one would have guessed we'd both wind up spending most of our lives on the river.

I could tell a lot of stories about Dan, but I'll limit myself to Memorial Day Weekend in 1978, exactly 30 years ago. We both had small babies and should have remembered that Memorial Day Weekend is usually cool and rainy in Minnesota, but we had the smart idea to spend the weekend canoeing the Root River in Southeastern Minnesota, along with our wives and infants, as well as Mark Ackelson and his family (Mark was with the Iowa Conservation Commission then, but has since gone on to great things with the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation).

The weather was cool and wet as expected, and our wives spent much of the weekend in a van with the babies trying to stay warm and trying to keep the babies occupied. So I wound up paddling in the bow of a canoe for probably the first time in my life. I'm a stern paddler, and that means I steer. Bow paddlers don't steer, which I quickly forgot when we got hung up in some rapids and I tried to steer our way out of it, obviously making things worse.

If I'd been paddling stern, you can bet I'd have screamed at Dan to get his paddle out of the water and let me get things under control. But Dan said nothing, just quietly trying to correct our course. He got us through the rapids, despite me, and despite breaking his paddle in the meantime.

Of course, we're now floating around the next bend, facing each other in the canoe, Dan's paddle broken, and that of course happened to be the landing where our families were waiting, wondering why we were looking so stupid. It wasn't our most glamorous moment.

I saved that broken paddle for 30 years and gave it to Dan at his retirement party last week, and I think that incident serves as a great metaphor for Dan's whole career on the river: getting it done, quietly; leading from behind; keeping the boat moving, saving the river one bend at a time, one day at a time.

Water level update

2008-05-07T16:09:00.000-05:00

The Mississippi River continues to run a bit high, but don't expect it to go up any more. The river is dropping north of the Twin Cities, although compensating for that somewhat is the Minnesota River, which is still rising as it nears the metro area.

The Mississippi at St. Paul will rise a few more inches before topping out on Saturday far below the level needed to generate any flooding. The Minnesota River at Savage is expected to peak Sunday.

The Mississippi will also peak at Hastings over the weekend. The St. Croix at Stillwater peaked yesterday (Tuesday). Expect slowly falling water throughout the region for the next couple of weeks, unless we get a lot of rain.

National Eagle Center and its golden eagle

2008-05-07T15:48:00.000-05:00

I stopped at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minn., last week. It's a great place to visit if you haven't seen it. From the Twin Cities, take Highway 61 to Wabasha, turn left and Highway 60 and drive straight to the river. It's right on the river downtown. The drive will take you 90 minutes from St. Paul and the center is a bargain at six bucks. Have lunch at Slippery's, follow Highway 60 across the river to Wisconsin Highway 35 north and you've made a darned scenic day out of it. If you're in Wabasha too early for lunch, there are some great lunch spots in Stockholm and Maiden Rock on the Wisconsin side of Lake Pepin.

The Eagle Center has three eagles on staff, including one golden eagle that broke its wing in a collision with a car in California. Golden eagles are uncommon here, but are wintering in the Mississippi River Valley in increasing numbers. They aren't fish eaters like bald eagles, so you won't see them right along the river but instead in side valleys, where their favorite foods are apparently squirrels and wild turkeys. Golden eagles don't summer around here, and it's thought that the eagles that winter in this area spend their summers near Hudson Bay.

Golden eagles look a bit like an immature bald eagle, although they have shorter necks, feathers on their legs, and they hold their wings a little different when flying. Ask the folks at the National Eagle Center to tell you how to identify one, then watch for them next winter.

This eagle's name is Donald and he weighs eight pounds.

Floods: the great wheel of life

2008-05-01T19:59:00.000-05:00

The media may have trained us to think that floods are bad things, but spring flooding on the Mississippi River is an essential part of the great and endless wheel of life.

Water this week is seeping through the floodplain forest, depositing sediment and enriching the lives of the thick web of creatures adapted to this seasonal pulse. Tree species in the floodplain forest are well-adapted to spending part of their year under water in exchange for a nutrient-rich sediment load on their roots. And once the water recedes, life springs from the forest floor with amazing enthusiasm.

Floodplain forests are thick with bird life all year, but even more so this time of year as dozens of species are migrating through.

Seasonal flooding on the big river requires some adaptation by humans flexible enough to get out of the way. Most of us--although not all--have figured that out.

It's birding time

2008-04-29T09:35:00.000-05:00

This is a great time of year for birding, since 40 percent of the migrating birds in North America travel the Mississippi flyway and everything seems to be on the move right now. This year is a bit special in that the chilly spring has delayed ice-out north of the Twin Cities, so lots of migrating birds have laid over here longer than normal. If you saw flocks of common loons last week on area lakes, your eyes weren't playing tricks on you.

The Mississippi River corridor in the Twin Cities sees 248 species of birds, a bit less than the 284 species on the bird list for the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge or the 307 species listed for the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge found downriver of Lake Pepin.

While the Canada goose is so common here they've become a pest, you may have never seen a Greater white-fronted goose (in the photo), which is a rare migrant through this area and is more likely spotted passing through South Dakota this time of year. It's the only goose with black patches on its chest (which doesn't explain its name). This bird shows up on all three bird lists cited above, but only on the river in the metro area do we have a Cackling goose on the list.

Yes, all geese cackle. But the Cackling goose looks like a Canada goose, only smaller. It winters on the Texas gulf coast and breeds north of Hudson Bay. Its visits here are pretty fleeting, since it has a long way to fly, and you're unlikely to see one on the golf course.

Meanwhile, get out in the woods along the river and look up. The warblers are coming. Thirty species of warbler are coming our way.

A hard lesson on Earth Day

2008-04-23T09:11:00.000-05:00

"O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever lived in the tide of times.

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial."

--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I

A property owner in Mendota clearcut a mature oak forest on a very steep northeast-facing slope in order "to create a prairie" and, incidentally, get this stunning view of St. Paul and the Mississippi River Valley.

Steep slopes are protected in the Mississippi corridor in the Twin Cities, but this one fell through a loophole. Mendota's river corridor ordinance prohibits clearcutting within 100 feet of the river (and this is not anywhere close to the river) and 20 feet back from the top of the bluff (which was all sod), but erred in not protecting the bluff face itself.

Future erosion problems are guaranteed, affecting downslope property owners and the city's own storm sewers. And the property owner will eventually need a significant retaining wall to keep the house and in-ground pool from sliding down the hill.

Gaylord Nelson's lessons of Earth Day 1970 are still finding some deaf ears, 38 years later.

Golden eagles

2008-04-20T11:47:00.006-05:00

I was reviewing a riverfront park plan a number of years ago and the community's planner was gushing about the resource values of the site and how the work they planned would "bring back the golden eagle." It's hard to bring back something we don't have, I thought at the time: golden eagles are primarily a Rocky Mountain bird. They don't nest east of the Badlands of western North Dakota.

At the time, everyone was working to bring back the bald eagle, which did nest in the area and has since become an astounding success story. There are 18 active bald eagle nests along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities corridor this spring. That's down one from 19 last year and up from 14 in 2006.

While golden eagles do migrate through this region, I thought them rare enough that I'd never seen one. Actually, I've probably seen several and mistaken them for immature bald eagles, who don't get their distinctive white head until they're four or five years old.

Golden eagles, it seems, are wintering on the river in this region in increasing numbers. The National Eagle Center in Wabasha started a winter count with trained observers in 2005. That year, they counted 21 golden eagles. In 2006, they counted 29, and in 2007 they spotted 51 golden eagles in the bluff country downriver of the Twin Cities. The 2008 count isn't on the center's website yet, but you can learn more about golden eagles--and eagles in general--at http://www.nationaleaglecenter.org/

Cornell is THE place to go when you're interested in birds, and there's a good picture of a golden eagle at http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Golden_Eagle.html#map

New sign and a great place to visit

2008-04-18T09:54:00.000-05:00

This is the new sign at the Meeker Island Lock and Dam site on the east side of the river right where Minneapolis and St. Paul meet. The St. Paul Parks and Recreation Department has done a great job cleaning up this site, where the first-ever lock and dam on the Mississippi was built. The lock walls are still visible when the water's not too high. The foundation of the lockmaster's house is still visible near the blufftop, and there's a new trail following the old wagon road down the bluff to the river's edge.

The lock and dam had a short life. Authorized by Congress in 1894, it began operations in 1907 and was demolished in 1912, rendered obsolete by the much larger Lock and Dam 1 (Ford Dam) a little way downriver. (St. Paul Parks and Recreation Department photo)

Water's rising--a little

2008-04-17T10:05:00.000-05:00

Heavy rains in Missouri and points south have produced significant flooding on the lower Mississippi, but up here we're barely getting a bump as the snowmelt moves through the area.

The Mississippi was at 6.1 feet in St. Paul this morning and is expected to rise to 7.9 feet by the 23rd. Considering some parts of Lilydale park start to get wet at about 14 feet, this isn't exactly spring flooding.

"Flood stage" is 14 feet in St. Paul, but that's a term only the media really love. Because society has changed the river and the lands along it so much in the last 150 years, "flood stage" today is largely an archaic term. Not much of interest gets flooded at flood stage in most towns anymore, and in St. Paul even Harriet Island Regional Park doesn't really start to get wet until the river hits 17.5 feet.

River flow is up a bit, but nothing to write home about. Flow at Lock/Dam 1 (Ford) is hanging around 13,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), up from around 10,000 cfs a week ago. At Lock/Dam 2 in Hastings, flow is about 25,000 cfs, up from around 16,000 a week ago. Most of the increased flow between these two points comes from the Minnesota River.

Photographer to speak about river

2008-04-14T10:02:00.000-05:00

Sam Abell, famous National Geographic photographer, will speak at the State Theater in Minneapolis Thursday evening and show some of the many photos of the Mississippi River he took in 2001 while working to illustrate a book by Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley.

While he didn't cover the whole river on that trip and missed a few great places, he did visit quite a few spots and you can expect to see some great photos.

He will be introduced by National Park Service Historian John Anfinson. There are few people who know more about the Mississippi River than Anfinson.

The StarTribune had a nice piece about Abell and included some of his photos:

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/17561829.html

Navigation season gets its latest start ever

2008-04-11T11:14:00.000-05:00

The commercial navigation season got its latest start ever in this area with the arrival this morning (April 11) of the first tow and barges to reach St. Paul. The MV David L. Griggs made it through Lake Pepin ice on Thursday. Heavy ice on the lake usually delays the beginning of the shipping season in this area, but the average start to the navigation season is March 20. The previous record for an ice-delayed start to the season was April 7, 1978.

There's more information on the Corps of Engineers website: http://www.mvp.usace.army.mil/pressroom/default.asp?pageid=1393

The bridges are coming!

2008-04-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

Construction continues on the 35W bridge project in Minneapolis, and there continues to be a nearly endless series of agency meetings related to that work. The bridge should be done and open to traffic by Christmas.

Planning is underway for replacement of the Lafayette Bridge in St. Paul. The timeline isn't certain yet, but there will doubtless be a mountain of paper devoted to the project before construction begins.

MnDOT announced this week it now plans to accelerate replacement of the Highway 61 bridge in Hastings. Pray they can do that one without a detour, because it's a long way around to the nearest existing bridges--South St. Paul (the never-ending 494 project) or Red Wing.

The old double-decker toll bridge between Inver Grove Heights and St. Paul Park is scheduled for demolition soon. It is structurally unsafe and has been closed for years. The approach structure on the Inver Grove Heights side will likely be saved as part of a trail, allowing people to walk or bike to an overlook that is virtually in the middle of the river.

MnDOT also plans to move quickly to replace the Desoto bridge in St. Cloud, which closed suddenly a few weeks ago when bent gusset plates were found. Remember when "gusset plates" weren't part of everyone's vocabulary?

There's no bridge involved, but planning is underway to rebuild Highway 10 in Ramsey, just west of Anoka. That's a busy piece of road, and at least one of the alignment alternatives gets disturbingly close to the river.

Eagle nest in St. Paul

2008-04-10T13:29:00.001-05:00

This bald eagle nest is in the city of St. Paul only a short jog from downtown. It is one of six eagle nests along the Mississippi in the city.

No spring flood this year

2008-04-10T11:35:00.000-05:00

It sure doesn't look like we're going to get any spring flooding this year. The Mississippi at St. Paul was at 4.43 feet this morning, which isn't very high for this time of year, and the forecast for a week from now is 5.7. That isn't much of a bump considering mid-April is when our biggest spring floods usually peak.

St. Paul's flood of record crested at 26.01 feet on April 16, 1965. The second-highest flood crest was on April 15, 1969, when the river hit 24.52 feet. The third and fourth-ranked crests both occurred in 2001: 23.76 feet on April 18 and then 23.6 feet on April 30. The fifth-ranked flood crest was 22.37 feet on April 13, 1997.

Some folks remember the legendary flood of 1993, but that didn't really get legendary until the water got to Iowa. It started as a huge rain event in the Minnesota River watershed and that produced a fairly notable flood here, but nothing in the top five, obviously. But as that flood crest moved south, so did the rainfall, and the flood levels just kept getting higher as the water moved on downriver. The St. Louis area really got whacked, but in Minnesota it was just some big water.

St. Paul's latest riverfront development

2008-04-10T11:23:00.000-05:00

St. Paul is looking at yet another redevelopment proposal for the old jail and West Publishing site. http://www.startribune.com/local/stpaul/17446719.html

There are a couple of giant buildings in the package, but if there ever was an appropriate place for tall buildings, this would be it. The jail site would have condos below the bluff and a terrace above, much like it does now. That's important at the Wabasha Street bridgehead. There are a couple of tall buildings just upriver, but they're in front of existing tall buildings downtown so as far as resource impacts are concerned, it's not a biggie. I haven't yet seen detailed plans, but the sketch in the paper looks like it includes a public stairway from the Kellogg Boulevard level down to the train deck, at least, and maybe on down to Shepard Road. This would be an important link for getting people from downtown to the new park on the upriver end of downtown.

I've seen far dumber ideas. This one looks pretty good, although I'll reserve some judgment until I've seen detailed plans.

Spring on the big river

2008-04-09T19:35:00.000-05:00

Spring is coming to the Mississippi River and it's time to take a new approach to discussing the river and its changes. After more than 30 years of getting paid to hang out on the river, I'll try to keep abreast of the river, interesting things going on, and related commentary. It's important to know this venue doesn't represent anyone's opinion but my own, and isn't related to employers past or present. I'll try to focus here on issues related to the Mississippi River, especially north of Guttenberg, Iowa, and particularly in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.

The ice is melting on Lake Pepin, but a fairly cold winter that hung on a bit long into March--without a lot of snow cover--led to pretty serious ice cover. For that reason, this will be one of the latest seasons ever for the first barges from downriver. On average, they reach St. Paul by March 20. This year, the first tow still isn't through Pepin and it's already April 9. Ice-wise, this might be the latest opening. There have been later ones, but they were flood-related.

And with pretty slow melt and not a lot of snow to begin with, flooding won't be an issue in 2008. At least not unless it starts to rain a lot.