The Record Now: What Stands Where, on This Ground

Mishawaka's fauna as the assembled record leaves it, November 2026

Read end to end, this section divides Mishawaka's animals into the same four companies as the county's — with this city's own names in each. The gone, on the record's word: the buffalo and elk of the Parkovash bottoms below this city, present on two county histories and a French place-name, gone on an undated departure no last-animal story fills; the black wolf and the panther of Chapman's list, for whom no township hunt, bounty, or farewell was ever documented here; the prairie chicken of Chapman's warning and the passenger pigeon of his roosts, the county's entries in South Bend's file. The restored: the deer, from Chapman's rarity to a buck on Main Street; the turkey, back in the county's woods on 2,795 released birds; the river otter, delisted in 2005, which reached this county by spread from releases in the Elkhart River and Pigeon River watersheds — no release on county ground, and none claimed; the black bear, which returned to the county for one documented summer in 2015 and passed this city by. The built: a trout and salmon river assembled between 1983 and 1992 whose upstream end is this city — the hatchery on its east side still filling its broodstock tanks with 700 lake-run steelhead a year, the ladder at Central Park still counted fish by fish, walleye planted at Maggie's Landing on a two-year rhythm — and, holding beneath it, the lake sturgeon, unbuilt and unrestored, whose river ends at the Twin Branch Dam. The arrived, uninvited: the zebra mussel, on the state's list for this river in this county; the coyote, absent from Chapman's lists, present at a council meeting in 2024; and the sea lamprey, held at lake level by a seventy-year program while its native cousins hold their documented place in the creek surveys. What this section has not printed is as deliberate as what it has: no commercial fishery that the record does not contain, no fish kill that did not happen here, no alligator but one Michigan turtle, no veterinarian the directories do not name, no eagle nest on ground where none is documented. The wild record of this city, kept straight, runs from a French name for buffalo cows in the bottoms to a motion-activated camera counting steelhead in a concrete staircase — and every step of it stands on a document with a date.

Principal sources

1. The entries of this section, each on its own sources.