The Record Now: What Stands Where, November 2026

Closing article — species status as of November 2026, from DNR and preserve records

Lead: This closing article prints only what a named record supports, at the strength it supports it, as of November 2026. The township's documented wildlife in 2026 lives overwhelmingly in two protected places — Spicer Lake Nature Preserve and Bendix Woods County Park, both in Olive Township's north and east — and in the counted record around them. Outside the preserves, the honest record for the township's farm and creek ground is thin, and that thinness is itself the closing finding.

Spicer Lake Nature Preserve (320 acres; 196-acre state-dedicated preserve at its core; a Wetland of Distinction, 2018; founded 1978 through the South Bend Audubon / Nature Conservancy search — carried in this history and not re-derived here). DNR's preserve description documents the habitat the animals stand in: two kettle lakes, Spicer (five acres of open water left at its center) and Lancaster, ringed by pond-lily and swamp-loosestrife marsh, buttonbush shrub swamp and red maple swamp forest. The Indiana Birding Trail's site account documents warblers on migration, woodpeckers year-round, Rusty Blackbirds occasionally in fall, Belted Kingfishers and Pied-billed Grebes at Lancaster Lake, and nesting Eastern Wood-Pewees, Wood Thrushes and Scarlet Tanagers in the woodland. The eBird hotspot record — the preserve's running species ledger — stands at 148 species on 330-plus checklists, its iconic list headed by the Red-headed Woodpecker (the Birding Trail's guaranteed bird for this site), with Bald Eagle, Sandhill Crane, Wild Turkey, Wood Duck, Great Blue Heron, Barred Owl and Swamp Sparrow all on the documented list — which is to say, Chapman's scarce eagle, vanished turkey and stopped-over crane, and his red-headed woodpecker, all stand on this ground in the current record. County Parks' preserve literature adds the mammal line at its strength: the preserve “is home to deer, mink, fox, coyotes” and provides home to endangered plants and animals, its own words, species of the endangered set unnamed there and not named here.

Bendix Woods County Park (195 acres; 27-acre state-dedicated beech-maple nature preserve). DNR's preserve description documents old-growth beech and sugar maple with red elm, basswood and black maple — the forest half of the township's pair. Its published bird record is a spring-migrant record: Visit South Bend Mishawaka's birding account lists warblers, thrushes, vireos and Scarlet Tanagers in spring, with Great Horned and Barred Owls as favorites, and eBird's Bendix Woods hotspot carries a documented list in the eighty-plus species range including Red-headed Woodpecker, Wood Thrush and Golden-winged Warbler. The park's fishing ponds and its 4.5-acre planted prairie — pollinator habitat, in the county parks master plan — complete its documented animal infrastructure; no species-level mammal or herpetofauna survey for Bendix Woods was found in the record reached, and none is summarized.

The county frame around them, current: bald eagles nest successfully in the county (St. Patrick's nest active since 2015, 16 eaglets through the 2025–26 account; Potato Creek likewise), osprey nest at the county's highest concentration at Potato Creek, the St. Joseph River's ladders passed roughly 800 steelhead in the first six weeks of the fall 2026 run, Indiana's herds and flocks of the restored species — deer, turkey, otter, beaver — are statewide and self-sustaining on DNR's record, zebra mussels are established in the waters ringing the township but not listed for its preserve lakes, and no breeding wolf, cougar, bear, bison, prairie chicken or passenger pigeon stands anywhere in Indiana's wild record. Chapman's 1880 chapter opened this section as a ledger of loss; the November 2026 record closes it as a ledger of partial, documented, preserve-anchored return — fullest exactly where the ground was set aside, in 1966 and 1978, and left wet and wooded.

Sources:

1. Indiana DNR, Division of Nature Preserves — Spicer Lake Nature Preserve (196 acres; two lakes, marsh, swamp forest) and Bendix Woods Nature Preserve (27 acres; beech–sugar maple old growth) descriptions.
2. Indiana Birding Trail, Spicer Lake Nature Preserve birding account — habitats, warblers, woodpeckers, Rusty Blackbird, kingfisher, grebe, nesting neotropical species.
3. eBird hotspots — Spicer Lake Nature Preserve (148 species, 330+ checklists; iconic birds incl. Red-headed Woodpecker) and Bendix Woods County Park (80+ species documented).
4. St. Joseph County Parks — Spicer Lake preserve literature (deer, mink, fox, coyotes; Wetland of Distinction 2018; 1978 founding) and Bendix Woods master-plan literature (prairie, nature preserve); Visit South Bend Mishawaka, birding account (Bendix Woods spring migrants and owls).
5. Indiana DNR — eagle, osprey and restoration status as cited in the preceding articles of this section; DNR fishing report, Oct. 15, 2026 (South Bend ladder steelhead count).