Chapman's water birds, and what the ditches did

1880, against the modern record

The marsh birds in 1880: Chapman's bird list reads, in its water sections, like a manifest of the marsh world while the marsh still stood. Of the swimmers he writes that they "formerly frequented this county in large numbers" and had "almost disappeared" by 1880; the rough-billed pelican — the American white pelican — "has now altogether ceased to make its visits here"; the double-crested cormorant "has been seen here." His duck list is a market hunter's inventory: wood-duck, canvas-back, red-head, the mergansers, mallard, pintail, the teals, spoonbill, gadwall, baldpate, and among the geese and swans "the American swan, the trumpeter swan and the white-fronted goose" — the ducks by 1880 already confining "themselves mostly to the wilder places," which in this county meant the Kankakee. Of the waders he is explicit about the mechanism: "they frequented the marshes, but cultivation has drained their favorite haunts." And of the cranes: "the whooping crane, always rare, is now never seen. The sand-hill cranes stop on their journeys north and south."

The reading of it: The 1880 list and the 1882–1918 drainage bracket the same event from opposite sides. Chapman, writing before the great ditching began, already records the market-gun and early-drainage thinning: swimmers almost gone, the pelican's visits ended, the whooping crane never seen, the ducks pressed back into the wild places. The whooping crane never returned to this county as anything but a bird of passage in the modern flyway-recovery era, and no county nesting record exists; the trumpeter swan, named in his list, was extirpated across the interior in the same decades and owes its modern Midwestern presence to reintroduction programs in other states — no St. Joseph County trumpeter record was found in the sources reached, and the swan is printed as Chapman's bird, not a modern one. The sandhill crane is the arc's exception: the bird Chapman saw stopping on migration, and the marsh's last documented local breeder to 1929, came back with the late twentieth century's crane recovery to breed again in Indiana's northern wetlands, and its bugling flights over the county's river and marsh remnants are now an ordinary spring and fall record — the one voice of the Grand Marsh that a South Bend resident can still hear on schedule.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, pp. 340–343.
2. The marsh and crane record as gathered in the sources of the preceding entry — Meyer (1936); Thompson (1888); the regional breeding statement for sandhill cranes in northwestern Indiana to 1929.