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Chapman's list, 1880; the modern test
The test: This section was asked to find the Potawatomi Park rookery — a heronry in the park that holds the zoo — if the record documents one. It does not. No rookery or heronry at Potawatomi Park in South Bend appears in the sources reached: not in the park's own published material, not in the bird record, not in the press consulted. The famous "Heron Rookery" of northern Indiana is a different place — the great blue heron colony preserved as the Heron Rookery unit of Indiana Dunes National Park, in Porter County — and the similarity of names is the whole connection; the file prints the negative so the confusion has somewhere documented to stop.
The county's heron record, at its true size: What St. Joseph County does hold is Chapman's heron list of 1880 — the great blue heron, the least bittern, the green heron, the night heron, and the American bittern among the waders of the marshes, with the glossy ibis "seen here" — and the modern ordinary record of great blue herons fishing the river and the county's ponds as a common, uncounted presence. A heronry may well stand in some county woodlot unknown to the published record; if it does, it is not documented, and in this section undocumented is the end of the sentence.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, pp. 340–343 — the waders list.
- The rookery test: searches of the park, bird, and press record for this section, November 2026 — no Potawatomi Park (South Bend) rookery found; the Heron Rookery of Indiana Dunes National Park, Porter County, is the region's documented colony of that name.