The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Closed at November 2026, this section's whole arc stands thus. The baseline of 1880 — large fauna gone, game birds failing, marsh birds retreating — is no longer the ground's description, but the recovery is selective and every element of it in this article is dated somewhere above. Present and ordinary: the white-tailed deer, extirpated from Indiana in 1893 and now the township's default large mammal, managed by harvest, with about 115,000 taken statewide annually in recent DNR reporting. Present and established: wild turkey, restored from a 1960s handful to a statewide flock estimated near 120,000; beaver, reintroduced in the Kankakee basin in 1935 and at work in its wetlands; river otter, released into the St. Joseph watershed 1995–1999, delisted (2005 or 2009 — the conflict stands above), and under a regulated trapping season since 2015 with a statewide quota of 750. Nesting and counted: bald eagles at the county's first recorded nests of 2015, the ND-LEEF pair at 16 eaglets in 11 years as of March 2026; osprey at the state's densest concentration, Potato Creek, in this township's own park; peregrine falcons in downtown South Bend at 63 fledged through 2025. In the rivers: a managed salmonid river on the St. Joseph — about 800 steelhead through the South Bend ladder in the first six weeks of the fall 2026 run — and a surveyed, smallmouth-led fishery on the Kankakee; the lake sturgeon still stopped below the county by the Berrien Springs dam, its ladders not built for it. Arrived: the zebra mussel, listed for the county's St. Joseph River on the DNR list updated January 2026. At the gate: invasive carp, absent from every Kankakee survey, advancing on the Illinois in August 2026 to 80 miles from Lake Michigan, against a barrier at Brandon Road whose construction stopped in July 2026 and resumed in September. Gone, with no return on any record: the bison from this township (county-proven, township-unproven), the wolf, the panther, the prairie chicken (last confirmed Indiana bird, 3 April 1972), and the passenger pigeon (extinct 1 September 1914). Visiting, once, in the present century: one black bear, St. Joseph County, June to October 2015 — the state still without a breeding population. And counted, or not: no Christmas Bird Count circle is documented over this township, whose birds enter the national census, if at all, at a neighbour circle's edge. That is the fauna of Lincoln Township as the record stands in November 2026 — richer than Chapman's page feared, poorer than the portage country held, and, for the first time in the town's history, measured.
Sources: the articles of this section and their sources, closed at November 2026; Indiana DNR species and fishing-report record as cited above. Closure: DUG — a closing synthesis article; it introduces no fact not carried, with its source, in articles #174–#183.