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River Report
In a word...beautiful.
I used to think the river in spring, before the trees leafed out, was boring. It's not. It's just different from what we see all summer.
Just upstream from here is the largest island in the Mississippi River. It's so big there are lakes within it with delightful names like Grassy, Buffalo Hall, Pond Lily and Wadleigh. It's called Beaver Island and for good reason. Beavers have shaped it, damming its sloughs and cutting channels for their travels. Here's an example of a work in progress...
This is a beaver race...a channel they keep open to haul branches from their work area to the water... 
Eagles were much in evidence though none were co-operative with the photographer. If you look at the center of this picture you'll see a dark blob. It's an eagle nest...the only one we know of in the island. These nests are huge...eight or ten feet across and weighing well over a hundred pounds. They don't use twigs in their construction. They use branches...sometimes three inches in diameter. 
Here's my only picture of indigenous wildlife...our Sasha living it up on a spit of land. 
We were amazed at the amount of traffic through the island. Mostly it was flatboats with one or two people aboard, lazing down the cut. There was one guy in an old V-hull boat with a fifteen horsepower Johnson, totally unable to read the surface of the water, running in circles and churning up mud like mad. Maybe he wasn't the most accomplished boater on the water but he was having fun. That's what counts.
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guess there weren't any fish huh?
Civil Discourse - ERA - A Mother President - Women's Rights - Primary Reform
Hamp, there were fish everywhere. But it didn't do us one whit of good. Our local purveyor of bait didn't have a worm in the shop.
A couple of times we saw substantial wakes on the surface of the water, made by large fish swimming near the surface...probably catfish. Saw several of them jump also. That's encouraging. The island is silting in and fishing gets worse every year. The only reason we were able to get into it today is that we're having a little high water, courtesy of warm weather and snow melt up north.
Probably just as well we didn't go fishing. Our hands would've frozen solid if they'd gotten wet taking fish off the hook. Water temp is 35°.
Chilly water and all. Now I haven't tied a worm on my fly rod in years.
Civil Discourse - ERA - A Mother President - Women's Rights - Primary Reform
Civil Discourse - ERA - A Mother President - Women's Rights - Primary Reform
It took me almost an hour to get the "catch" part.
Sound advice to both fish and investors.
Thanks for the pics creeper. I had no idea that an Eagles nest is 8 to 10 ft across. That is some nest!
I love the post and the pics. You said in response to Hampy "The island is silting in...." What does that mean? How come it's happening?
Here's an aerial picture of the island.
View Larger Map
(nuts...that was supposed to embed but it didn't and it came out smaller scale than I wanted. The island is the big, dark green area in the river south of Highway 30.)
Zoom in a little and you can see the lakes, and if you look carefully you can see that there's a cut through the island. When the river gets high it usually gets muddy, too, from the turbulence caused by faster flow. That muddy water flows through the cut and into the island, then slows down when it reaches one of the wide spots (lakes) in the island. When the water slows down, the mud settles out.
The most fascinating example of this is right smack in the middle of the island. That's where Upper Lake is. Or, rather, was. It was a huge lake, normally four or five feet deep. Upper Lake is almost totally gone now, filled in with silt from the high waters. It's marked here by a pale, slightly crescent-shaped mud flat. The water is carving channels through the newly-made land but there are times, when the water is low, that there is no flow through the island at all.
The remaining lakes you see in this image are still there because there is normally no flow through them to carry the silt that would fill them up. At high flood stage, water flows through the whole island and they get some mud settling but nothing like the lakes with constant flow.
A couple of things to note on the map...the pale, straight line is the cleared right-of-way under a big power line. The light green, cleared areas on the upper right are former farms. (One is still planted in a big garden. It's the best soil on the face of the earth.) The farms are in the area where a town actually existed in the first half of the 20th century. The town had a store and a school house. It was known for being a wild-and-wooly place, the residents of the island being squatters who lived off the land. I have a cousin by marriage who was born on the island...one of many babies who started life there.
edit: The big dark blue area you see on that aerial photo is the pool above Lock and Dam #13, the biggest pool in the river.
thank you creeper.