Birding adventures w/ the Audubon Society [Part 2]!

The Great Lakes, the largest assembly of fresh water in the entire world. There's five of them, and a lot of other water down here and in different places. We're here, right? (Other side) We're right here and we're going to go look for some birds. I'm down here in the Calumet region on the south side of Chicago, hanging out with folks from the Great Lakes chapter of the Audubon Society. They're teaching me all about the cool work they're doing in this industrial corridor to restore the region's natural wetlands, which I did not expect to find among all of the factories and trains. But first, let's learn about fire. Hi, I'm Darwyn Vitt-Gorra. I am the current crew chief for the Audubon Great Lakes habitat restoration internship. We are in the Calumet region down here in the Big Marsh area. We are clearing three-foot burn brakes around some of our young native sensitive trees. Even though our native trees are fire adapted, when they're this young, the heat of it is just too much for them to take. We want to make sure that we are protecting them as best we can. A lot of our soil health comes from the fact that fire has been a management application on these lands for thousands of years. We are helping to enrich the soil so that wildlife have healthy habitats that they can continue to come back to. Just down the road from Indian Ridge Marsh is Powderhorn Lake. I'm meeting up with another one of Audubon's team who also provides assistance via boots on the ground and in the marsh. My name is Kayla Lindsay-Fisher. I am the senior stewardship associate for Audubon Great Lakes. Right now we are looking at the channel in between Wolf Lake and Powderhorn Lake. This channel was dug out in 2023. It was quite the feat. There was about 8 ft of slag, a byproduct of steel production, that had to be essentially taken out. During the industrial times when there were a lot of steel factories here, they would dump it in areas that they didn't really have anywhere else to put it. The local neighborhood is right here. Before this channel was made, before we had a water control structure that helped to alleviate some of the flood waters from Powderhorn Lake when we would get really heavy rainfall. A lot of that water would go right into the roadway and to unfortunately in people's homes. This has been a great thing not only for the habitat for different animals and plants, but then also of course the neighborhood that is just nearby. There's lots of different turtle species, frog species. Um, we get lots of fish that travel through the channel. It's a great native snake. They usually like to be in the vegetation, but when it the temperatures drop down and it gets cold, they need the sunshine to help them stay warm. They love wetlands. He's probably not very happy with me cuz I yanked him. It's like, bye. If you thought this was fun, just stay tuned for the next video. I'm meeting Audubon Great Lakes conservation director and I'm going to ask him all about facts about wetlands. Stay tuned.