Meet My Yard: The Banks of the River

Hello. You might already know this, but a river runs through the Professor Haus. Well, not through the house itself, of course, but in the backyard. It was one of the selling points for us.

It made us giggle to say we had waterfront property. It also excited us to have access to running water right in our backyard should the apocalypse actually come to fruition.

The name of the river is the Ecorse River, but I like to call it the “Dead People River”. The reason I call it that is at the heart of the actual name.

See? The French Settlers that first, uh, settled here named the river Rivière aux Écorces, which translates to “bark river”. The reason they called it that is because of the custom that the local Native Americans had of wrapping their dead in the bark of trees and burying them at the mouth of the river.

Hence, “Dead People River.”

Oh, here is what it looks like today, August 29, 2024. It has been raining the past couple of days, so it is high… and fast.

Sizewise, it’s much more like a creek than a river, but I’m taking the official name because it sounds much cooler to have a river in the backyard than a creek, doesn’t it?!

As you can see, there is dense and lush foliage surrounding the banks of our river. And, as you can probably imagine, that supports a very healthy ecosystem of wildlife.

We have so many varieties of birds that I had to start keeping track in my weekly reading blog.

We have bunnies, who I suspect eat my tomato plants. They are frickin’ adorable, though, so I don’t care. I didn’t spend money on the seeds anyways; I just took them out of the tomatoes I already ate.

There is the dumb groundhog, who would be much easier to hate if it weren’t so cute. But, once or twice a year, it will dig a hole close to the house, so we do our fair share of cursing it’s adorable lil face. Especially when it pops it’s head out of the hole that its dug by the riverbank.

The groundhog hole isn’t pictured in this photo; I just wanted to show more river.

We have so many squirrels: black ones (like Victor), grey ones (like Rube), and the occasional red one. Needless to say, I adore my squirrel friends.

We have a mad amount of ducks (lacha, if you’re Irish), and I love seeing and hearing them. I don’t feed them too much, though, cause the previous owner warned me that they started, and then they had hundreds of ducks descending on the yard every morning.

Maybe that’s why we have such good soil?

And I’ve even seen a mink playing on the banks of the river. Yes, I squealed.

When I told my neighbor, he said excitedly, “That’s wonderful! The minks are coming back!!!”

See, according to what I’ve been told by my neighbors, someone official came in and clear cut the river banks a few years ago. This displaced a ton of wildlife and has taken decades to grow back.

All along the entire river.

And the river’s pretty important for our local wildlife, you know? Where else are they gonna go?

The river itself even has a bit of history. There are two branches to the Ecorse River—a north and a south. They meet up at a point in Lincoln Park, Michigan, called Council Point Park. In 1793, at that very spot, Chief Pontiac held a council before attacking Fort Detroit.

Here’s a pic of Council Point Park from 2017 (I believe).

Pay close attention to the left side of the pic in each season. The lush vegetation and gorgeous foliage?

Welp, here’s what it looks like now. Again, pay attention to the left side of the pic. Where all that beautiful greenery used to be.

It’s all gone – down to the dirt.

The trees in the back are about half a mile away and were cut down a few days later. Linda Schaub, a local who loves Council Point Park, wrote a blog about what’s currently happening with even more photos. You can read it here.

And what’s happening is the same thing that happened a few decades ago. They are clear-cutting along all sides of the Ecorse River. Earlier in the year, we attended a few meetings with our neighbors and the department heading up the project.

We were loud and passionate about how we wanted to keep as much greenery and trees as possible. We were vocal about our concern for the local wildlife. My neighbors, who have been here for decades, spoke passionately about how they definitely didn’t want to see the same thing happened that happened before. The representative listened.

We felt hopeful. For a while.

Then that rep left the project, and suddenly there was a new rep, and even suddenly-er they started clear-cutting the banks of the Ecorse River.

I am not 100% sure of all of the project’s nuances. I just know I don’t want to lose 20 feet of foliage on each side of the river.

Luckily, my neighbors are loud, passionate, and unafraid of confrontation. I’m still working on some of those myself. They spoke to the local news about their concern, and my fingers (and everything else) are crossed that something positive will come of it.

There are some good pics of what’s happening in the article I linked above.

My neighbors have contacted so many different agencies to try to stop this—or at the very least, work with us to keep our nature.

I mean, where is all that wildlife going to go?! This area is so heavily populated – with both people and creatures.

The creatures were here first.

I was driving home from ceramics the other day and stopped to talk with one of our neighbors. He said, “We’ve tried everything we know to try. Me and [other neighbor] joked about chaining ourselves to the trees on the day the big scary machines show up. “

“Consider me in,” I told him.

Now, the only question is: what color and weight chain do I use?

p.s. “big scary machines” were my words, not my neighbors.