This is the first comprehensive and fully illustrated guidebook for nature lovers who want to explore the wild and natural areas of southern Indiana by trail, water, or road. Featuring 95 beautiful color photos and 5 maps, A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana provides ideas for a lifetime of fun and exploration, and makes planning easy by including directions to the areas, offering suggestions on what to do when you arrive, and what you will find when you explore. Steven Higgs highlights each site’s unique natural characteristics and history with additional facts, anecdotes, and observations. Higgs directs readers to the very best locations in southern Indiana for bird and game watching, fishing and boating, hiking and camping, and more. Come and explore the natural areas that represent southern Indiana wilderness at its pristine best!
This is the first comprehensive and fully illustrated guidebook for nature lovers who want to explore the wild and natural areas of southern Indiana by trail, water, or road. Featuring 95 beautiful color photos and 5 maps, A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana provides ideas for a lifetime of fun and exploration, and makes planning easy by including directions to the areas, offering suggestions on what to do when you arrive, and what you will find when you explore. Steven Higgs highlights each site’s unique natural characteristics and history with additional facts, anecdotes, and observations. Higgs directs readers to the very best locations in southern Indiana for bird and game watching, fishing and boating, hiking and camping, and more. Come and explore the natural areas that represent southern Indiana wilderness at its pristine best!
A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana: 119 Unique Places to Explore
396
A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana: 119 Unique Places to Explore
396Paperback
-
SHIP THIS ITEMShips in 1-2 daysPICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
This is the first comprehensive and fully illustrated guidebook for nature lovers who want to explore the wild and natural areas of southern Indiana by trail, water, or road. Featuring 95 beautiful color photos and 5 maps, A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana provides ideas for a lifetime of fun and exploration, and makes planning easy by including directions to the areas, offering suggestions on what to do when you arrive, and what you will find when you explore. Steven Higgs highlights each site’s unique natural characteristics and history with additional facts, anecdotes, and observations. Higgs directs readers to the very best locations in southern Indiana for bird and game watching, fishing and boating, hiking and camping, and more. Come and explore the natural areas that represent southern Indiana wilderness at its pristine best!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253020901 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2016 |
| Series: | Indiana Natural Science Series |
| Pages: | 396 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Steven Higgs is an award winning environmental writer and photographer and author of Eternal Vigilance: Nine Tales of Environmental Heroism in Indiana (IUP, 1996).
James Alexander Thom is the acclaimed author of Follow the River; Long Knife; From Sea to Shining Sea and Panther in the Sky, for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historic novel.
Read an Excerpt
A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana
119 Unique Places to Explore
By Steven Higgs
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Steven HiggsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02098-7
CHAPTER 1
Part 1
THE LAND STEWARDS
The Land Stewards
The natural area destinations in this book are owned and managed by a variety of public and private entities, including federal and state governments and private, nonprofit conservation organizations. Some are owned jointly, mostly between Indiana Division of Nature Preserves and nonprofits. Others are contiguous to one another with separate owners and are managed under cooperative agreements.
While the six hundred thousand acres of land highlighted here are stewarded by their owners, some are neither protected nor preserved in the sense that they are off limits to human intervention. Timber harvesting, always a controversial subject in public lands management, is practiced on most state and national forest acreage in Indiana. Since 2005 the Division of Forestry has logged portions of Back Country Areas, which, according to a 1981 news release from Republican governor Robert D. Orr, were established "to be enjoyed by the wilderness seeker as a place of solitude and repose."
Fish and wildlife areas managed by the state may include crop plantings that are intended to feed game species.
U.S. Forest Service
The U.S. Forest Service, an agency in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, owns and manages the Hoosier National Forest, which is one of 155 the agency oversees in the National Forest System (NFS). Along with twenty grasslands, the system totals 193 million acres in forty-four states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. That's roughly 9 percent of the entire U.S. land mass.
The Forest Service's mission is to "sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations." The NFS is divided into nine regions. The 202,000-acre Hoosier is part of Region 9, also known as the Eastern Region, which is headquartered in Milwaukee.
The Forest Service dates its origins to 1876, when Congress created the Office of Special Agent in the Department of Agriculture whose mission was to assess the quality and conditions of the nation's forestlands at a time when they were at great risk. Settlement patterns and technological changes in the 1800s had resulted in scarred and damaged landscapes in Southern Indiana and across the nation, ultimately leading to concerns of a nationwide timber famine. Five years later, in 1881, the Office of Special Agent became the Division of Forestry.
Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which gave then President Benjamin Harrison authority to designate public lands in the West as forest reserves. Harrison, the only president from Indiana, had pushed the legislation. The reserves became national forests in 1905, when President Theodore Roosevelt transferred them to his newly created U.S. Forest Service. The agency's first head was Gifford Pinchot, whose vision was to manage the forests "to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people in the long run."
While the National Forest System, like the National Park System, has land preservation as a function, its managerial priorities differ from parks. National forests are open to logging, livestock, oil and gas drilling, and other commercial activities, as well as recreation and amenities-based activities like hiking, nature study, photography, and wildlife watching.
Each national forest is assigned a forest supervisor and one or more district rangers who oversee land management. The Hoosier National Forest supervisor's office is in Bedford, with a district office in Tell City.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior, owns and manages the Muscatatuck, Patoka, and Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuges, all of which are located in Southern Indiana. Their combined 65,731 acres in 2015 are part of the 93-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System, which is composed of more than 520 National Wildlife Refuges and thousands of small wetlands and special management areas nationwide. The agency's National Fish Hatcheries Program operates sixty-six National Fish Hatcheries, sixty-four fishery resource offices, and seventy-eight ecological services field offices, including one in Bloomington that serves Central and Southern Indiana.
Fish & Wildlife's mission is "working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people." The service is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has seven regional offices and nearly seven hundred field units. Indiana is part of the Midwest Region, which also includes Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Key agency functions include enforcing federal wildlife laws; protecting endangered species; managing migratory birds; restoring nationally significant fisheries; conserving and restoring wildlife habitat, such as wetlands; and helping foreign governments with international conservation efforts.
Fish & Wildlife traces its origins to the U.S. Fish Commission, created by Congress in 1871, whose mission was to study the nation's declining food fishes and recommend ways to reverse the trend. In 1885 Congress created the Office of Economic Ornithology in the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study the food habits and migratory patterns of birds. After several name changes, it became the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1905.
The survey studied birds and mammals, managed the nation's first wildlife refuges, controlled predators, enforced wildlife laws, and conserved dwindling populations of migratory birds. The Bureau of Fisheries and the Biological Survey transferred to the Department of the Interior in 1939 and combined the next year into the Fish & Wildlife Service.
In addition to the ecological services field office in Bloomington, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has field offices for each of the refuges that are located in Seymour for Muscatatuck, Oakland City for Patoka, and Madison for Big Oaks.
Indiana Department of Natural Resources
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is the state government agency entrusted with protecting, enhancing, and preserving the state's natural, cultural, and recreational resources for the public's benefit. These include state nature preserves, parks, forests, and fish and wildlife areas in Southern Indiana.
The agency is divided into two teams. The Land Management Team oversees the state's natural areas and manages them for preservation, recreation, and extractive activities like timber harvesting. Its divisions include Nature Preserves, State Parks & Reservoirs, Fish & Wildlife, Outdoor Recreation, and Forestry. The Regulatory Team has authority over entomology and plant pathology, historic preservation, oil and gas, reclamation, and water.
DNR is overseen by the autonomous, twelve-member Indiana Natural Resources Commission (NRC), which is composed of seven citizens chosen on a bipartisan basis, three ex-officio members from state agencies, and a member of the Indiana Academy of Science.
DIVISION OF NATURE PRESERVES
The DNR Division of Nature Preserves identifies, protects, and manages more than 250 nature preserves totaling more than 46,000 acres in all twelve of the state's natural regions. Its mission is to maintain natural areas in sufficient numbers and sizes to maintain viable examples of all of the state's natural communities and to provide living museums of natural Indiana as it was when the European settlers arrived. The first state nature preserve — Pine Hills Nature Preserve at Shades State Park — was dedicated in 1969.
Established by an act of the Indiana General Assembly in 1967, the Division of Nature Preserves provides permanent protection for natural areas, defined as land and/or water that has "retained or re-established its natural character, or has unusual flora or fauna, or has biotic, geological, scenic, or paleontological features of scientific or educational value." The Division also manages and maintains viable populations of endangered, threatened, and rare plant and animal species.
Inclusion as a dedicated state nature preserve requires agreement of a site's landowner, the DNR, and the NRC. Once dedicated, a preserve is protected in perpetuity from development that would harm its natural character.
Dedicated state nature preserves are owned by DNR Nature Preserves, Parks & Reservoirs, Fish & Wildlife, and Forestry, as well as city and county park and recreation boards, universities and colleges, and private conservation organizations, including The Nature Conservancy, Central Indiana Land Trust, Whitewater Valley Land Trust, Ouabache Land Trust, Sycamore Land Trust, Indiana Karst Conservancy, and Oak Heritage Conservancy.
As part of its management protocol, the Division of Nature Preserves uses prescribed burning, removes nonnative plants, and maintains preserve boundaries and trails. It also inventories the state for previously unknown natural areas, maintains a registry of natural areas, and dedicates new preserves.
The Indiana Natural Heritage Data Center, a program administered by Nature Preserves, locates and tracks the state's rarest plants, animals, and natural communities. It maintains a database of this natural diversity to help set priorities for protection.
Dedicated state nature preserves, regardless of ownership, are managed to maintain and/or restore their natural ecological conditions. With a few exceptions, they are open to the public for hiking, nature study, photography, wildlife watching, and, with advance permission, scientific research. Visitors are asked to stay on trails to reduce erosion and damage to the fragile plant communities that thrive on the preserves' floors.
Some preserves do not have parking lots or hiking trails. The Division of Nature Preserves and the organizations that own the individual sites can answer questions about access and visitation.
As the Division of Nature Preserves says on its website, nature, not recreation, is priority no. 1: "More than any other reason, nature preserves are set aside to protect the plants, animals, and natural communities which are found on them. Visitation is allowed to the extent that the features can tolerate it without deterioration."
State law prohibits disturbing or removing anything from dedicated state nature preserves without a special permit.
DIVISION OF STATE PARKS & RESERVOIRS
The Division of State Parks & Reservoirs, DNR's largest division, manages thirty-five parks, lakes, and recreation areas across the state, sixteen in Southern Indiana. The properties range in size from the 165-acre Falls of the Ohio State Park to almost 16,000 acres at Brown County State Park. They include eight U. S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoirs and the state-built Hardy Lake.
The division's mission is to "manage and interpret our properties' unique natural, wildlife, and cultural resources using the principles of multiple use and preservation, while sustaining the integrity of these resources for current and future generations." Multiple use means properties are managed for a variety of public uses, from, in the case of state parks and reservoirs, scenic drives to fishing, camping, hiking, horse riding, biking, and nature study. State and national forests allow logging and other resource-extractive uses under the multiple-use umbrella.
Some Parks & Reservoirs properties, like Monroe Lake and Patoka Lake, have multiple recreation areas under their supervision. Many, like Shakamak, O'Bannon Woods, and Whitewater Memorial State Parks, have dedicated state nature preserves within their boundaries. Others, including Brown County State Park and Brookville Lake, abut other state, federal, and land trust properties to create more expansive natural areas than each provides on its own.
As of 2016 the Parks & Reservoirs division managed more than 2,000 buildings, nearly 8,400 campsites, 700 miles of trails, 631 hotel and lodge rooms, 75 marinas, 200-plus shelters, 160 or so playgrounds, 149 cabins, 16 swimming pools, and 15 beaches.
HISTORY OF INDIANA STATE PARKS
Indiana State Parks history dates to 1916, when Col. Richard Lieber, an Indianapolis businessman who came to be known as the "father of Indiana state parks," recommended creation of a state park system to coincide with the state's centennial celebration. Lieber became a national leader in the state parks movement and served as the Indiana Department of Conservation's first director for more than a decade.
Under Lieber's direction, the state purchased 350-plus acres in Owen County for $5,250 at auction and established McCormick's Creek as Indiana's first state park on May 25, 1916. In almost a century, the number has grown to twenty-two, with parks stretching from ever-changing sand dunes on Lake Michigan to four-hundred-million-year-old fossil beds at the Falls of the Ohio River.
As with national and state forests, parks, and other public properties, Indiana's state park history is inextricably linked to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). A division of the Works Progress Administration, the CCC hired unemployed workers during the Great Depression to reclaim Hoosier landscapes devastated by overlogging, ill-fated agricultural operations, and other poorly planned development projects by planting trees. They implemented erosion-control measures where needed. They also built lakes, roads, shelters, restrooms, gatehouses, trails, bridges, and other structures, many of which are still in use at state parks and other state and federal properties today.
Versailles State Park features a life-size commemorative statue celebrating the CCC workers' contribution to the country's natural heritage. It is one of fifty-nine such sculptures in thirty-eight states nationwide.
A stated goal of the division's parks side is to "give Hoosiers the ability to experience what the Indiana landscape was like prior to settlement ... mature forests, wetlands and prairies. Additionally, we interpret the historical and archeological context of our state. All of this involves what is known today as resource management."
The reservoir side traces its roots to Cagles Mill Lake just north of McCormick's Creek in Putnam County, which was built in 1952 as the first U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir in Indiana. While recreation and wildlife management opportunities were among the goals for all Corps dam projects, the primary reason for the state reservoir system was flood control — impounding water in some areas to slow downstream flooding in others. The Corps owns the reservoirs and leases the water and surrounding landforms to the DNR for management.
DIVISION OF FISH & WILDLIFE
The Indiana Division of Fish & Wildlife manages Indiana's fish and wildlife populations on more than 150,000 acres of land on twenty-six properties statewide through research, regulation, and restoration. Eleven are located in Southern Indiana. The emphasis is on game species for hunting, fishing, and trapping, along with rare and endangered species.
The division's mission is to "professionally manage Indiana's fish and wildlife for present and future generations, balancing ecological, recreational, and economic benefits." Under state law, it shall "provide for the protection, reproduction, care, management, survival, and regulation of wild animal populations, regardless of whether the wild animals are present on public or private property."
Among the division's stated values are the following: fish and wildlife resources belong to all the people of Indiana; regulated hunting, fishing, and trapping are important wildlife management tools; fish and wildlife resources enrich the quality of human life; public participation is essential for effective resource management; and regulated hunting, fishing, and trapping are legitimate pursuits when conducted in fair chase.
"Fish and wildlife resources are renewable, and when wisely managed will indefinitely provide numerous public benefits such as hunting, fishing, trapping, and wildlife viewing," the division says on its website.
The Fish & Wildlife division also raises and stocks fish in public waters, provides access to public lakes and rivers, and offers advice and incentives to landowners who wish to develop wildlife habitat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana by Steven Higgs. Copyright © 2016 Steven Higgs. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by James Alexander Thom
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Natural Area Etiquette
Part 1. The Land Stewards
Part 2. The Southern Indiana landscape
Part 3. Destinations
Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Part 4. Supplementary Materials
Species list
Glossary
Resources
Index
What People are Saying About This
Steven Higgs has done an excellent job of not only compiling the places, but also detailing the important flora and fauna located therein, along with recreational opportunities for visitors to these preserves. I cannot imagine the amount of time that went into exploring all these places! Anyone with a general interest in the outdoors, including hikers, birders, campers and fishermen, will find this book useful.
A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana fills a void in available guidebooks geared to nature-based tourism. You would need to do hours and hours of internet research to compile just a small portion of what this one book provides. This is an excellent guidebook and offers a big-picture view of southern Indiana’s diverse environments. There is something for everyone—from botany and geology to history—which makes the book extremely useful for both families and ecotour groups as well as the lone explorer seeking out a new experience.