 The calls of songbirds and the soft lapping of water is heard in these Indiana wetlands as wood ducks move slowly through the water. In other wetland areas, whooping cranes and endangered species can be seen as they get ready to migrate south for the winter. These are the sights and sounds that greeted the first Americans when Indiana was being settled and developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Wildlife species and the hundreds of thousands migrated across this land while others made it their home. Sadly, their numbers diminished as more and more wetlands were cleared and drained for farming over the years. Now those sounds are being heard again in ever-increasing numbers as the Natural Resources Conservation Service, working with soil and water conservation districts and private non-profit conservation groups, leads the effort to restore and improve wetlands. These wetlands are critical habitats for various wildlife and endangered species such as the crawfish frog, the copperbelly water snake, and migrating whooping cranes that use these sites each spring and fall. Jane Hardesty is the Indiana State Conservationist who leads the wetland restoration effort in Indiana. Well, I'm pleased to talk to you today about what I consider a very popular program as a result of the Farm Bill, and it's called the Wetland Reserve Program, or what we call WRP, and it's administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. I guess I look at it that WRP is kind of like the premier wetland restoration program of the whole nation. I think that the main goal of the program is trying to achieve the greatest wetland values and functions at the same time trying to get the greatest wildlife habitat for the entire purpose of enhancing lands to incorporate, not just the wetlands, but full habitats. And the greatest thing about this program is that it's all voluntary. It's not a regulatory program, and what is really great about it is that our NRCS employees working hand-in-hand with private landowners in providing technical assistance and financial assistance in looking at the long-term establishment of conservation practices and wildlife practices. Now, the easements that we buy on the WRP lands are permanent or long-term, and the greatest thing about this is that the landowners maintain full ownership of the property, and they also control the access to the land and how it's to be used. Of course, it needs to be within whatever the policy is of the WRP program. And I think that some of the greatest things and the benefits of the program is not only that it improves water quality, it recharges groundwater, it definitely protects and enhances habitat. If you kind of look at wetlands is what we call the oasis of the landscape, because it is full of all kinds of life out there. We've been able to go anywhere from projects as small as five acres up to over 7,000 acre projects. We've got three projects in the state that has been a real challenge and some of the greatest wetland projects, I think, in the country. Right now is going on in southwest Indiana that we call the goose pond. Even though the project is only not even quite half done, we've been able to pull in migrating birds, shorebirds, particularly the sand hill cranes, that people in that area are very surprised about and are really excited about seeing the project finished. Another project that we have up in northwest Indiana called the Kankakee Sands has been in place for quite a few years and we've been able to bring in over 20 species that's already on the state's list of threatened and endangered species. Along the Muscatatec River in southeastern Indiana, 5,500 acres of wetlands have been restored to date. These restorations combine riverine and wetland habitat types to form a corridor of restoration. This corridor provides critical habitats for a wide variety of wildlife, including a number of threatened and endangered species. The river also serves as a migration path for migratory waterfowl in the spring and fall. The restored wetland habitats in the river corridor dramatically increase the number and types of waterfowl species that use that path. The same corridor effect is also being put into place on a larger scale along the Wabash River in western Indiana. The Wabash is a large river and is Indiana's longest river, 466 miles within the state. It drains the vast majority of the state. These river corridor wetlands are providing other important benefits to the environment. In addition to habitat, wetland restorations along the river system reduce downstream flooding and improve water quality by trapping and filtering out sediments and pollutants. Early on in the WRP program, we were involved in doing straight line dikes, fairly typical engineering type practices on our restoration work, and that included low level dams that had narrow top widths and fairly steep slopes. What we're doing now is that we're trying to be more creative in our restoration activities to provide a greater diversity of water levels and times of the year that a particular restored area would have water on it. So we're trying to mimic what the land would have been like pre-agriculture rather than just a straight box type restoration activity. The main thing that I've noticed on the wetland restorations has been that if we can restore the site, we'll get a tremendous response from wetland species. And that will be a variety of species, migratory waterfowl, neotropical migrants or songbirds, amphibians and reptiles, furbearers such as the river otter, those type things. A variety of species have used or responded to our sites. Neotropical migrants such as warblers, thrushes, those type things. Weeding birds, great blue herons, great egrets, green herons, those type species. Sandhill cranes, whooping cranes which are a fairly listed species. On amphibians and reptiles, we've had a response by a number of amphibian species. The crawfish frog which is a state endangered species and the copper belly water snake which is a fairly listed species have been observed on our sites quite regularly. We've had a variety of wetland habitat types that were involved in doing our restorations. In the southeastern portion of the state we're doing bottomland hardwood forest type activities. We're trying to replicate old river slews and oxbows in our restoration. Up in the northeastern portion we do prairie pothole type restorations. Onto the west we'll do more things with the big rivers systems and we have interaction between our wetlands and different prairie habitats a mosaic if you will of different habitat types and whenever we have two habitats coming together like wetlands and prairie we tend to have a greater diversity and a greater number of species that would occur. In the past 10 years Indiana landowners have restored over 35,000 acres of wetland habitat and enrolled an additional 15,000 acres of land in the wetlands reserve program as associated habitat. In regard to the WRP restorations on my right here we have an example of some of the older style restorations in which we have some deeper water on the site. The dike that I'm standing on is a higher built dike. It has narrow top width on it and fairly steep side slopes. We're getting away from those type of restorations and we're going more to what you see on the left here in which we have shallow water, water 6 to 24 inches in depth and we have areas that do have open ground on it. This particular area is a good complex of WRP restorations that we've done. The largest wetlands restoration program site in the state is Goose Pond. It attracts hundreds of migrating sand hill cranes, great numbers of migrating ducks and other species of wildlife that are on Indiana's threatened and endangered species lists. Historically the Goose Pond was several thousand acres of shallow water and since then it's been drained of course and then the highway was built at some point and it pretty much dissects the old historic pool. What we're trying to do is to work with the Indiana Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration to raise about two and a half miles of this road which will then allow us to more historically restore this site. We'll end up with 2,000 acres plus about 2,200 acres of open shallow water here in the main what we call the main Goose Pond pool and then it will function simultaneously with the water on the other side of the highway and pretty much as best we can restore historically what was on this site. This is the main pool of the Goose Pond. This area over here has approximately 5,938 acres. What we're looking at here back behind us is the main basin of the historically what was here before the road was put in and the buildings. The tree lines in the background basically are the boundary of our easement out here and the buildings up to the north of us also mark the boundary. So it kind of gives you an idea of the size of the project we're dealing with out here and what we're trying to do is restore historically what was here of this old glacial lake bed and there's be about approximately 2,000 to 3,000 acres in this main pool. Hopefully when the road goes up then we'll be able to restore that 2 to 3 to 4 feet of water. We've got some interior ditches that we're going to be dealing with. It's going to have deeper water in there. And then back over here where the old pump house used to be where it used to drain all this is where we're going to put our big weir that will control the elevation of the water in here. So it's a project that I'm unaware that's being done in the United States right now especially in Indiana. We're real fired up about it. Real energetic about the opportunity it presents here. It's a challenge. One thing that we have found out that this project is once you think you've got it figured out it throws a monkey wrench in it. The soils are of such a nature of being 78% clay that the field work the field itself dictates the field work that's being done. We try to follow our standards and specs the best we can on it but we've had a lot of adjustments we need to make with our agronomists our state engineers to adapt to the field conditions to get this project up and running and get the restoration on the ground. We've created cradle and nose. We've got 1300 acres of prairie grasses over 3 to 400 acres of trees plus more to be done and even planting trees on this soil is a challenge. And it will continue to be a challenge all the way until it's restored. What kinds of engineering work go into a project like this? For a project of this magnitude there's many many aspects of engineering. We've started with the survey for example then we moved on to basically planning which is more of a engineers need to be involved in but there's all kinds of other disciplines that are involved in the planning. We move on to actually doing hydrologic hydraulic modeling we actually get into looking at the soils we do geologic investigations which on this project we've utilized our own soil scientists we've utilized outside sources we're still in the process of trying to obtain further folks to work with us on the project to obtain more geologic information as far as the designs we get into designing water control structures structures, earth fills, those are the basic two things and we've also done a lot of macro topography work which is basically just small basins in the ground to create some additional habitat. Dykes have been completed. Goose pond main pool is progressing. Highway is being redesigned. In southeastern Indiana along the Muscatatuck River this corridor of restoration along the river is greatly enhancing the river habitat bald eagles are seen there now flocks of great blue herons, egrets, shorebirds and migrating waterfowl are seen there now also. Bob Tatlock is one of the owners participating in the Wetlands Reserve program. Well one thing it's flooding so much in this area anymore and tree tops in the creek and everything and I can't get a crop out of it and I've worked for an electric company in Fort Wayne Indiana about 30 years ago and they told me one of these days Bob said there's nothing but floods down your area and I said why? He said all the concrete and buildings being built all that water is going to come your way and it's coming through, you know, it's just worse every year so I can't farm it. And so well I have some facing wildlife in it. Landowners are increasingly interested in the Wetlands Reserve program in Indiana and wildlife species are proving that if you build it they will come. The Wetlands Reserve program is accomplishing its goal of no net loss of wetlands on agricultural lands.