It's easy to look at Seney National Wildlife Refuge and assume it has always been this way.

Quiet pools. Trumpeter swans. Loons calling across the water. Moose somewhere out in the marsh if you’re lucky enough to spot one.

But a little over a century ago, people were trying to make much of this place into farmland.

They dug enormous drainage ditches through the wetlands, sold pieces of the swamp to hopeful settlers, and tried to force an Upper Peninsula landscape into becoming something it simply wasn’t very good at being.

It didn’t work.

In this episode, we follow Seney from one of the great wetlands of the eastern Upper Peninsula, through logging, drainage schemes, failed farms, fire, and eventually one of the largest wildlife restoration projects in Michigan.

We’ll meet the Civilian Conservation Corps crews who built the refuge’s famous system of pools and dikes, learn why those pools are more artificial than they look, and meet Betty Losey, a young biologist who spent years studying Seney’s trumpeter swans and became one of the early women doing field research in American wildlife biology.

And we’ll look at something even stranger.

More than eighty years after people tried to drain Seney’s wetlands, refuge scientists are still working to undo some of those changes.

Sometimes restoring a place doesn’t mean building something new.

Sometimes it means figuring out how to let the water come back.

Want to know more?

Explore the historical records, maps, refuge documents, additional reading, and some of the evidence behind this episode here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q7GplsAxRoEYysKg_iogvbjvlJzObHNx/view?usp=sharing

Have a story, correction, family connection, photograph, or piece of UP history I should investigate?

Email me at explorindaupeh@gmail.com

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