Nothing inspires awe like Mother Nature in motion. Come autumn, massive waves of birds journey southward, filling the skies and often staging together by the thousands in fields and waterways. Migration events like these are bucket list moments for wildlife lovers, and in Wisconsin, there is no better place than Horicon Marsh to witness them.
During migrations, as many as 350,000 geese and ducks alone pass through the marsh – about an hour’s drive northwest of Milwaukee. Sandhill cranes amass by the thousands, their prehistoric croaking filling the air.
Special sightings include the tundra swans, on their way from Alaska to Chesapeake Bay, thousands of redhead ducks, and rough-legged hawks, which come here from their Arctic nests for the winter. Most impressive, however, are a few rare whooping cranes, bright white and towering over their gray cousins. Only about 700 whoopers exist in the wild, and less than a century ago there were only 21 in the world!
The marsh’s creation story is, geologically speaking, icy: Glaciers carved out a basin and created a lake trapped behind moraines when the ice melted 12,000 years ago. The water eventually eroded its way out, draining the lake and leaving the silty foundation of the largest freshwater cattail marsh in North America…