Mike Kilen

mkilen@dmreg.com

Editor's note: This story by Register reporter Mike Kilen originally ran in April 2017.

Dorchester, Ia. — Michael Osterholm found the heartbeat of his Allamakee County land, opening a small crevice in the Earth. The spring’s cold water poured over what was once a corn field and found its natural path.

He gave birth to a long-lost creek, reversing a longtime Iowa trend of diverting creeks to make crop fields. More cold-water streams are being improved in northeast Iowa, but Osterholm is uncommon because he shouldered the cost.

He was nearly giddy standing aside it, shedding his earlier straight-faced scientific tone, and described the joy in all the life that returned to his valley, including the rare native brook trout.

“I talk to myself sometimes out here,” he said on a soggy morning prior to Earth Day on Saturday. “I say to myself, ‘Can you believe it?’ "

Osterholm is a renowned epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota and doesn’t even mention the New York Times piece he authored recently on infectious disease as a growing national security problem. Before he tackled such weighty issues, Osterholm grew up in northeast Iowa’s rolling hills, fishing along fast-degrading streams, and returns frequently in middle age for his labor of love, making one small sliver of Earth healthy again.

“I love how the human spirit goes and does what it wants to do – that positive thing,” said Claudia McGehee, an Iowa City artist who illustrated the new children’s book “Creekfinding,” on Osterholm’s efforts.

“That’s true, his neighbors told him, 'you can’t do that, you can’t rebuild a creek,'” added author Jacqueline Briggs Martin of Mount Vernon. “But he did.”

It started when Osterholm bought 98 acres near the tiny town of Dorchester in 2002.

One of the first people he talked to was the prior owner’s grandson. He told Osterholm that he once fished in a stream on the land. All Osterholm saw was a corn field. He’s a scientist, so he researched. He looked over the ground and began to see where the ground was soggy during wet periods and planted small flags as a rough guess of its path.

He found USDA aerial photos of the land prior to 1949, when spring water was diverted to a ditch along the road so the farmer could plant corn. The stream’s path in the photograph matched his flags.

“The water was trying to find its way back to its original location,” he said.

Once, the area teemed with such creeks. The Driftless Area, a 24,000-square-mile area on the corners where Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota meet, wasn’t leveled by the last glacial advances, leaving a landscape of bluffs with deeply creviced bedrock close to the surface. Springs flowed through it with cold water.

In the area’s 600 cold streams after settlement, anywhere from four inches to 28 inches of soil filled the streambeds and farmers wanted to use the soft, rich dirt to grow crops, said Duke Welter, outreach coordinator for Trout Unlimited’s Driftless Area Restoration Effort, whose mission is to protect and restore the streams.

He said that’s why it’s a big job to bring a creek back to life, and you don’t see many landowners like Osterholm financing it on their own. He said it cost him "several hundred thousand" to restore Brook Creek.

Osterholm’s hard work began with that soil. After idling the land of corn production, he began to haul out hundreds of dump trucks of dirt and fill in the deep ditch. He pulled out 400 junk cars dumped on the property and 7,000 trees. He planted native tallgrass, such as big bluestem, to recreate the prairie valley.

He began to help the stream, leveling out deep banks and putting in rock from its confluence with Duck Creek over the course of 1,400 feet back to the spring.

“Then we opened the spring, and it came pouring down,” he said. “This spring puts out a gallon of water per second.”

There were fits and starts along the way. He once hauled in tons of rock, discovered it wasn’t natural, and then hauled it back out in the frozen winter when trucks couldn’t sink in the ground and damage the prairie.

Over the next seven years, it began to take shape. He restored the bluff above the valley to beautiful oak savanna. He had annual burns. Plants came back whose seeds were lying in wait for the right conditions to grow for decades. Aquatic insects returned.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources harvested eggs from what was once considered the last naturally reproducing population of brook trout in nearby South Pine Creek. Officials stocked the offspring in Osterholm’s creek. The trout need the cold water that stays a constant temperature through most of the year, even in searing heat of summer of dead cold of winter.

“It’s really important to have another stream with a reproducing population,” said Mike Steuck, a fisheries supervisor with the DNR in northeast Iowa.

With that, the waterway had a new name – Brook Creek.

The brook trout are now reproducing in it. Fishermen that Osterholm allows on his land with permission have caught up to 17-inch trout before releasing them.

One day, Osterholm says, he was out by the creek and heard a loud sound he thought was deer running through water. But it was the trout slapping the creek during spawning, laying eggs and waiting for males to swim over and fertilize them.

He stops his stories to note the “okalee” call of the red-winged blackbird and the click of the dickcissel, attracted to the prairie. He moves on to a tree frog, who has become a daily visitor to the porch of a handsome lodge he has built near the creek. He tells of the huge 50-pound snapping turtle he named Henry that patrols the valley now.

“Once I thought it was another old car and started pulling it up,” he said. “It was Henry.”

All this is not lost on the children’s book author and illustrator, Martin and McGehee, who are along for a book signing later in nearby Waukon.

Martin said she was drawn to the story because it was one of repairing what was broken.

“There are so many stories of loss in the environment,” she said. “Here is a story of saving, of fixing.”

She hopes children will read the book and notice the things around them.

“Not all kids live next to a creek. But in Iowa all kids see birds. I hope they listen to the bird song,” she said. “I hope they see that one person can make a difference.”

The book’s cover shows a trout jumping as a heron and frog, insects and birds and a family and their dog peek out from the prairie grasses.

“It’s a story of discovery,” said McGehee.

Osterholm says the stream is not without challenges, even yet. He said he has tested the water and found levels of bacteria above government standards from the area’s cattle operations. Yet it’s still some of the cleanest water in the Midwest, he said, and he will try to keep it that way with a conservation easement that ensures future owners will, too.

“The pleasure is immense – you see these beautiful trout – but I think the real thing is legacy,” he said. “Long after I am gone these trout will be there. When you think of one’s contribution in a lifetime – what we give to our kids and community – this will live in perpetuity.”

The book will be around for a long time, too.

“Hopefully,” he said, “kids will see we can do a lot to repair the damage we inflict on Mother Earth.”

By the numbers: More trout streams and trout fisherman

MORE RESTORATION: Michael Osterholm’s restoration of a creek was a substantial private undertaking. But government and non-profit agencies are largely responsible for leading the growth in the number of miles of trout streams to fish in and the economic impact from a rising number of trout fishermen in the Driftless Area.

Nearly 98 percent of the Driftless Area’s 24,000 square miles is private land, and the vast majority is used for agriculture, said Duke Welter, outreach coordinator for Trout Unlimited’s Driftless Area Restoration Effort in Wisconsin.

He said his organization has spent $45 million on 300 restoration projects on creeks in the Driftless Area in the past 13 years. In return for expert assistance and labor to restore their creeks, landowners must grant anglers access. The 450 miles of publicly accessible trout creeks has grown to 1,200 miles in the last 12 years.

MORE ECONOMIC BENEFITS, JOBS: The subsequent growth in trout fishing has led to a direct economic addition to the Driftless Area’s economy of $413 million a year and 6,500 jobs. When restoration spending and secondary multipliers are added, it’s $1.6 billion, according to Trout Unlimited’s economic analysis based on a survey of anglers, released earlier this month.

MORE TROUT FISHING: In Iowa in the 1980s, five streams supported naturally producing trout; today it’s 43, said Mike Steuck, a fisheries supervisor in northeast Iowa with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. And the 140 miles of trout streams open to the public in that time have grown to 530 miles. Therefore, the number of trout stamps sold in Iowa to anglers has increased steadily over 30 years to more than 47,000 last year, he said.

The DNR provides some technical assistance and stocks creeks with trout. But you can’t just throw them in water and watch them grow. Trout require the clear, cold water from springs.

Restoration efforts improve the water quality and help the fish survive, creating a habitat that is good for spawning and for insects that the fish eat.

Osterholm’s newly clear Brook Creek eventually flows into nearby Waterloo Creek and improves its water quality, Steuck said.

“It’s one of those things that the DNR can’t do alone,” he said. “It takes private landowners to help.”



