Montezuma: Marshes Brought Back from the Dead
Near Geneva, New York
Before European settlement, the northern end of Cayuga Lake spread into an enormous marsh that Native peoples had hunted and fished for thousands of years. Then in nineteen ten, the widening of the New York State Barge Canal dropped the lake level by eight to ten feet and drained the wetlands almost entirely. Within a generation the wildlife was gone.
In nineteen thirty-eight, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Montezuma Migratory Bird Refuge to restore what the canal had destroyed. Civilian Conservation Corps crews built a system of dikes to hold water back, and life slowly returned. Today the refuge covers about ten thousand acres, and Montezuma sits on one of the busiest migratory flyways on the Atlantic Coast. In the mid-nineteen seventies it became the first site in New York State to receive reintroduced bald eagles, and the eagles stayed.
