SR eee ©) IND © bl ie) N 
Published Quarterly by the 
Pale eN OPS TACT DUIBION S00 CLE TY 
2001 NORTH CLARK STREET, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
Number 51 September, 1944 
Birds in a Popular Recreational Area — 
Turkey Run State Park, Indiana 
By FREDERICK H. TEST 
Department of Zoology, University of Michigan 
TO ONE UNFAMILIAR with Turkey Run Park, it may seem peculiar that the 
Illinois Audubon Society’s Bulletin should carry an article on the birds of 
an area in Indiana. However, to one who has spent several summers in the 
park, it is not incongruous, for Turkey Run has been a favorite recreational 
locality for numerous Illinoisans during many years—spring, summer, fall 
and winter. 
Turkey Run, the second oldest in the system of Indiana state parks, lies 
in Parke County, in the west-central part of Indiana, almost in contact with 
the Illinois and Indiana state boundary line. Through it flows Sugar Creek, 
a scenic stream, roughly from north-east to south-west, some fifteen miles 
westward to enter the famed Wabash River, an important migrational high- 
way for birds. The park occupies a tract of somewhat over 1,000 acres of 
varied terrain, mostly woodland, of which a large part is virgin timber. 
Much of the latter is composed of fairly open stands of beech, sugar maple 
and white oak on the higher ground, with sycamore, black walnut, elm and 
tulip trees or yellow poplars in the ravines and bottom lands. 
Probably the best known feature of Turkey Run is its series of numerous 
gorges cut in the sandstone which forms the underlying rock of the area. 
This sandstone was laid down on the shores of a great inland sea in the 
Pennsylvanian period of the Carboniferous Era — long before birds evolved 
from their bipedal dinosaurian ancestors. From that time, many millions 
of years ago, we know almost nothing of the birds which inhabited the 
future Turkey Run. Even for the geological yesterday, when water and 
rocky debris from the melting ice sheet which long covered northern and 
central Indiana were cutting the gorges of the present, our knowledge of 
the birdlife is nil. Probably at that time few if any birds inhabited Turkey 
Run. But, as the enormous glacier retreated northward, in its wake came 
vegetation and animals which could live and reproduce in the cold climate, 
working their way slowly up from the more southern latitudes to which 
they had been forced, and gradually establishing themselves in the areas 
uncovered by the melting of the ice. Thus, Turkey Run became reinhabited. 
Today, some of the cold-loving species of plants are still to be found in 
the park. As the southern edge of the ice-sheet moved northward, farther 
and farther from Turkey Run, naturally the weather in the park became 
progressively warmer and warmer. Various individual plants were literally 
rooted to the spot, unable to follow the cool climate to which they were 
adapted. Most of them died and left no descendants, but the deep canyons 
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