Iroquois County State Wildlife Area

Iroquois County State Wildlife Area preserves two thousand four hundred eighty acres of northeastern Illinois near the Indiana border as a rare remnant of the former Great Kankakee Swamp. Shaped by meltwater at the end of the Wisconsonian glaciation, its damp outwash plain supports a mosaic of sand dunes, wetlands, grassland, woodland, prairie, marsh, and black oak savanna. While much of the Kankakee Swamp was drained for farmland in the late nineteenth century, this sandy tract remained largely intact. Illinois began acquiring it in 1944, first seeking to restore greater prairie chicken habitat, then managing it for seasonal hunting. Its Hooper Branch Savanna Nature Preserve includes Illinois’s largest remaining single tract of oak savanna.

Illinois · United States