It’s 11 AM on a breezy September morning, too cool for swimming, and yet Kevin Cummings is crouched over, foraging like a raccoon in the swirling, waist-deep brown water of the Kishwaukee River. Two inches of rain fell yesterday, and the river is swollen with cold, murky water. He’s only a few feet offshore, but the river runs deep there and Cummings must struggle to stay upright in the current as he gropes along the bottom with outstretched hands.
“Let me guess. Pimpleback?”
Cummings, in his mid-30s, has his long black hair tied back in a ponytail, and with his round sunglasses, black wet suit, and old white sneakers he looks like he’s ready for Outside’s fashion pages. He holds out his right hand and shows us the two mussels he’s found.
Cummings wraps the belt around his wet suit and heads back into the river. Mayer measures the two mussels with a caliper and writes the information in a large notebook. She shows me how to distinguish males from females: the valves of males are more pointed. Then she places the two in a cotton mesh bag and lays it in the shallow water at the bottom of the bank.
The two biologists figured the construction work would send a slug of sediment downstream for 100 yards or so, burying any mussels that might be living quietly in the riverbed. They knew that the Kishwaukee was, by Illinois standards, a fairly high-quality river, relatively clean and biologically diverse. Within the last several years a researcher had found an ellipse–a mussel that’s on Illinois’ list of “species of special concern,” meaning that it may soon be considered for inclusion on the state list of threatened and endangered species–in a creek a mile away. A volunteer searcher had also found a creek heelsplitter, which is on the state threatened-species list, just a couple miles upstream.
It’s a simple life. They live quietly, filtering out their steady diet of whatever flows by, occasionally falling prey to a raccoon or muskrat if the water is shallow enough, or a predatory fish if the mussels are young and small. If water levels drop in the heat of summer, a mussel can move, slowly, by extending its foot and pulling itself along behind it, leaving a trademark trail on the riverbed. But if they don’t need to move they won’t.
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Of the 285 species once found in the United States, 78 have been found at one time or another in Illinois. They lived throughout the state’s waterways–in lakes and ponds, in streams large and small, deep and shallow, fast moving and gentle. Just to list their common names is to speak a sort of vernacular poetry. The rivers of Illinois were once rife with the orange-foot pimpleback and the cracking pearlymussel; spike and Wabash riffleshell; tubercled blossom and Higgins eye; winged mapleleaf and round hickorynut; pondhorn, pink papershell, pyramid pigtoe, paper pondshell, and purple lilliput. One could pick out of a clear stream a plain pocketbook, fat pocketbook, or rock pocketbook, a spectaclecase, a snuffbox, a pistolgrip, a washboard. There were sheepnose, rabbitsfoot, catspaw, and monkeyface; elktoe and elephant-ear; butterfly and fawnsfoot and deertoe. There were bleufers, ring pinks, yellow sandshells, pink heelsplitters, white and purple wartybacks, and pink muckets. There were ellipses and rainbows and squawfoots and rayed beans. And that’s not including the multifarious tiny fingernail clams: the lake, swamp, river, pond, and rhomboid; or the ridged-beak, ubiquitous, greater eastern, ornamented, perforated, Alpine, or Adam peaclams.
