North Shore Channel

North Shore Channel

If the inner Earth child in you is aching for nature apart from the lake-fill, look no further than the North Shore Channel in Skokie. Just three miles from campus, the channel is a quiet area full of wildlife. Trees line the banks of the channel and nothing is so graceful as the silent fall of multi-colored leaves to the water below. The only sound is from the rustle of a baby deer. It is cool enough this morning for steam to rise and hover over the water. During the warmer months, the channel is regularly used for kayak and canoe trips. When Northwestern is in session, the crew team uses the channel in the fall and spring for practices and the occasional regatta. However, despite the peaceful exterior the channel faces many environmental problems.

History

The North Shore Channel was built in 1910 as a drainage canal to flush the sewage-filled North Branch of the Chicago River down the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, said Sergio Serafino, Northside plant manager for the water reclamation plant. The waterway forms the eastern-most border of Skokie and runs all the way up to the locks of the Wilmette Harbor of Lake Michigan, draining out of Lake Michigan in Wilmette, near the Baha'i House of Worship. The flow of the southern half is treated affluent from the waste water reclamation plant, he said. "The quality of [the treated affluent] is pretty good. During dry weather, that is the sole flow in the channel."

Ecology

Jerry Garden is a restoration naturalist with the Emily Oaks Nature Center with the Skokie Park District and describes the channel as having a diverse ecology. "The channel has fairly good and diverse mammalian wildlife with deer, skunks, raccoons and possums. It's also a great collector of migratory birds. They feed all along the edge of the channel."

Katie Euphrat is a senior and rowed on the Northwestern crew team for two years and liked seeing the diverse wildlife. "My favorite thing about rowing on the channel were the deer and wildlife everywhere," Euphrat said. "While rowing, we'd often see deer on the side and that was pretty and nice to see. We'd also see little otters so I guess [the channel] can't be that dirty."

Near the North Shore College Prepatory School "is a good stretch of wet prairie that looks really pretty, thanks to restoration efforts from the students," Garden said.

Environmental issues

The channel is not without its issues, though. During rain events there is sewage overflow in the north part of the channel, said Rob Sulski, water pollution control manager with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. "This is where we have problems with water quality, mainly in terms of the dissolved oxygen level in the water," he said. "The dissolved oxygen levels drop down for two or three days and this effects the fish community."

Garden also describes the northern section as "pretty neglected. That section of the water is stagnate." Garden pointed to the fluctuation of waterfowl as an indicator of the quality of the water. "When you find them varying significantly it is because they aren't getting the fish they are looking for and this is due to the low quality of the water."

Sulski says the channel is "ecologically overall a fair to poor zone. However it does have ecological functions. It's a major migratory corridor for birds and bats, especially aquatic ones. It does have thick canopy corridors and some privacy for black crown heron and egrets. It also has a little shelf where small fish can get up."

Looking toward the future

The water quality has improved dramatically from what it used to be, Sulski said. "It went from open sewers to the introduction of water treatment plants in the 30s then reservoirs with potential future supplemental aridation. [The channel] is what it is and it has its limitations. It will never be like the more natural channels."

Garden admits that the channel has come a long way. "If you had tried to do kayaking on it 20 years ago you probably couldn't have stood the smell," he said.