Film Review: Fluddles

words by David Hoyt

Flip through the glossy magazine of any national birding organization, and you could be forgiven for concluding that the world of birding, as a subset of the larger world of conservation, is concentrated on the coasts. It is a rare feature article that treats subjects in the Mississippi Valley, a rare prize-winning photo that is taken on the Illinois River, and even more rare an article that treats a subject in the Corn Belt, that stretch of industrialized agriculture running from Indiana across Illinois and into Iowa. It’s as if nature did not exist in the space between California, Texas, Florida, and upstate New York.

Of course, as we all know, this is not true. Fortunately, Chicago-based documentary filmmaker Bob Dolgan is doing his part to correct this unfortunate imbalance with a growing body of work focusing on the avian ecology of the Midwest. Dolgan looks at places that appear, at first glance, to be empty, if not downright hostile, to bird life: A Chicago city beach. A tree stump in the middle of a farm field in Central Illinois. Places you don’t necessarily go looking for wildlife, or places you drive past to get somewhere else. But, as Dolgan takes the time to show us, nature exists in all these locations, and sometimes spectacularly. (A cameo appearance is made by massive flocks of migrating Snow Geese on Lake Decatur). Even more so when pains are taken to make the rural, farming landscape even just a little bit more hospitable. 

In Fluddles, Dolgan’s latest film, he looks at the practice of restoring or creating intermittent wetlands on private agricultural land—which is most of the land in Illinois. Released less than a year after the United States Supreme Court overturned an Obama-era rule formulated under the Clean Water Act (Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, 598 U.S. 651), the film’s understated presentation couldn’t be more timely, for it is precisely the sorts of wetlands highlighted, which are short-lived and lack any direct, above-ground connection to a permanent body of water, that have recently lost federal protection. They were once ubiquitous in Central Illinois and the Corn Belt, and wherever they somehow persist, they are magnets for shorebirds.

The kinds of wetlands that Dolgan shows us look like poorly drained cornfields after a spring thaw or summer storm—and that is, in fact, what they are. Most of Illinois, like most of the Corn Belt, was “wet prairie” until a massive effort to drain the region by installing underground tiles began after the Civil War and continued up through the 1920s. The result was a boon for agriculture but a bust for the flocks of migrating waterfowl that follow the Mississippi Flyway. Where farmers have been persuaded, through a mix of incentives, to pull the tiles out and let the water find its natural level, shorebirds bound for the Gulf of Mexico or the Canadian Arctic almost magically appear.

Dolgan isn’t looking to rouse birders and conservationists against the Supreme Court’s highly controversial removal of wetlands protections, although that is an undeniable political context for the film. Rather, his focus is on an emerging collaboration between nonprofits, state agencies, and federal agencies that aim to make wetlands restoration on Midwestern working lands a win-win: a boon for migrating birds and wildlife, and a tangible benefit to farmers in the form of flood control and reduced fertilizer runoff. As one of the non-profit representatives states toward the end of Fluddles, the goal of such initiatives is for the presence of wetlands on a property to eventually be viewed as “a normal part of Midwestern farming.” 

View Fluddles on August 8 when filmmaker Bob Dolgan joins COS for Birds & Bytes. The film can also be viewed on Vimeo.