Urban Birding: Touring the Rouge River

Although most folks think of birding as something done “out in nature,” Bootstrap Analysis – a great site for information about Michigan birds & birding – has an interesting feature about the Rouge River in Detroit. She begins:

The Rouge River is an urban river, and its urban character is nowhere better reflected than in its last few miles, after it passes through the campus of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the Henry Ford Estate. As it approaches Michigan Avenue all sense of riverness ends: this is where the Rouge gets harnessed into its concrete straitjacket, and it remains shackled down to where it empties into the Detroit River.

The channel was built in the mid-1970s by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control.

Click through for her photos & tour of the river bank and also for photos of the construction of the channel like the one attached from Wayne State University’s Virtual Motor City project. If you’re interested in the preservation efforts on the river, check out Friends of the Rouge River.

Here’s a neat video of a kayak tour of the Rouge and also a map.

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