♪♪ Kohlsdorf: The Iowa Valley Scenic Byway traces a stretch of the Iowa River known as the Iowa River Corridor.

Part of the Mississippi River watershed, the corridor is home to a wide variety of birds and wildlife, and includes habitats such as wetland, grassland, forest, and savannah.

Ellingson: The Iowa River Corridor is a public expanse of land that runs Tama, Benton, and Iowa Counties.

It's 15 to 16,000 acres, end to end, and it was incepted after the '93 flooding.

A lot of the valley floods here pretty frequently.

And after a number of floods, the federal government finally came in and offered any interested land owners that farmed in the valley the opportunity to buy their land out and kind of rescue them from that flooding.

The U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service owns most of it.

There is some state ownership and some county ownership.

Kohlsdorf: At Otter Creek Marsh outside the town of Chelsea, Iowa's Department of Natural Resources is focused on fostering wildlife habitat, providing an excellent location for fishing, paddling, bird watching, and hiking.

So, Otter Creek Marsh is right behind us here.

That's about 3,600 to 3,800 acres of wildlife area, and it's got a couple of different types of habitat on it.

One of them is a manmade marsh system that's about 1,200 of those acres, and we can manage those.

We're trying to grow a lot of annual weeds, moist soil-type plants that produce hard seeds, and those are beneficial for migrating water fowl.

Once we get that vegetation grown, August and September, we'll start refilling our marsh with water, and we'll bring that up slowly, and we'll start to time that with some of our migration.

As our birds start to come back this fall, we'll have available habitat out there, which is critical for them during their migrations.

This was the first place in Iowa that sandhill cranes were ever documented to have re-nested after they were extirpated back many, many years ago.

So, we've had a nesting population of cranes here since '92, and that's growing and growing.

We've got trumpeter swans out there.

I think this year, we have at least four successful pairs with 15 or so cygnets between those four pairs, so that's pretty exciting.

We're standing on an observation deck here on Otter Creek Marsh, and it's in the shape of a flying bald eagle.

We constructed this thing a number of years ago, and it does get a fair amount of use.

There's actually an active bald eagle nest out in there.

So, when we built it, we kind of had it pointing that way.

Whether you're hunting or whether you're out here just to enjoy wildlife, view wildlife, go for a walk with your binoculars, that kind of thing, there's a lot of opportunities out here to experience wildlife in whatever capacity you're interested.