The marsh now covers about 32,000 acres, and huge flocks of geese stop there each fall. Wetlands don’t often get second chances, but Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin did. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources describes its history as a change from wetland to wasteland and back again. It was the result of decades of work by people determined to restore the land.
In 1921, conservation-minded people launched a fight to restore the marsh. A breakthrough came in 1927, when the state legislature passed the Horicon Marsh Wildlife Refuge Bill.
The bill called for land purchases and a dam at Horicon to bring back the marsh’s water levels, the DNR said.
But the work didn’t end there. In the 1940s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acquired the upper end of the marsh and made it a National Wildlife Refuge. Together they form one of the largest freshwater marshes in the United States. The marsh is also known for its geese, which come there in the autumn. The author, Richard A. So the numbers are not set in stone, and they can change with time. More recently, the U.S.
A 1983 conference paper provides a sense of how big the flocks can get. Hunt of the Wisconsin DNR, said the refuge’s fall Canada goose population was about 200,000 at its peak when he presented an earlier paper in 1973. Since then, he said, changes in the Horicon area had reduced the peak to fewer than 100,000. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2025 fall surveys of the refuge counted anywhere from about 800 to more than 18,000 Canada geese per survey.
The DNR says that set the marsh on the road to recovery. Today, about one-third of the marsh is managed by the state and about two-thirds by the federal government.
