BLOOMINGTON - For a few days in January, Mary Jo Adams understood exactly how the little boy felt when he stuck his finger in the dike. | Flood help in some oddly named places | Mississippi, Missouri rivers to flood?

Adams lives along the Mackinaw River and has devoted years to projects designed to restore the river's watershed while urging others living along its banks to use good land management. She volunteers with The Nature Conservancy, the Mackinaw River Watershed Council and the Mackinaw River Ecosystems Partnership with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

She and her husband, Sandy, planted several hundred trees as part of the federal government's Conservation Reserve Program to help slow runoff and prevent erosion on their 55 acres, where they raise horses. Their nearest neighbors are white-tail deer and wild turkey.

They also restored a 3-acre wetland on property Adams' mother, Mary Lou Mercier, owns upstream.

Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn recently named Adams "an environmental hero."

Adams hopes to improve water quality for the smallmouth bass, catfish and other critters that live in or near the river and for people who canoe and kayak there. She also hopes that, over time, the work does something to ease flooding.

As the Vermilion River sent water pouring into hundreds of homes in the second week of January in Pontiac, high water also trapped Adams at her home on the Mackinaw for a day and forced her to hike out of the property a couple of others. The raging current tipped her young trees and threatened to rip them out by the roots.

A truck camper from a nearby campground washed downstream and ended up on her property north of Carlock.

"It's frustrating that you go through all this work," said Adams, 55, an instructional assistant professor at Illinois State University's School of Kinesiology. "If you really think about the whole big picture, you can really be pessimistic. But sometimes, you have to focus on your own little world and be optimistic about that."

When it rains, it pours

Experts agree: Human activity may have worsened recent flooding in Illinois. Exactly to what extent is unknown. They also agree human efforts can't stop all flooding. Sometimes when it rains, it pours, and there is little anyone can do about it. And it poured.

Last month was the wettest February in Illinois since accurate recordkeeping began here in 1895. The winter months from Dec. 1 to Feb. 29 recorded the third-highest precipitation amount ever, the Illinois Water Survey said.

Adams and Maria Lemke, an aquatic ecologist for The Nature Conservancy, said agricultural practices and urban sprawl aren't helping. Installing pipes and straightening creeks and ditches make water drain from fields faster. Likewise, expansive wetlands that once stored and filtered water were drained for farming long ago. Paving fields with asphalt for parking lots and subdivision streets flushes rainwater quickly instead of absorbing it.

Vern Knapp, a senior hydrologist with the Illinois Water Survey at the University of Illinois, said slight depressions in fields called potholes once stored rain that evaporated or seeped slowly away. They're no longer there.

"Have we taken away nature's controls? That's a tough one to answer. The common thought is, 'Yes,' but it's not so simple," Knapp said.

Weird winter

Early pioneers didn't keep accurate data on stream flow, so Knapp said scientists can't say what rivers were like before about 1916. By then, plows and engineering had begun to alter the landscape. No matter what Illinois waterways were like way back when, experts say this winter was all about nature - and work by people like Adams probably could have done little to stop the most recent floods.

Studies have shown human activity has more impact on small creeks and streams than larger rivers the size of the Mackinaw, the Vermilion or the Illinois, Knapp said. Evidence points to urbanization of the Chicago area having only a 10 percent impact on water levels at Peoria when the Illinois River floods.

"It's difficult to separate out what is caused by greater rainfall and what is caused by human action," Knapp said, "but rainfall is the bigger factor. It is hard for us to pinpoint what is happening from drainage modifications. … I'm not putting down programs that are designed to reduce runoff. They do have their impacts and their benefits. But when you have lots of rain, what are you going to do?"

"It was a weird winter," added Lemke, who has worked on the Mackinaw River Project for more than five years. "Over a long time period, you are going to have small floods and big floods. That's what rivers do."

Illinois state climatologist Jim Angel said high rainfall amounts, which were near record levels, are characteristic of periods of La Nina, an area of cold water that at times forms in the Pacific Ocean near the equator. Regional weather patterns shift, and winters are usually wet in Illinois as a result, he said.

In January, the ground was saturated and frozen. When the downpours came, the water had nowhere else to go but into the rivers.

Mixed signals

Forecasters have mixed signals to work with while predicting whether flooding will occur after spring officially begins Thursday.

The ground continues to hold as much water as it can right now, Knapp said. But Angel said the National Weather Service is calling on precipitation to be normal to dry. Average rainfall in the Bloomington-Normal area in March is 2.87 inches, and in April it's 3.83 inches. May averages 4.52 inches.

"It all depends on how it plays out," Angel said.

Added Knapp: "If March is dry, it may not mean anything. If we start having rainfall on top of saturated soil, the possibility is we will have greater runoff. … Normally, the spring is when you have the most floods anyway."

The long-term outlook is even harder to predict. Environment America, a watchdog group, worries global warming may be the culprit behind data showing storms with heavy precipitation are 22 percent more frequent in the East North Central region of the country, including Illinois, than 60 years ago.

"Some of the states in our region have seen a 30-40 percent increase in extreme rain events," said Rebecca Stanfield, director of Environment Illinois. "Illinois hasn't seen that kind of increase yet statewide, but the storms we had last summer gave us a taste of what Ohio, Missouri and Wisconsin have been seeing more regularly."

Knapp isn't so sure. True, he said, studies showed rainfall spiked upward in 1970 and continued to rise through 2000. But average precipitation returned to long-term normal levels, he said, and moisture amounts would have continued rising if climate change and global warming were to blame, he said. Scientists can't explain the wet spell that lasted three decades.

No matter what the future brings, Adams and Lemke will keep working. The Nature Conservancy projects to restore wetlands and slow runoff in rivers like the Mackinaw and the Illinois are being used as models for work elsewhere. Improvements in water quality have been noted because more topsoil stays in fields and doesn't find its way into streams.

"I'm still going to do it even it if it doesn't make a global difference," Adams said. "It's the right thing to do. … You do what you can do."

"I don't get pessimistic about it," Lemke said. "You have a long road ahead of you, and you take it one step at a time and keep going forward. You are not going to get what you want overnight. … Can we go back to what it was? I don't think we can go back. But there are things we can do. And there are times it's going to flood. You just have to learn to get out of its way."

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Water, water everywhere

2.5 inches: Average precipitation in Illinois in February

4.5 inches: Precipitation in February 2008

6.7 inches: Average winter precipitation (December-February)

11.3 inches: Total precipitation in winter of 2008

SOURCE: Illinois Water Survey