Did Someone Say Mud?

My post from earlier in the week set the stage for what we are experiencing now in on the East Marsh. All our water management over the last several months has finally allowed us to reach our goals, and we are experiencing the extensive "late season drawdown" that we established as our primary 2017 restoration objective for nearly 200+ acres of marsh.

The vegetative response will be very interesting to watch. If we like what we see, we let it ride. If we don't, we always have the option of re-flooding one or more of the management units and essentially starting over.

But one thing we definitely can see is that the timing of our newly exposed mud is setting the stage for what we hope will be a bonanza of shorebirds. Dozens of species like the one pictured to the left are specifically adapted to capitalize on these situations. Their feet are typically long and well suited for "snowshoeing" through the wet mud, and long legs don't hurt anything when the mud is soft and the bugs are plentiful.

What amazes me most about this group of birds? (1) Their diversity [I have a lot to learn to differentiate all the subtleties that differentiate the species]; (2) Their ability to find and exploit new mud [they seem to appear out of nowhere the instant water goes away]; and, (3) Their metabolism [most of these species seem to never stop moving!]. Identification is tough (I'm always looking for positive id's from those who know more than me), but photography can be even more challenging. We hope to spend more time in the marsh with a camera over the days and weeks to come.

This medium-sized hunter of the shallows let me get pretty close yesterday while I was photo monitoring.
Can anyone ID?

Just like shorebirds, bird watchers seem to appear out of no where as soon as new opportunities arrive. I witnessed six vehicles and nearly a dozen individuals armed with scopes and telephoto lenses on the roadside to the west of our East Marsh late on Wednesday afternoon. Word is out that we have "fresh mud." Seasoned birders are well aware that the shorebirds are sure to follow.

For perspective, here are some comparison photos from the same vantage points: June versus August. The "after" shots were just taken yesterday.

BEFORE: Very sparse emergent vegetation and turbid water dominate in the Tower Marsh; June, 2017

AFTER: Millet and other annuals are beginning to fill in opportunistically thanks to the dry conditions that are conducive
to germination; August, 2017

BEFORE: Broad expanses of shallow water dominate the 100-acre Dinky Track, leaving little but dead and decaying
loosestrife clumps in the background; June, 2017

AFTER: The same perspective following drawdown -- shorebird activity is picking up and so is the germination of new
annuals in the mud; August, 2017

Clean Slate, Fingers Crossed

After months of effort, we have finally accomplished a full drawdown on the main Tower Marsh.
This image shows the ~half of the ~80-acres that we hope will evolve into a broad diversity of desirable wetland
vegetation. It's been decades since this has been done though, so it's a "fingers crossed" experiment.

For two years now, Roy and I have been using the term "clean slate" to describe the starting point that we face -- or in some cases strife for -- with our management units when we contemplate restoration activities. While it seems somewhat counterintuitive, the broad expanse of mud depicted in the image above is about as "clean" of a slate as we can get on our property.

In reality, we don't ever have the luxury of starting fresh. All of the land targeted for restoration has a history, and each individual target area confined by earthen dikes ("management unit") has its own specific past, present, and future. Our goal is to help provide environmental circumstances that promote the most ecologically desirable future. And it all starts with water (or in some cases, the lack thereof) and plants. As I've discussed in previous posts, many of our units were dominated by invasive species at one time or another over the last several decades. Some were dominated when we took possession of the property in 2015.

Others, like the "South Tower" unit pictured above have had enough water on them long enough that there isn't much growing. Two to three feet of standing water tends to limit emergent vegetation, especially if the water levels are sustained. And if the water tends to be murky (like ours was), even submergent vegetation (below the water level) tends to be limited.

But every unit has a "seed bed," a residual reservoir of plant seeds made up of several to many species -- deposited over years and even decades -- that resides in the shallow surface "mud" that in several cases, we have now exposed. The gamble is what is that seed composition, and what can we trigger to germinate?

In the case of last year's effort in the West Rest Pond, we weren't confident that we'd like what we'd see in the seed bed, so we flew in millet to help promote desirable plants (read more here, if you haven't already, to better understand how we try to stack the deck using millet). We are implementing a similar tactic on the far East Dinky Marsh because we are concerned there may be high percentages of Phragmites and loosestrife seed (reminder: both "bad guys").

But the Tower is a roll of the dice we are willing to entertain. Only time will tell if the gamble will pay off. I'll get more into the impacts of drawdown as we witness what unfolds.

P.S. The only plant material visible in the image above is a small amount of aquatic smartweed in the foreground, the ring of Phragmites that we are allowing to grow on the far dikes to help keep soils stabilized (dark green plant in the background), and the bright green millet (background, but in front of Phrag) that we flew in a few weeks back to try to minimize the spread of Phragmites from the surrounding dikes. It is still short, but it is coming on well.