Dike Maintenance: Kindly Replace Your Divots

Dike Repair: Our ever-dependable contractor (Buehler Excavating of Oak Harbor) was on-site this AM with excavator in toe.
A couple hours and a fair amount of compacted clay was all it should take to put us back on the right path. We should know 
a lot more by morning, provided the pumps continue to run and we don't get a significant thunderstorm (a low probability).

It was a busy day on the marsh. As is so often the case, there were several things going on all at once. Much of our activity was driven by dike maintenance and the ongoing effort to bring the water levels down on the neighboring marsh so that we can circle back on our final push to draw down on an additional 100-200 acres of own east side (before it gets too late in the "early" drawdown season). [NOTE: Because of stress on dike stability, it's not advisable to draw down one unit while leaving an adjacent unit in a high-water condition. Differences in head pressure tend to wreak havoc.]

After several consecutive days of dedicated searching, Roy and Nate were finally able to turn up the primary source of our neighbor's problem (and by association, ours): a significant hole . . . well, three holes, actually. Pumpzilla has been churning out 5,000-gal/min for several days in a row on the neighbor's 65-acre unit to supplement his ~1,500-gal/min pump, and we still weren't making any measurable headway. The math suggests we should be dropping 4-6" of water per day. We obviously knew there was a problem, but despite the tireless (tiring) search, they just couldn't seem to pinpoint the problem until late yesterday. Fortunately, all the hard work paid off, and Buehler Excavating came to our rescue -- as they so often do!

Meanwhile, I was showing a local fence company around an area on the north side of the property that we're considering doing some work on. I then met with the County road mowing crew and tag-teamed to get the shoulders around our entrances cleaned up. They did a great job and things look as good as they have since we moved in.

I probably moved a couple/few cubic yards of clay. I'll feel it tomorrow, but it will make for a much smoother ride atop the dike, and it will also help reduce the likelihood of a small nuisance from becoming a big problem.

Finally, I focused my attention on a remote interior dike on the West Marsh to do some much more modest hand repairs of my own. I felt like I was channeling my inner Bill Murray as I identified small (softball- to basketball-sized) holes, sinks, and slumps caused by some of the same culprits that forced the excavator repair. As critical as muskrats are to the broader marsh ecosystem, they can also be a burrowing nuisance to put it modestly. Groundhogs and beaver can also be devastating. Fortunately, the biggest of these excavating rodents, the beaver, are not very common in the immediate area.

Julie caught this snapper up on the dike recently.
She was likely seeking high ground to lay eggs.

Another source of some of the smaller "potholes" that I encountered today likely came from still other digging mammals -- namely raccoons and opossums. Roy has seen this time and time again over his years in the marsh, but he has recently been pointing out these shallow depressions all over the tops of the dikes where clay had remained exposed (devoid of vegetation).

These locales are magnets for a broad diversity of nesting turtles like the snapper shown to the left. This is especially true on warm, rainy nights in the spring and early summer, when many turtles make their way out of nearby water, dig shallow holes, and lay several to several dozen round eggs that are then recovered with a few inches of soil to incubate (much like sea turtles).

Unfortunately, opossums and even more so raccoons are very wise to this behavior, so much so that coons are known to dig on fresh clay without any other visual or olfactory cue. They are unbelievably adept at raiding nests, and when you witness the quantity of destroyed sites, just on our property, it seems a miracle any single turtle prevails. But they do. And to a certain extent, this is just a natural part of nature's "checks and balances" system.

A raided turtle nest. Note dark hole right off the point of the burdock leaf and the small, broken shells to the upper left of the hole
(they look almost like dried white rose petals).

ASIDE: Ohio is home to 10-12 species of turtle (depending on interpretation of "wild" vs. "introduced") and as many as eight of them likely call our marsh home. We hope to focus on turtle monitoring over the balance of the summer to document as many as possible. Our #1 MOST WANTED is the Blanding's turtle -- hopefully more on them soon!