Off The Beaten Path – The Index Eagle February 1997 by Bob Hubbard

This article is from the Index Eagle, February 1997 and authored by Bob Hubbard. He has given us permission to reprint his articles but PLEASE DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. This article may not be reproduced without the express written permission of IndexWa.org and/or Bob Hubbard.
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I suppose I must have seemed to have gone a little bit overboard last month, what with my big to-do about what was. After all, just a mud puddle generating rafts of floating slime. But there you go: I’m that kind of guy. I’m used to looking at the ecosystem from the standpoint of one or another of its bugs or other critters: which usually has me looking around trying to find the food chains which sustain them. Often I find the food item first, usually a plant, then notice the bugs hidden within it or the chew or browse marks left by its other apprecianados. The filter-feeding aquatic bug community though, has resisted this approach because it is a community whose food travels to it. rather than the other way around. Speculating on this community’s food source is easy, but proving it is more difficult: like deducing where in a cloud a particular snowflake first started to form. Seeing the algae rafts pull loose from the puddle’s bottom and start on their way downstream gave me a feeling like watching those snowflakes form in the cloud and drop towards the earth below. A feeling like watching creation.

Sharp readers will have noticed that my puddle musings may have answered only part of the question I’d had about the source of the algaes in the river’s load of drifting plankton. Some of the algaes were obviously pulling loose from their anchorages on the bottom and joining the flow, but what had seeded them into the water before that? Algaes could obviously migrate downstream and settle into new territory this way, but how do they get up into the headwaters?

One possible way is for the algaes and diatoms to get stuck to the feathers and feet of ospreys. ducks, eagles, ouzels and other aquatic birds, who then fly upstream, transplanting some of them with every new landing further upstream, even into the high lakes. Many species of feather mites associated with aquatic birds make their living by eating diatoms and other algaes which get caught in the feathers: this association suggests that diatoms (et al.) are dependably common in the feather habitat, and thus able to be transported and transferred in significant numbers. With their thick fur, wading or swimming mammals such as deer and bears could as easily act as taxicabs for the algaes and diatoms. Indeed, there may be hundreds of such freeways in our forests going every which way. Each splashdown site and cruising track used by an aquatic bird, each wading or swimming site used by a mammal or other animal becomes the launching point for a veritable flotilla of transplanted algaes and diatoms.

Given the appropriate environmental conditions, both green algaes and diatoms (which are actually golden algaes) can form heavily-fortified ‘resting cells” (called ‘zygotes” and ‘statospores” respectively) which are able to survive periods of excessive heat, cold and dessication. So even if the ‘taxicab” critter is out of the water for a period of days, when it finally splashes into those cold, clear headwaters some viable algaes and diatoms are likely to be washed into the stream there, and given the newer, better conditions. These will germinate into their more normal “vegetative” forms.

During the normal course of things, stream levels go up and down in response to weather events, and stream bottom rocks which are one day covered with water may be high and dry the next. The algae’s and diatoms on the newly-exposed beaches generate a lot of resting cells as they dry out and when the winds blow over the beaches these zygotes and statospores are carried away along with the other beach dust. Winds blowing upriver constantly reseed the entire length of it with an eclectic mix of species and even downriver winds in the Western Cascades might bring loads of resting cells from Eastside streams, where these same winds are blowing upriver.

Back in a stream again, these revitalized algae’s and diatoms will either get stuck to a rock or something in the stream channel, or will be born along in the flow of water as freshwater plankton. Plankton is the Greek word for wanderer, and it is used collectively to describe a diverse array of free-drifting organisms, regardless of whether they are plant or animal in nature.

Receiving their energy from sunlight, the drifting algae’s and diatoms use it to pull inorganic nutrients (such as phosphorus. magnesium. carbon dioxide, etc) out of the water they are bathed in. so that as they drift they grow and reproduce. Nutrient-rich waters can support faster growth, other factors remaining the same, but near the river’s headwaters, its nutrient value is low and thus the algae’s growth rate is slow, except near localized nutrient concentrations. So the underwater storm of photosynthesizers gets off to a pretty slow start, with each scarce ‘flake” taking a long time to grow and split into two flakes.

Some of the diatoms and algae’s have the luck to wash into quiet backwater pools where a lot of decaying leaves and sticks are laying on the bottom. The stored energy of these organic riches is slowly digested out of them by bacteria, who break down the sugars and complex organic molecules. Some of the organic nutrients are leached out by the water, which flows over the sticks and through the leaf packs and comes away somewhat enriched, like a very weak tea. The mites and insects in the waterlogged organic debris may help to make the ‘tea” stronger by their action of fragmenting the leaves and sticks, which yields more surface area to leak both organic and inorganic nutrients out of. Algae’s and diatoms, as noted, make use of the inorganic nutrients, while the bacteria are the major initial ingesters of the organic molecules.

A diverse array of protozoans, from amoebae and paramecia to rotifers and hydras, prey on the bacteria and algae’s and diatoms, and serve in turn as food for a multitude of aquatic mites and insect larvae. Surges in the flow of streamwater wash a certain number of these micro decomposer organisms out of the quiet spots and into the main streamflow, where they join the drifting algae’s and diatoms as members of the planktonic community.

Pieces of leaves and wood fibers, some of them quite large, join the plankton fleet too, sent on their way by chewing insects, whose sharp but clumsy mouthparts impart a certain sloppiness to their mealtakings. And of,course. the bites which didn’t get fumbled also make their way back into the stream ecosystem as microfeces, and these drift along as other plankton particles. The sticky algaes and diatoms often attach to the surfaces of the particles of leaf, fiber and rnicrofeces, and the nutrient enrichment there allows fast and lush growth. Pieces of leaf and detritus drifting for long, typically become heavily encrusted with diatoms and algaes.

This example streams plankton community is getting complicated and diverse pretty fast: now we’ve got a drifting army of pieces, some single-celled and quite small, others much bigger, like the diatom-covered microfeces and leaf flakes. We’ve got single-celled algaes and diatoms in both free-drifting singles and multiple-celled clumps, pieces and strands of multicelled algaes, bacteria, protozoans. copepods, water fleas. nematodes and others. The average distances between the drifting pieces are getting shorter and shorter as more and more pieces join the flow: the river takes on some of the character of a giant freeway sparsely populated with traffic, at least from the standpoint of someone drifting along with them. To someone on a riverbottom cobble, it probably more resembles a snowstorm of debris flying by in the liquid wind.

In certain rare stretches, the bottom of the river is smooth bedrock. The rest of the way the river bottom is made of loose rocks and cobbles, and where the water slows down enough, fine gravels, sands and silts. All of these bottom types except the bedrock are made of loose pieces of rock, which pile up and leave spaces between them. These spaces are very important, for they interconnect and allow water to circulate and flow down in the sub-basements of the stream bottom. Cover the bottom of a sloping trough with gravel and then pour water through the trough and you’ll see the same thing. Because of irregularities in the stream bottom contours, in some places water from the open stream is pushed down into the inter-gravel pore spaces while in other locations it is being pulled out of them. The water’s flow in a stream channel, being turbulent, sooner or later carries every particle of plankton down to near the bottom, where it runs a chance of being pulled into the inter-gravel spaces or brushed across the surface of the stream bottom. These are the habitats of the stream’s filter-feeding insect citizens.

There may be a good many of these citizens, especially in the stream system’s lower reaches where just the algae and diatom part of the plankton storm is so intense the very water is turned a murky green. In the upper reaches of the same stream, where the trees and vegetation shade much of the stream, the plankton storm is sparse and many of its flakes are relatively large because of the preponderance of decaying leaves as a plankton contributor. Here, the filter-feeding community may be sparse too.

On the bottom of the stream, differences in flow velocity cause a variety of bottom types to form where different sized particles drop out of suspension in the water. In pools and swirls, pieces of decaying leaves skitter and bounce around like burger wrappers on a bare lot, forming temporary piles and drifts, then blowing away again. Here and there small piles of leaf pieces and twigs remain steady, and only by looking close do we find that some of them are really just rudely-made tents, not true piles, and inside these tents are the larvae, or young of caddiceflies of the family Hydropsychidae. The tents, or retreats, have no fixed design and are glued together with silk extruded from the caddicefly’s mouthparts, using pieces of locally-found leaves, sticks and rocks. Some of them look like patchwork pup tents while others look like multi-peaked Bedouin tents. But regardless of floorplan, the entrance usually tends to face across the current and a special catch-net is built out in the ‘porch area”. The Hydropsychids hang out in their retreats and wait for plankton particles to catch in their nets.

Many Western streams have 3 or 4, or even 5 species of Hydropsychids inhabiting them with a sort of progression of those species occurring, as the stream goes from headwater brook to tailwater river. The largest species, making the largest mesh nets. tend to be typical of the upper reaches, and these tend to catch the biggest plankton flakes as well as the occasional drifting insect, which is also devoured. Travelling downstream, plankton storm passes through communities of ever-smaller filtering species, who use ever-smaller mesh sizes in their nets, so that finally it encounters meshes so fine that tiny individual diatoms and single-celled algaes are caught and retained. Other caddiceflies. of the family Polycentropodidae, make their retreats exclusively of silk mesh, building them in the form of tapering tubes which lead like miniature silk tornados into the inter-gravel spaces of the stream bottom. These retreats act as their own catch-nets, funneling plankton down to the ‘trumpetnet caddicefly” larvae in their down current ends. Other members of the same family spin fine-filtering sheet nets over hollows or depressions in the rocks and live beneath them, plucking food from the mesh. A third family of filter-feeding caddiceflies. the Philopotamidae, has members who make long silk mesh tubes as their retreats, but they make them as parallel-sided tubes called ‘finger nets”, which are closed at the downstream end, open at the upstream end, and glued by their lower edges to the upper sides of stream bottom rocks, so that the current holds them open like windsocks and gradually fills them with plankton.

Several genera of Chironomid midges also feature larvae which make silk catch-nets for catching plankton: the meshes on these are often small enough to trap small diatoms and large protozoans. Other fine-mesh or fine-sieve filterers include blackfly larvae, discussed in an earlier column [Sept. ‘94), and freshwater sponges and freshwater clams who do their filtering inside their bodies, rather than with external nets. Several families of mayflies feature larvae with fringed forearms or other body parts which catch plankton like combs and hold it for eating.

When you consider that just one little filter-feeder might clear the water of thousands of pieces of algaes, diatoms, leaf scraps, microfeces and other particles in it’s larval lifetime: and that a one-meter stretch of a river channel might harbor hundreds, even thousands of filter-feeders, then you can start to see where their contributions to water clarity start to add up. Of course, most of these filter-feeding critters are insects, such as caddiceflies, and they eventually reach maturity and go flying off to find mates. Along the way, many of those fall prey to hungry fish birds, bats, or small mammals or amphibians. The great variety of filter-feeders ensures that there will usually be some species around in useable pupal or adult form (rather than hidden larval form), thus benefiting the birds and bats of the terrestrial forest community nearly year-round.

Filter-feeders are major recyclers in the forest web. Think of how many of them there are on (in?) a stream bottom, and how much plankton each one catches and transforms into flesh. Think of how that flesh represents a unit of cleaned water and that it makes the rest of the water just a little bit clearer because that unit’s worth of particles are no longer in it. From a trout’s point of view, this is creating food from waste.

If I seem overly obsessed with the unglamorous in nature it’s because the glamorous already seem well-met with suitors and don’t want for attention. The filter feeders and their prey, the freshwater plankton, are hardly as exciting as the antelopes and the grasses of the Serengetti or the caribou and the lichens of the North Slope, but in their own environment they are equally important. Trout, lions and wolves respectively depend on such grazers to provide them with meat to eat, crafted from local plant life. (O.K.. sometimes not so local in the filter-feeders’ case.) In the stream ecosystem this food chain is not so easy to observe: filter-feeders in particular spend most of their lives totally hidden from view on (or in) the stream bottom, and the planktonic community, though exposed to direct view, is normally made of such small members as to be functionally invisible in the moving water to the unaided eye.

In this largely unheard-of world, drifting plants powered by sunlight scavenge the waters of inorganic nutrients, bacteria scavenge the organic nutrients, and hidden insect larvae filter the waters of the drifting algaes, decaying leaves and other organic particles, cleaning the waters as a result and keeping the nutrients on site.

Filter-feeding is an elegant way to turn otherwise lost nutrients (once it’s dissolved or on the way downriver, how else do you get it back before it’s gone?) into local environmental gain: attaining in two steps the form of the ever-useable, edible insect, that universal coin of nature.

Off The Beaten Path – The Index Eagle January 1992 by Bob Hubbard

This article is from the Index Eagle, January 1992 and authored by Bob Hubbard. He has given us permission to reprint his articles but PLEASE DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. This article may not be reproduced without the express written permission of IndexWa.org and/or Bob Hubbard.
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Off the Beaten Path – Jan 1992

She was few days short of a year in age. This pupa of a certain caddicefly of the family Limnephilfdae, and she was nearly at the end of her life’s cycle. She had lived until now in a series of portable sand-and-silk tubes or cases of her own making, dragging them around the stream bottom as she combed the area for decaying plant or animal matter, algae. and anything else she could scavenge to eat. Two months ago, she stopped eating, glued her case to a river bottom boulder, sealed up the ends of her case and went into a kind of hibernation while her body metamorphosed, changing into its pupal form. Now that changeover was complete and she was chewing away at the silk-and-sand barrier at the front of her case.

She was among the first to attach to her rock, and probably unaware that she had since been joined there by dozens of others of her species. Other rocks nearby, harbored similar concentrations of the squat cylindrical cases that went by the common name of Periwinkles. Inside these cases. other caddice flies were also waking up and starling to chew.

Tonight at dusk, and for the next three dusks, nearly the entire local population of this species of insect – hundreds of thousands. if not millions of individuals – was about to make a big, synchronized dash from river bottom to shore, right through a gauntlet of hungry trout.
The trout knew something was up; a few early emerging caddice flies had already been interrupted In their race for shore. The fat insects made excellent snacks, and throughout the afternoon more and more trout had drifted into the area in anticipation of a good meal. As dusk approached, the trickle of emerges increased to a gush, then a roar. The ‘hatch”, as the fishing people term it, was on.

The particular caddicefly we have introduced finally chewed her way out of the case during the height of the hatch. Her actions were typical of those of her kind. As soon as her body was out of the case it started generating a small amount of gas. This couldn’t escape through her pupal skin, so it started to accumulate under it, forcing it away from another layer of skin under it, her soon-to-be adult skin. The river current plucked her from her grasp on the case and she went tumbling away downstream. All around her the water was filled with other tumbling bodies. The trout swept through this horizontal hailstorm like wolves veering and snapping, enjoying this first course of a fine natural meal.

The caddice tumbled for a bit near the river bottom before the gasses under her skin caused her to rise to the surface. Her legs, short and strong during her larval phase, (the better to drag her heavy case around with), was now longer, and fringed with hairs. She worked those long legs now like mad oars with multiple knees, scrambling her way upward in a tangled blur of motion. The trout continued to dash around stuffing themselves, and several times in her ascent the caddicefly was buffeted by currents caused by the darting fish.

Reaching the surface, the caddicefly heads for the nearest shore. All around her are other caddiceflies with the same goal. Legs rowing, windmilling and thrashing, they head for shore like a miniature D-day fleet. Swirls and explosions of water all around tell the caddices of lost comrades and the narrowing of the gene pool. Rainbow missiles erupt from the water, jaws agape, insect victims centered between hookscarred lips. To the insects, the shore seems a long way away.

Each caddicefly must face ruthless enemies and appalling odds in its sprint to the beach. But because they have evolved a synchronized emergence. the caddiceflies make that dash in a crowd. The trout find themselves literally overwhelmed with food. and enough insects usually get through to assure continuation of their species. Once safely ashore, the caddiceflies crawl into the bushes and moult out of their pupal skin, whose only purpose seems to be to get the insect from its river bottom case to the shore. The now adult caddices must soon run another gauntlet of enemies, as the slim, moth like insects assemble over the river in large swarms to find potential mates. Bats and birds swoop through these swarms like trout of the air, gorging themselves. Thousands more of the insects are lost, but again their natural enemies are overwhelmed with prey, and many more caddices live long enough to find mates in the Single’s Bar atmosphere of the swarm.

The paired caddiceflies leave the swarm and fly to the nearby forest floor to consummate their ‘marriages”, and then the females fun a gauntlet one more time as they fly over to and into the river and swim and struggle their way back to the bottom again. Here they lay their sticky strings of eggs on the rocks and gravels, and finally, their life complete, they release their grip on the bottom and allow the gentle current to deliver them, slowly tumbling to the many mouths of the river.

Bob Hubbard

Off The Beaten Path – The Index Eagle December 1990 by Bob Hubbard

This article is from the Index Eagle, December 1990 and authored by Bob Hubbard. He has given us permission to reprint his articles but PLEASE DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. This article may not be reproduced without the express written permission of IndexWa.org and/or Bob Hubbard.
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The floods this year have done more than just create a lot of environmental havoc and property damage – they have also rekindled many peoples’ interest in forestry as it relates to watershed dynamics and flooding. Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, these floods cannot be blamed exclusively on the loggers and their handiworks, for there are many, many factors which operate together to create a flood. Because of the speed with which the river rose after the storm started. I suspect the influence of a least one of these factors, though – the one I call the Damaged Sponge Effect.

The uncut forest presents three layers of sponge to rainstorms, each of which soaks up rain until it is saturated before it passes the rain along, undiminished to the layer beneath it. Logging can destroy or damage each layer, reducing the water holding capacity of the site and also the amount of rime it takes to saturate the site, which then starts shunting water from the storm into the creeks. This means that more of each storm winds up in the creeks, faster, in the damaged sponge areas, than from undamaged areas. The tree crowns make up the first layer. Old-growth trees, possessing immense quantities of needles, branchlets, lichens and mosses often take a half hour or more to become saturated (as anybody who has ducked beneath a giant tree to get out of a summer squall knows). After leaf-fall, this layer is less effective in hardwood forests, such as our pervasive Alder forests of the Skykomish; and in clear-cuts this layer is completely gone.

The second layer is the litter/duff layer of the forest floor. In old-growth, this layer is especially voluminous, having been accumulated over hundreds of years. Thick moss and well-rotted logs also contribute to the effectiveness of this layer in delaying the arrival of rain to the next layer down. The widespread practice of slash-burning partially or completely destroys this layer, as does the skidding of logs and the building of roads.

The third layer is the soil itself. Under old-growth, this layer is typically deep, with lots of pores, and has tremendous water-holding capacity. Unfortunately, the pore structure is quite fragile, and the thump of a falling tree, or even a few passes of harvesting equipment is sufficient to compact the soil enough to largely destroy its water-holding capacity. Slash burns can destroy the crumbly structure of the soil, giving the same results, and the bared soil is exposed to direct rain splash (rain often falls with sufficient force to blast soil particles a meter into the air). Sediments loosened this way are washed into otherwise undamaged soil pores, plugging them. This layer is very slow to heal, following damage.

As can be seen, there are many ways that logging can damage the sponge function of the forest, thereby hurrying storms into the streams and causing fast rising rivers during rain events. The more a watershed is logged, the more potentially damaging this effect becomes. Although modern harvest techniques are less damaging to the sponge layers than some of the older techniques, the fact remains that significant percentages of our watershed were clear-cut and burnt.

In spite of years of new growth on the soils of these sites, the sponge function remains severely impaired on them, so we’d better get used to rivers which react fast and extreme to every passing storm.

Off The Beaten Path – The Index Eagle November 1995 by Bob Hubbard

This article is from the Index Eagle, November 1995 and authored by Bob Hubbard. He has given us permission to reprint his articles but PLEASE DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. This article may not be reproduced without the express written permission of IndexWa.org and/or Bob Hubbard.
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A certain family of Ospreys -which are sometimes called fish hawks or fish eagles-, has lived just southwest of Index for a long time, 17 years at least. During this time they have had several changes of address as tree after tree rotted and weakened under the osprey’s huge nest then broke off in windstorms. Time after time the ospreys rebuilt their nests, sometimes in the same tree, sometimes in another. In last December’s column I wrote a little about the osprey family and sort of wondered aloud about whether they were going to be able to spring back from yet another windstorm home wrecking, the second in a year’s time. Turns out they’re made out of tough stuff; they were building a new nest in a tree a couple hundred feet upstream the next Spring. They’d finished building the nest, had stocked it with 3 eggs, had kept these warm enough to hatch them, and by late Spring their chicks were getting pretty big and noisy as they clamored for food. And then, right across the river, the peaceful forested hillside was turned into an industrial zone.

This was the big project out on hiway 2 a couple hundred feet east of the Index junction, on the downhill side of the hiway; the one which lasted all summer and gave daily employment to at least 3 flaggers handling traffic out on the hiway and half a dozen or more dump truck drivers and power excavator operators down on the job site. Altogether there were many more people involved at some stage or another, but this core group is what most locals saw as they drove by or waited in line out on the hiway. What we saw was a never-ending succession of dump trucks arriving at the site carrying rock, and a similar succession of dump trucks leaving the site loaded with clay. We could see a couple of power shovels or excavators, as they dumped their loads of clay -3 scoops usually do it- into the dump trucks.

What we can now see if we look in just the right place is a view down and across the river, to a small grove of old-growth trees. A broken-topped tree in this grove extends a big side-limb to the right some distance below the top of the trunk, and out on this limb is the new 4 or 5 foot diameter stick nest of the ospreys.

I was worried that the constant noise was going to disturb the ospreys, but they managed to adapt to the construction. As the excavators dug deeper and deeper trenches across the hillside, the ospreys made hundreds of trips upriver and downriver to get the fish to feed their growing chicks. All through the dumping of the rocks into the trenches the ospreys continued to fish and feed their young, and encouraged them to exercise their wings.  Sometime around midway through the project the young ospreys fledged, taking their first awkward flights. The young birds still couldn’t feed themselves, but now they started to follow their parents around, learning how to find and catch fish.  The young ospreys looked comical as they tried to emulate their parents; they flapped enthusiastically from one teetering, jerky landing to another, and they slowly acquired the skill to do it smoothly. One day I looked up and had to laugh; one of the youngsters was practicing his (or her) soaring, and he only had enough confidence to extend his wings about halfway out to full spread.  He was so tense that little updrafts and downdrafts would buffet him and cause him to lose his balance and then he’d have to flap his wings to recover. He was doing more flapping than soaring that day, but in the next few weeks he improved measurably, and by the time the hiway project wrapped up in late October all the osprey youngsters were pretty fair fliers and gliders.

For their part, I thought that the hiway project workers did a pretty good job. They hauled out an awful lot of unstable blue clay and replaced it with heavy, stable rock fill. They rerouted the drainage on the slope into several big plastic drainpipes.  They left a couple of buffer strips of trees, so the site would keep a little of its wild, scenic character. They burned their wood wastes, the stumps and logs and limbs, and every night they put out their waste fire, restarting it each morning instead of just letting it burn all night like the Forest Service and logging firms are wont to do.  (this costs more, but is safer because it eliminates untended fires) And they cleaned up any litter and left a nicely landscaped site behind when they were done. Hopefully, the slope will do its part and cease its slowly-creeping ways so all this attention isn’t wasted on it.

The ospreys must have been thoroughly confused by the hiway project; they watched us cut down a bunch of trees and saw them into pieces and burn them. Then they saw us bring in big power shovels to dig great deep trenches where the trees used to stand. They watched the dump trucks haul the clay up onto hiway 2, then drive it less than a mile down the hiway before turning off on the Mt. Index road and hauling it back upstream until it was almost directly across the valley from where it started out, then dumping it in an abandoned sand pit. They watched other dump trucks return from parts unknown to fill up the great trenches with big, broken rocks.  Then they watched other trucks bring topsoil to cover the rocks with, and when that was spread out, they watched another truck come and spray grass seed, chopped up hay bales and green dye all over the “topsoil”.

I think the workers and flaggers of the hiway project saw the family of ospreys just across the river and realized that this wasn’t just another roadside drainage adjustment job; it was an industrial intrusion into the peaceful world of a great wild bird. There were days when the waste pile fire was left unlit; I wondered whether that had anything to do with keeping the smoke away from the osprey nest, where the nestlings were still unable to fly at the time …  Unfortunately, the project’s perfect record was soiled the other day, when one of the trucks owned by the contractor got too far over on a shoulder of the Mt. Index road and rolled over into a small stream. A couple hundred gallons of diesel spilled into the stream, and even though the hazardous spill folks got out there in a hurry, much of that diesel ended up in a small cattail wetland a few hundred feet downstream from the spill. The effects of that spill on the wetland will be interesting to see, come spring; during the winter most of the plants there look dead anyway, and it would be hard to tell which ones have been affected.

Who knows, maybe come Spring we’ll see another new generation of ospreys raised in this increasingly human-altered wild valley. They’re tough, no doubt about that. If serial home wrecking windstorms aren’t enough to drive them out, and if heavy construction noises don’t drive them out, maybe poisoning their habitat won’t drive them out either. I hope not. Stay tuned, and maybe in another year or two we’ll go back and see how they’re doing.