Surely you know the drill by now. Our man Bill likes to walk. He likes to write. This installment takes us 25 miles east of Dallas, into 1,800 acres of man-made wetlands. This one’s cool. Jump for the goodies.
Wet n Wild
By Bill Holston
“In an age where man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.” This quote from Rachel Carson adorns a sign on the beautiful wide porch of the John Bunker Sands Wetlands Center, the site of last Saturday’s walk. These man-made wetlands are a great example of what can happen when people heed this apt warning from one of America’s best known environmentalists. Our need for water is going to continue to become more acute. According the North Texas Municipal Water District, the “area population is projected to increase from 1.5 million people to 3.5 million people by 2050. The demand for water will be like adding the equivalent of one Lake Lavon every decade for 50 years.” We’re used to just turning on a tap and having clean drinkable water come out. This is a luxury to much of the world and it doesn’t just occur without expense and planning. This wetland area presents an innovative approach to meeting these water needs. And it presents a great place for a hike.
The Center is located about 25 miles east of Downtown Dallas off of US 175, just past Seagoville. The center originally had the extremely catchy name, East Fork Raw Water Supply Project, which for some reason they changed. The center is now named in honor of the late John Bunker Sands, the inspiring former director of The Rosewood Corporation and the son of Caroline Rose Hunt and Loyd Bowmer Sands. Mr. Sands initially developed the wetlands as part of a holistic approach to the cattle ranches belonging to Rosewood. His efforts at holistic ranching were widely recognized and honored, and he was awarded the Lone Star Land Steward Award in 1996. Eventually he oversaw the development of over 2100 acres of wetlands.
This wetland is now dedicated to a world class and extremely innovative approach to solving North Texas Water needs. The Center is run by a non-profit corporation and is a cooperative venture between North Texas Municipal Water District, the Rosewood Corporation and the Hunt family to use wetlands to obtain clean water. Every day, water from the East Fork of the Trinity River is diverted into these 1,800 acres of these Wetlands in order to allow nature to do the work of cleaning the water. The process is fascinating. Water is pumped from the Trinity River and initially into sedimentation ponds. The water is released through a series of wetland cells. There are 24 of these wetland cells which have been planted with over 1.6 million plants, which work to filter out nitrogen and phosphorous out of the water. It takes 7-10 days for this water to complete the process of making its way through wetlands. Eventually this cleansed raw water is pumped through a 43 mile pipeline back into Lake Lavon, where it is treated and used for our water needs. This basically works to recycle water which would otherwise continue to flow downstream.
My lovely wife told me my last Law Man Walking epistle made me sound like a bleeding heart environmentalist. Well, environmentalism actually makes sound economic sense. Republicans for Environmental Protection writes this about wetlands: “Besides being marvelous wildlife habitat, wetlands are good filters. They can absorb moderate amounts of nutrients and help cleanse storm runoff. Without wetlands, these pollutants would flow down to our rivers and beaches, creating a potential public health problem. They perform this cleansing function at no charge, thereby saving tax dollars that would otherwise have to be spent to achieve the same ends.”
What exactly is a wetland? Well, without knowing anything else, you can identify two of the three components: wet (ie water) and land (ie land). The third component is plants. According to the Clean Water Act, the term wetlands means “those areas that are inundated or saturated by surface or groundwater at a frequency and duration sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions. Wetlands generally include swamps, marshes, bogs and similar areas.”
According to Texas Parks and Wildlife: “Wetland … are valued in different degrees for their ability to improve water quality, provide economic benefits for wetland-dependent businesses, help in stabilizing global levels of carbon dioxide, reduce flood damage, and provide recreation opportunities.”
So, it might not be the best idea to drain all those swamps in order to build malls. Not that I have anything against malls. Ok, I hate malls. In my opinion it’s why God and Al Gore invented the internet.
The best part of this project and the reason I traveled there last weekend with the North Texas Master Naturalists was because of the abundant wildlife this remarkable wetland attracts. I arrived early Saturday morning and entered the fantastic educational building for the center. This 5,400-sq-foot building houses multiple meeting rooms and classrooms and serves to educate school groups about wetland ecology. The entire building is filled with extremely well designed boards with information about the North Texas Blackland Prairie and Riparian Wetlands, and is open for school groups to visit. I learned for instance that the Trinity River Basis is the largest river basin that begins and ends in Texas and drains nearly 18,000 square miles. Most of the wetlands that existed along the Trinity River Basin have been drained, making preservation of the remainder critical.
Our class was greeted by the two employees of the center, education manager Linda Dunn and, Director John DeFillipo. Both are knowledgeable and passionate about this project. Our first project was to learn about this wetland region. We learned for instance that there are three different plant communities in this wetland, emergent, floating and submerged. The plants include Cattails (Typhaceae), Pickerell Weed (Pontederia cordata), and Duckweed (Lemna minor) among others. These plants act as the filters to clean the water as it moves through these wetlands.
After getting some orientation, it was time to explore. Our class left the education building and spread out along the shore of the wetlands. We waded into the shallows with buckets and nets to collect macro invertebrates. This was much more fun than it sounds. Our group’s ages range from our twenties to sixties. Yet we all explored our inner child and laughed with delight as we waded into the muck and filled our buckets with the teeming life that reflects the health of the water. It reminded me of when I was a young teen growing up in Mobile, Alabama. My buddies and I used to don our Keds and wade in a bayou that backed up to our neighborhood. We renamed the creek ‘the Zambezi’, and spend countless summers wading the creeks, picking up snakes and frogs. My poor mom once walked out to see a dozen snakes crawling around her azaleas.
After filling our buckets, we headed back to the classrooms and began the process of isolating and identifying the invertebrates. Later, John placed samples onto a projector. We found Scuds (Malacostraca), Water Boatmen (Corixa), the largest group of aquatic true bugs, and my favorite, the Predaceous Diving Beetles (Coleoptera: Dytiscida). Well, if you can’t have fun catching Predaceous Diving Beetles, I don’t know what to tell you. The biggest hit however was the leech which we watched as it attacked all of the other invertebrates in the dish. It was actually quite entertaining to see the little swimming creatures battling each other on the screen in front of us. We could see the predator/prey relationships play out with the tiniest creatures. It was the invertebrate version of Charlton Heston fighting from chariot in Ben Hur.
Next up was my favorite part of the trip. The wetlands behind the education building are crossed with levees, which you access through a series of boardwalks. I took off alone across the boardwalks. There are islands filled with towering aquatic plants and the entire area is teeming with wildlife. The first evidence of the abundant wildlife was the scat from the bobcats and fox that use the boardwalks to cross the wetlands. I loved seeing the flashes of red from the Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) which cling to the tops of cattails. Once off of the boardwalk, trails follow the levees which divide the cells of water being treated naturally. It was a sunny warm day, and I walked along looking for birds. I was not disappointed as the pools of water were filled with various types of waterfowl. I watched Northern Shovelers swim along. These are really pretty ducks and I saw quite a few of them over the course of the afternoon. As I approached one of the ponds, I saw several White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) floating in a pool. As I approached them, they all took off together, soaring overhead and away from view. As I walked along I had the feeling of walking in a really exotic place. This was confirmed as I walked to the end of one of the levees. A flash of color caught my eye. I stopped and sat down, shielded from view by the abundant bullrushes. There in front of me were two lovely pick Roseate Spoonbills ( Anas clypeata). I’d never sent these before. I think of these beautiful birds as living along the Gulf, so this was an unexpected treat. I opened up my backpack, had some water, and ate a cliff bar. I took out my binoculars and sat and watched them for a long time. They waded along the shore, fishing along with other shore birds like the one beautiful bird with a long curved beak that I couldn’t identify. Its long hooked beak is perfectly designed to pierce the muck and feed. We also learned that just last week they spotted a Peregrine Falcon, one of the world’s fastest creatures. They regularly see Bald Eagles.
After sitting here for a while I was joined by a couple of my fellow master naturalist trainees. We talked about how much we are enjoying this Master Naturalist class and how much we were learning. We shared stories about the places we loved in Texas. My friend Stacy talked about bird watching at Port Aransas and I talked about my camping trips to Big Bend, when my kids were little. We shared stories about watching the Milky Way. I don’t really know if we have other things in common, but it was really nice to walk along and share my love for learning with people who enjoy this as much as I do. I told them just how healthy these walks were for my mental health, and they are. In fact of all three of us celebrated how much we enjoyed learning. Yet at the same time, we all lamented how much we don’t know yet about things. We walked along seeing shore birds that none of us could identify. It’s encouraging to realize that this is something I could continue learning about for years, and at the same time it is daunting. Blaise Paschal wrote: “Knowledge has two extremes that meet. One is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge only to find that they know nothing and come back to the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance that knows itself.” Pensees 83. Well, I’m on my way to that ignorance.
Soon we joined up with another group of our classmates. This crew was experienced at birdwatching. There were even a couple of spotter scopes. By listening to them, I learned that one of the birds we had seen was a Greater Yellowlegs (Tringa melanoleuca), and that beautiful dark bird with the curved beak was a White Faced Ibis. Many of the pools were with American Coots, one of the common ducks at White Rock Creek.
If you want an introduction to the John Bunker Sands Wetland, you’re in luck. Tomorrow the center is open to the public to hold its first 5k fun run and walk on the Levees. If I read it correctly there will be bird tours and crawfish plates. They had me at crawfish plate. This would be a great way to get introduced to the place.
I walked back to the building, not quite ready to get back to the concrete of the city. As I walked through the wetlands, observing the abundant wildlife, I’m struck by how rejuvenating this time is. On the wall was this quote by Henry David Thoreau: “(H)ope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities but in the impervious and quaking Swamps.”
