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Public Is Invited
Marietta Natural History Society
Summer 2010 Newsletter
Summer Stroll
at the
Kroger Wetland
Thursday, July 8, 7:00 PM
Meet at the parking lot on Acme St.
Set aside an evening to visit the
Kroger Wetland. Becky Wright will
be there to talk about her lovely
meadow garden. She has shown that
native wildflowers can stand on their
own! Afterwards take a stroll through
the only wetland in the city of Marietta.
Beguiled
by Buffalo?
Energy
Under Foot
Thursday, August 12
6:30 PM – Meet at the
Hermann Fine
Arts Center
parking lot,
4th & Butler
Presenter:
Dr. Robert Chase
Dr. Chase, Chair of the Marietta College
Petroleum Engineering program, will lead
us on a trip to the first oil well drilled in
Ohio – near Caldwell. Drilled as a salt
brine well, it accidentally hit oil! We’ll
also learn about the Marcellus Shale that
underlays the eastern part of Ohio and may
be the one of the largest natural gas
resource plays in our history.
Thursday, September 9, 6:30 PM
Meet at the Hermann Fine Arts Center
parking lot, 4th & Butler
Host: Melva Dixon
The Dixon Buffalo Farm, near Beverly, boasts the
largest herd in the entire region, with about 50
bison. Some people may also know of the farm as
the site of an annual bluegrass music festival.
Melva Dixon, owner of the farm, will tell us about the
advantages and challenges of keeping a herd in SE Ohio.
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Marietta Natural History Society
Summer 2010
Upcoming Events at Ohio River Islands
National Wildlife Refuge
The following events are sponsored by Friends of Ohio River
Islands National Wildlife Refuge. All activities are free and
open to the public. Meet inside the refuge visitor facility unless
otherwise indicated. To learn more about any of the activities,
please call or email: Janet Butler: (304) 375-2923, ext. 117,
janet_butler@fws.gov.
Nature Journaling – July 10, 10:00 AM - Noon
Using the refuge as inspiration, participants will explore the
techniques of collage, painting, sketching and incorporating
found objects and organic materials to create a one-of-a-kind
nature journal. Led by Bette Cain. No experience necessary.
Reservations helpful (see number above). Appropriate for
ages 10-adult.
Life in the River – Saturday, July 31, 10:00 - 11:00 AM
An up-close opportunity to see some of the river’s critters
(fish, mussels, turtles, etc.) and learn about their world. Meet
at the pavilion next to the visitor parking area. Appropriate for
ages 3 and up.
Insect Safari on Middle Island – August 14, 10 AM - Noon
Discover the fascinating world of insects on a trail walk. Meet
on the island at the information sign parking area next to the
bridge. Appropriate for ages 4 and up.
Insect Safari and Jewel Bug Activity at Buckley Mainland
August 28, 10:00 - Noon. Create a jewel bug to take home.
Appropriate for ages 4 and up. Reservations appreciated but
not required Meet at visitor parking area. What will we find
this year on our trail walk?
Nature Journaling – September 11, 10:00 AM - Noon
.
Same as above.
River Refuge Festival, September 25,
10:00 - 3:00 PM Help us celebrate the refuge! Free Valley
Gem boat tour around Buckley Island, activities and displays,
live music and lots of fun for all ages.
Suggestions, Comments or
Contributions for the MNHS
Newsletter?
Send them to the Editor:
374-8778
spilatrs@marietta.edu
Surveying on a Budget
Some of our commonest species seem to be declining, and the Ohio Biological Survey is seeking help in surveying
Ohio’s biota. Through what they call “Surveying on a Budget,” for this year they have chosen two species that are
readily recognizable and not easily confused:
Black and Yellow Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia) and Red Baneberry (Actaea rubra).
When you see one of these species during 2010, please report
it to the Survey. Red Baneberry, is a State-listed species and
should not be touched or otherwise disturbed. It could be
confused with the white baneberry, so take a photo if you are not
sure about the identification, but please leave the plants alone.
If possible, they would like to have the following information
about any plants that you report:
Species (Common) name,
Date observed,
and Location
(latitude-longitude in decimal degrees; OR street address,
If in a municipality; OR descriptive location,
(e.g., 5 miles SW of Sunbury, OH on State Route 3)
Records can be sent to the Survey office via mail or e-mail. OhioBioSurvey@rrohio.com
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Marietta Natural History Society
Summer 2010
Not all snakes lay eggs
Most snakes in Ohio are “oviparous” – they lay eggs
that develop and hatch outside of the female’s body.
However, the garter snake is “ovoviviparous” and the
offspring emerge live from the mother throughout
much of the summer and autumn months. After
copulation the egg (surrounded by a amniotic
membrane but no shell) is retained in the oviduct.
Unlike oviparity of mammals, in which the fetus draws
nutrition from the parent through the placenta,
offspring of ovoviviparous reptiles draw little if any
nutrition from the mother, and rely primarily upon the
food provided by the yolk sac of the egg. Water
snakes,
brown snakes, copperheads, and
rattlesnakes are also
ovoviviparous.
Recycled Paper
30% Post-Consumer
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Marietta Natural History Society
Summer 2010
Everybody Lives Downstream
Dr. Eric Fitch
Dept of Biology and Environmental Science, Marietta College
“Everybody lives downstream” is an oft used maxim of
environmental science. It is a variation of Barry
Commoner’s 2nd Law of Ecology “Everything must go
somewhere”. Most of Marietta and Washington County is
blessed with abundant surface and groundwater resources
in a very dynamic hydrology. This is what first attracted
Native American groups and then later settlers from the
newly minted United States in the form of the Ohio
Company in 1788.
Water resources are essential to the establishment of
human settlements for a variety of reasons: meeting the
physiological needs of people and their domesticated
plants and animals, navigation, and hydropower to name a
few. One of the most important is sanitation. In my youth,
the mantra “the solution to pollution is dilution” was still
commonly used by those supposedly “in the know”. This
had been our experience as a people.
For the most part in the eastern United States, the best
way to get rid of human and animal wastes, wastes from
the production of food and even industrial waste was to
dump them into a large and/or moving body of water and
let your problems go downstream. Now there were
exceptions to this.
Chicago found the putting their wastes into Lake
Michigan didn’t work out so well. What went out with the
morning tide came back in the afternoon. Chicago was a
plague city early on with outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and
other
waterborne
diseases. They
solved this
problem by
building the
Chicago
Sanitary
and Ship
Canal, diverting
water out of
Michigan to the
Des Plaines River
and south, eventually into the Mississippi
River. Closer to the turn of the 20th
Century, growing metropolises in
the East, first New York and then a
few others, started to develop
massive infrastructures to carry
wastes away from their cities either out to
sea, down river or both.
In 1899, the federal government first
became involved in the passage of the
Rivers and Harbors Act. It seems that
people had become comfortable that with using public
waters as open dumps. They would throw in larger objects
like broken furniture, wagons, construction wastes, horse
carcasses and if a ship would run aground and become
wrecked the owners would abandon it on the spot. Rivers
and harbors were becoming littered with threats to
navigation.
Through the 20th Century, first at the local, then state
and finally the federal level, the assurance of water quality
and the protection of public waters became an issue of
concern and action. As human population grew numerically
and in density, as a primarily rural, agrarian, low-density
population transitioned into a majority urban, industrialized,
high-density population, the capacity of surface and ground
waters to absorb and dilute ever larger and more complex
mixes of nutrients and toxins became overwhelmed.
Many living today can recall the ominous news
headlines of the 1960s where Lake Erie was pronounced
to be “dying” and the Cuyahoga River caught on fire not
once but at least a couple of times. The legislation that
became the federal Clean Water Act was not passed into
law until the early 1970s. Bottom line, for most areas of the
United States the use of rivers as open sinks persisted
throughout most of the first two centuries of the nation.
The waters of Washington County have been impacted
in ways parallel to the rest of the nation. The surface
hydrology of Washington County is dominated by five
significant systems: the strand of the Ohio River flowing
along its southern border, the Muskingum River and
tributaries, the Little Hocking River and tributaries, the Little
Muskingum River and tributaries, and Duck Creek and its
tributaries. As they flow through more rural areas upstream
and through Washington County, the main inputs are from
non-point sources (e.g. runoff from agriculture, from
highways and parking lots, etc.) and from point sources
such as septic system discharges.
Nitrates and pesticides, especially as they infiltrate
groundwater, are a particular concern in these areas.
There are larger point discharges at sites such as power
plants, industrial sites and wastewater treatment sites. At
these sites, what is allowed as discharges is controlled
under the Clean Water Act and its regulations under
NPDES (pronounced phonetically or as Nip-Dees); the
optimistically named National Pollutant Discharge
Elimination System. Marietta and some of the smaller
communities in the county treat their wastewater under
NPDES permits.
See Downstream, page 5
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Marietta Natural History Society
Downstream, con’t from Page 4
Air emissions can also contribute to surface
waters. Some of these emissions are captured by
emission control systems while others escape to the
atmosphere. Particulates such as sulfur oxides, nitrous
oxides, lead. mercury and others settle out and are
some of the major sources of toxic contaminants to
surface waters.
Factor two are flood events. No matter how good a
wastewater capture and treatment system a community
has, floods and storm events can overwhelm systems
and allow untreated sewage and other wastes into
surface waters. Factor three is of particular concern to
communities such as Marietta: the presence of
persistent wastes in soils and sediments. Communities
such as Marietta which have a long history of industrial
development may have sites where long-lived toxins
were buried and which can over time migrate into
ground and surface waters.
A classic example of this is the presence of DDT in
Duck Creek; the only body of water in the state of Ohio
with detectible levels of this chemical. DDT was banned
from manufacture and use in the U.S. in 1972 and much
of the world followed suit. Prior to the manufacturing
ban, Cytec (American Cyanamid) produced DDT for a
time at their Greene St. facility in Marietta. DDT remains
present in the soils of the site and are carried by surface
and groundwater into the creek. Dispersion into surface
waters of this and other chemical wastes buried on the
site were the subject of a recent OEPA hearing. This is
but one site in the county where such buried wastes can
present problems for water quality.
So, what is the status of surface waters of
Washington County? Both Ohio EPA and ORSANCO
data indicate that the waters are generally of good
quality with occasional problems cropping up, e.g. a few
years back ORSANCO investigated some dioxin hot
spots along the Ohio mainstem and in our local pool.
Generally speaking, waste loading for all our local
bodies of water remain within regulatory standards.
Unfortunately, neither OEPA or ORSANCO have the
ability (personnel, time, equipment, money) to perform
ongoing monitoring of these waters. Public health
departments do some limited testing of private wells
and some surface waters especially for biological
contamination. The National Resources Conservation
Service does some limited testing as well to supplement
their work with watershed districts and farmers. Some of
the data gaps are supplemented by volunteer activities
involved in watershed monitoring.
[Editor’s note: You can help! Kristyn Robinson,
Watershed Coordinator with Friends of Lower
Muskingum River, wants to train and assemble
stream teams so that local waters may be
tested more frequently. Call 374-4170 for
more information]
Summer 2010
2010 MNHS Membership
Doug Albaugh
Lynn Barnhart
David Becker and
Sandy Snyder
Brad Bond*
Ava Bradley
Gary and Gloria Brown
Christine Broyles
Janet Butler
Argyle Clarke
Caroline Clark
Nancy Coleman
Patrick & Harriet Collins
Del & Carolyn Crandell
Janet Crawford
Scott & Janice Emrick
Richard & Jeanette Esker
Martha Farson
Keith & Barbara Foster
Margaret Fredericks
Mark & Betty Gatewood
Sharon Gegner
Mary Grubert
Nancy Habel
Dan & Gillian Harrison
Ruth and Dave Hawkins
Lila Hill
Steve Hill
Janice & Casey Hofmann
Neal and Barb Hohman
Anne Jacoby
Martin Jamison
Tanya Jarrell
Jim & Terry Jeffers
Arthur & Elin Jones
Paul Knoop, Jr.
Joyce Kronberg
Marilyn Logue
John & Mary Beth Lohse
Marshall & Betty Lowe
Kurt Ludwig
Peggy Malcomb
Bill Thompson
Dave McShaffrey
& Ann Delleur
Laurie Meagle
Maggie & Steve Meyer
Jane & Ed Michael
Dr. & Mrs. James Mills
Diane Mitchell*
Jack & Barb Moberg
Jim & Gwen Noe
Janet O'Brien*
Marilyn Ortt*
Frances Parlin
Tim and Carol Peterson
Cathy and Stan Piekarski
Bob & Caroline Putnam
Bob Placier
Dave & Mickie Richardson
Marjorie Shonnard
Corey Sites & Family
Steven and Jane Spilatro
Tom Steckel
Carol Steinhagen
Gerry Stewart
Patrick Stewart
Stewart-Whistler Family
Teresa Stone
Dr. Dwayne Stone
Jay & Joan Stowe
Bill & Elsa Thompson
Bill & Julie Z. Thompson
Cynthia Ting
Gene & Melanie Wagner
Anita Wall
Pat & Fred Wood
Becky Wright*
Rosemarie Zimmer
* Monarch Membership
Benefits of
Membership
L Monthly programs
L Field trips
L Quarterly
newsletter
L Educational
experiences
for kids and adults
Invite a Friend to Join the
Marietta Natural History Society
Monarch - Friend $50
River Otter - Family $25
Wood Thrush - Individual $15
Why not give a gift membership?
Mail check to address below
The MNHS Mission
i To foster awareness of and sensitivity to our environment and its biodiversity
i To provide a place where people with these interests can gather for information and activity
i To create a presence in our community representing these ideas
Marietta Natural History Society
P.O. Box 983
Marietta, Ohio 45750
(740) 373-5285