Nature: Restoration of Mentor Marsh is magnificent

Naturalist Becky Donaldson has helped restoration efforts in Mentor Marsh, allowing native flora and fauna to make an impressive comeback/Jim McCormac

Columbus Dispatch

September 15, 2019

NATURE
Jim McCormac

On Aug. 13, I journeyed to the largest undiked wetland on the U.S. shores of Lake Erie: Mentor Marsh, just east of Cleveland. My guides were Becky Donaldson and Ben Piazza, Cleveland Museum of Natural History employees and on-the-ground marsh managers.

We hopped in an Argo “marsh buggy” and set off on a comprehensive tour of the 800-acre wetland. I have long been familiar with the marsh, but the changes that have been wrought in recent years are stunning.

Disaster struck in the 1960s, when tailings from local salt-mining operations leached into a nearby feeder creek. Salt might be good on fries, but it’s disastrous for freshwater marshes. The worst consequence of the salinity spike was invasion by an aggressive nonnative grass, Phragmites australis, or common reed.

The Eurasian grass is salt-tolerant, and it eventually cloaked nearly the entire wetland. Indigenous flora was choked out by the nearly impenetrable stand of 10-foot-tall bamboo-like plants, and biodiversity plummeted.

A Mentor Marsh strangled by Phragmites was all that I, and most of my contemporaries, knew. However, in a stunning reversal of fortunes, the Cleveland museum has orchestrated one of the most ambitious wetland restorations on the Great Lakes.

Beginning in 2004, common reed control was implemented. It was baby steps at first, but in recent years the efforts have grown tremendously in intensity. The varied management tactics include physical mashing and cutting, aerial spraying, and on-the-ground herbicide treatments.

I could hardly believe my eyes as Donaldson and Piazza shepherded me through the marsh. There was scarcely any common reed to be seen. Freed from the shackles of this infestation, native flora has resurfaced from the seedbank.

Dozens of native-plant species, some not seen in decades, dotted the marsh: pink mists of swamp milkweed, attracting migrant monarch butterflies; swamp rose mallow, with its gargantuan showy pink flowers formed thickets; brilliant magenta flowering spikes of swamp loosestrife — a native — bringing numerous butterflies.

Nearly 200 species of native plants have been documented, and most are far more prevalent now that the common reed has been removed. New finds are made every year, and Donaldson recently made a stellar discovery, the state-endangered northern wild rice.

The astronomical spike in floristic diversity has spawned a proliferation of animal life. We saw birds galore, including bald eagle, Caspian tern, common gallinule, osprey, Virginia rail, wood duck and many others. Fish such as pike and yellow perch have returned, and beaver and river otters are occasionally spotted.

A healthy marsh is a boon for the Cleveland region, attracting scores of natural-history enthusiasts from far and wide. Lake Erie water quality is better, and visual appeal for local residents is enhanced. The threat of blazes that erupted periodically in stands of incendiary common reed has been eliminated.

Many partners have played a role in Mentor Marsh’s recovery, including the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, National Fish & Wildlife Foundation and U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dan Donaldson of the Lake County Soil and Water Conservation District was especially helpful in implementing restoration practices.

But the catalyst for this success story is the Cleveland Museum’s Natural Areas Program and its visionary leader, Jim Bissell. He and his staff — Donaldson, Piazza, David Kriska and others — have done the heavy lifting.

Mentor Marsh was Ohio’s first state nature preserve, dedicated in 1971. Kudos to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for working to return it to its original splendor.

For more information, visit www.cmnh.org/mentor-marsh.

Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch on the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month. He also writes about nature at www.jimmccormac.blogspot.com.

Phragmites - an ENORMOUS pest

With its lush sprangled top, this grass is a bit of a pretty thing when at full maturity. It is the Giant Reed, Phragmites australis, and if you live near or visit Lake Erie, it'll certainly ring a bell. Mature culms can tower to a dozen feet or more, and under optimal conditions it grows in such dense profusion that a muskrat would have a hard time threading through the stalks.

Nearly all of the Phragmites that we've got in Ohio - and many other areas in the eastern U.S. - is of Eurasian extraction. There is a native variant - Phragmites australis ssp. americanus - but it is now quite rare in our neck of the woods. We used to have more of the native, but most of it has been vegetatively steamrolled by the invader.

Like a chlorophyll-filled cockroach, Phragmites scrambles around with astonishing speed, threading its way into all available nooks and crannies. Most of its conquests of new turf is accomplished by runners, or superficial rhizomes, shown above. These roots can grow up to several dozen feet a year, which is an effective way to thrust one's gramineus self into new and unwanted terrain, quickly.

Back in November, I was flying over Lake Erie and happened over one of Ohio's most iconic birding locales, Headlands Dunes, just east of Cleveland and hard on the Lake Erie shore. The brown spit of land is brown because it is cloaked in native grasses: Coastal Little Bluestem, American Beach Grass, Switch Grass, and Canada Wild Rye, mostly. This spot is the best remaining naturally vegetated beach on Ohio's Lake Erie coast.

A very short distance away is an absolute forest of Phragmites. We are looking west down the old channel of the Grand River, which is now a large nature preserve known as Mentor Marsh. Virtually the entire former river bed is filled with the invader grass.

Mentor Marsh is still a fabulous place, and it is very important that it was protected and remains in good stewardship. But what it must have been like in the pre-Phragmites days, when an outstanding diversity of native flora reigned! I have seen old photos from back in the day, when bur-reeds, pickerel-weed, various pondweeds, bulrushes and other sedges, water-lilies and many others proliferated. Plant and animal diversity go hand in hand, and back then Mentor Marsh would have been a stunningly rich spot for birds and other wetland fauna.

Fortunately, stewardship of the marsh is partly under the auspices of the Natural Areas Program of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and they have toiled hard to diversify the sea of Phragmites. Museum personnel have restored small sections of the marsh along the Wake Robin Trail, shown above threading its way across the marsh.

Because of their successes in beating back the Phragmites, all manner of native flora has flourished along the Wake Robin Trail, and it's no coincidence that this has become the hotspot in northeast Ohio for finding two highly coveted feathered skulkers, the Nelson's Sparrow and Le Conte's Sparrow.

Would it be that we could only expel all of the Phragmites over the nearly 700 acres of marsh, but that's a tall order, and the foot soldiers are few. Financing to arm the troops in the ground battle is tight, too, and that's why it is so important to support organizations such as the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The CMNH is doing some of the most important conservation work in northeast Ohio, and if you've visited Mentor Marsh and nabbed your lifer Nelson's or Le Conte's sparrow, you've benefited from their efforts. Ditto that if you've been to any of the other 34 sites totalling some 5,000 acres that the Museum has protected.

Ohio is truly fortunate to have the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and its Natural areas Program, and should you find a way to help support them, please do!

Tongue of a flicker

The entrance to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, one of the country's best such museums. If you haven't been, put it on your itinerary.

Last Friday night marked the kickoff of the museum's annual Explorer Series of lectures, and I was honored to be the inaugural speaker. Beforehand, the Native Plant Society of Northeast Ohio had their annual meeting, above. I am a longtime member of this group, and sat in. What a cool room to have a meeting in! The surrounding dioramas depict various North American ecosystems. It takes a long time to fully inspect the contents of this place, visit the planetarium, and do everything else that there is to do.

About 260 people attended the evening lecture, and I gave a program about some of the best remaining natural areas in the state, including one in the Cleveland region. There's a wonderful slate of upcoming Explorer Series programs; if you live in the area or want to devise an interesting trip, consider attending one of the lectures and touring the museum beforehand. The sensational Cleveland Museum of Art is only a few minute's walk away, too.

Bright and early the next morning, Andy Jones and I led a bird/nature walk at Dike 14, on the shores of the Cleveland lakefront. Dike 14 is a large former dredging impoundment - the perimeter is a mile long - that has now reverted to a wild state and can be fabulous for birding in migration. That's the distant downtown Cleveland skyline as we look west from the dike.

Fifty-two people sjowed up at 7:30 for our hike - quite a crowd when you're trying to ferret out furtive fall warblers! All told, several hundred people visited Dike 14 this day, as it isn't normally open to the public, at least not yet. There would have been many more visitors, no doubt, but the skies opened around 9:30 and it really poured. Up until then, it was great and we had a number of warblers and other migrants, some interesting insects, lots of plants, and even a few snakes.

Here's Andy, quizzing folks about a very distinctive set of feathers. We later saw the rest of the bird.

And here it is, a recently perished Northern Flicker, one of the most beautiful woodpeckers in the world, especially up close and personal like this. It's a shame that the flicker met its demise, but it also opened up a great learning opportunity.

The specimen was fresh enough that Andy could easily unfurl the flicker's remarkable tongue, which puts even Gene Simmons to shame. Woodpeckers have what is essentially a spool that the they wind their tongue around, as said tongue can extend several times the length of their long, chisel-like bills.

The tip of a woodpecker tongue is armed with small barbules, or little prongs, although they don't show up in this photo. This adaptation allows the bird to rapidly flick its tongue into deep crevices and snare small insects, then rapidly pull them back into their mouth. Flickers are often seen on the ground, as they are inveterate ant hunters. One specimen which was dissected had about 5,000 ants in its stomach! A long barbed tongue is a huge asset if you are a bird that wants to lap up massive numbers of ants.

Thanks to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Dike 14 Committee, and Ohio State Parks for making these events possible.