Bringing Back the Forest With the Trees

MIDDLE ISLAND, W.Va. — From the shade of a 10-by-10 bird-watching shelter, Matt Connolly studies a painter’s palette of plant life: lavender thistle, wheat-colored barnyard grass, rust-red smartweed and snow-white chamomiles sway among various shades of green.

“Yeah, it’s pretty,” he says with a shrug. “And yeah, people like wide-open spaces. But it should be forests.”

Connolly, deputy manager of the Ohio River Islands National Wildlife Refuge, is less interested in protecting what is than restoring what was. Hundreds of years ago, this 235-acre island was covered with trees, their branches heavy with birds.

Today, trees ring only the outer edges of what has become a vast meadow -- land stripped down by a century of farming and a factory that made marbles. Birds still feed on tangles of blackberry and grape vines, but their numbers are fewer and the species have changed.

Connolly and the rest of his U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service staff want to rebuild the forests and lure back the creatures that once thrived. The cerulean warbler with its brilliant blue hues. The prothonotary warbler, feathered in gold, orange and green.

Here, history is the goal.

Middle Island is among 22 islands that, in whole or in part, make up the refuge. Created in 1990, the network encompasses more than 3,200 acres of fish and wildlife habitat in one of the nation’s busiest industrial waterways.

Fish & Wildlife plans to acquire 13 more islands along a 400-mile stretch of the river between Shippingport, Pa., and Maysville, Ky., eventually linking some 12,000 acres of flood-plain forests, wetlands and aquatic habitat.

The latest addition is Fish Creek Island, a forested, 48-acre great blue heron rookery that remains relatively undisturbed. Consol Energy donated the island near Moundsville to the Nature Conservancy, which will turn it over to the refuge.

In the early 1900s, Fish Creek Island was tapped for oil and natural gas. Later, power lines were erected there. Consol bought it in 1956 with coal-mining plans that never materialized.

‘A Natural Fit’

“We felt this was a wonderful thing that Fish & Wildlife was doing, trying to capture all those islands and restore them.... It was a natural fit for us,” says Consol spokesman Joseph Cerenzia.

A total of 193 bird species have been found on the islands, 76 of which breed there. The refuge is also home to 500 plant species, 101 kinds of fish and 42 varieties of mollusk, including the endangered pink mucket and fanshell mussels.

But on many islands, threats abound.

Native plants are choked out by fast-growing invasive species that were brought in to control erosion and then took over.

As many as 40 plants trouble Middle Island, including Japanese knotweed and multiflora rose. Japanese honeysuckle, which starts photosynthesis months before native plants, wraps itself around trees from top to bottom. That makes it hard to destroy one without destroying the other.

The same goes for mussels, which flourish in shallow water and now face a double threat: Vanishing habitat and the prolific, all-consuming zebra mussel, which immigrated to the Ohio by attaching itself to barges and boats.

Native mussels have long been in peril from over-harvesting. Enterprising fishermen sold the meat first, then the shiny interior shell for mother-of-pearl buttons. They crushed what was left to make seed pearls for oysters.

Then the river changed.

Once shallow enough to wade across and navigable only during certain seasons, it’s now 30 feet deep in the channel. Instead of riffles, it is a series of deep lakes controlled by locks and dams.

Before private companies began dredging the Ohio River for sand and gravel, erosion was natural. The foundation of an island gradually washed from head to tail, wearing down at one end, building up at the other and slowly migrating.

Now, the eroded material drifts to a hole in the river. The islands aren’t moving. They are shrinking.

“It’s the case frequently that people’s livelihoods overtake the environment,” Connolly says. “It’s a losing battle unless we can do some kind of protection.”

Short of a ban on dredging, little can be done. Refuge managers could stabilize the islands with riprap, but the large rock would destroy the shallow mussel habitat.

“The islands are going the way of the dodo,” Connolly says. “They’re disappearing.”

Middle is the only island among the 22 that is accessible by car, just a short steel bridge away from the town of St. Marys.

Although the refuge is open to runners, bow hunters, photographers and cyclists, not everyone is a fan.

Trappers and raccoon hunters with packs of dogs are banned. So are all-terrain vehicles. Anglers who once spent their evenings reeling in catfish can no longer come after dark.

“Our refuge has its share of controversy,” Connolly says. “They all do.”

Next year is the centennial of the U.S. refuge system, and Connolly is hoping to obtain extra funding for a special project. He wants to restore a 7- to 10-acre section of wetlands ruined when a farmer installed curved tiles to drain excess water from his crops.

Connolly hopes to locate and pull those tiles, put down a layer of clay, and allow the low-lying area to fill back in and remain flooded year-round. That would allow wetland plants and native frogs to reestablish themselves.

To rebuild the forests, Connolly and his staff collect seeds every fall and ship them to the National Tree Trust, which grows plants over the winter. In the spring, volunteers help plant the seedlings.

Upset by Industry

When he thinks of most coal companies and other extraction-based industries, Connolly grows irritated. Too often, he says, their idea of reclaiming the land is to plant tall grass and argue that it’s for migratory songbirds.

“They say, ‘We’re creating habitat for grassland birds,’ and they are. That’s great, but this is traditionally a habitat for birds that need forests,” he says. “They’re saying, ‘We’re creating biodiversity,’ but that’s not the way the word was intended. If they want to define it that way, well, the San Diego Zoo is the most diverse place on earth.

“This was core habitat for birds like the cerulean warbler. Where is the habitat for them? Who’s creating that?” Connolly asks. “The prairie states need to create more grasslands. We need to create more forests.”