Northeast Creek Streamwatch

The City of Durham has drafted a Water Quality Recovery Program Plan for Northeast Creek. The citizen review of this document is September 9, 2009, 6:30 pm at City Hall. Here is the draft document for your review:

Water Quality Recovery Program Plan PDF (27 pp, 568K)

For more information, contact Michelle.Woolfolk), 919-560-4326 ext 30219

In the fall, members of Northeast Creek Streamwatch planted lariape (monkey grass) to slow erosion along the side of a building at Parkwood Elementary school.

Recently, Northeast Creek Streamwatch members, Parkwood Elementary teachers and a a group of first graders worked on erosion control of an area that is next to the water-wise garden and just below the water barrel at the Parkwood Elementary School.

by Michael Pollock

There have been some complaints about the dead trees in the swamps and beaver ponds around Newhall Village and Parkwood. these trees are mostly at a safe distance from yards and are on the public lands administered by the Army Corps of Engineers and the NC Wildlife Commission around Jordan Lake. Even if they could be cut, this would harm wildlife that the community should value.

Redheaded woodpeckers, bold woodpeckers with black and white wings, white bellies, and brilliant red heads, are one of the species most dependent on the snags. They can be seen in other places, but beaver ponds with tall dead trees echo with the trilling calls of redheads. They nest in snags and stuff acorns into cracks for the winter. Pileated woodpeckers, hawk-sized black and white woodpeckers with red crests, live in the deep woods around Northeast Creek and excavate nest holes in dead trees. Other woodpeckers and nuthatches also use snags. Hawks and ospreys build large stick nests in snags. Herons, such as the great blue herons you can see in Parkwood and elsewhere, also nest in snags and tall trees.

Because of the lack old trees and adequately large forests, there are fewer nesting sites for many species. Snags only last so long. The old beaver pond under the large powerline that crosses Grandale once had redheaded woodpeckers, but most of the snags have fallen and it will be decades before the trees are large enough to start the cycle again. Chimney swifts, the small swallow-like birds that twitter high above Durham all day in the summer, originally lived in large hollow trees, but now there are more chimneys than hollow trees, hence the name. Because the swamp is remote, it also shelters native birds from competition with the non-native starlings and house sparrows for scarce hollow trees. Wasps and feral bees make use of hollows and woodpecker cavities, as do hibernating mourning cloaks, question marks, and other butterflies.

Beyond the snags, these swamps are very valuable. In the spring and summer they bring every night with choruses of frogs and toads, including the cowbell-like call of locally rare green treefrogs, slender green frogs with white side stripes. In the fall and winter salamanders lay eggs in fish-free pools. Without the swamps, nearby communities would not have American and Fowler’s toads to control pests. Fish like bowfin, pickerel, and mosquitofish breed in the beaver ponds and control larval mosquitoes, which prefer puddles, not ponds. Raucous blue and white belted kingfishers dive for fish. There are also crayfish, freshwater shrimp, pill clams, dragonflies, and buttonbushes, a swamp flower that abundantly attracts butterflies and moths in midsummer. Fallen trees become natural planters and walkways for wildlife. The bottomlands are habitat for colorful wood ducks, migrating birds, turkeys, woodcocks, beavers, muskrats, foxes, deer, raccoons, opossums, and possibly occasional otters, mink, bobcats, coyotes, aand bears. At night the swamps echo with the calls of barred owls, which nest in hollow trees, as do nocturnal southern flying squirrels.

Snags that threaten homes should be removed, but there is beauty in a snag and a swamp, and they are both home to many beautiful and interesting species that many would be sad to lose.

Northeast Creek Streamwatch has invited other watershed groups in the Triangle to a meeting to discuss the state of the waterways in the Haw River and Upper Neuse River watersheds.

The meeting is at 7 PM in the Durham Department of Solid Waste Management Building, 1833 Camden Ave., Durham, NC (off E. Club Boulevard near I-85).

Five members marked the flame azaleas at the Duke Energy substation near the Triangle Waste Treatment plant. We also picked up a lot of litter on Alston Avenue near the substation. The chair followed up by calling Duke Energy’s right-of-way contact to let him know that the plants had been marked.