The mergansers of Appalachia
Ohio and other states are now home to these elegant diving ducks.
Editor’s note: There’s been some good news for Piping Plovers in Illinois during the last 72 hours—broods have hatched in Chicago and Waukegan. We’ll have a full account at the next opportunity. Two accounts to check out—Chicago Piping Plovers and Lake County Audubon Society. Thank you for your patience.
Southern Ohio never has been a trifling place. Two hundred forty-eight million years ago this plateau thrust upward from the continent surrounding it. The land’s been in a state of constant erosion ever since, wearing down the sandstone and shale all the way to the Ohio River. What’s left is a tangled web of hollows and steep ravines that spider down from around I-70. There is hardly a flat piece of land for thousands of square miles. It hearkens to the old saying about nearby West Virginia, that a cow would need two legs shorter than the others to graze on the steep land.
The terrain of the Allegheny Plateau alone is forbidding. A flood or a landslide could wash out a road for months. Electricity, fuel, water, let alone broadband and cell service, are never taken for granted. Bobcats, coyotes, snakes, occasional black bears and spiders the size of beer coasters are the norm.
In all my time visiting southern Ohio, one thing I’d never seen in the creeks was any type of waterfowl. Sure there were phoebes, grouse, and wrens. But the runs and rills were just too narrow for water birds.
That’s why it was so surprising when my traveling companions and I happened on a duck one June. At first I assumed it was a Mallard, but then it stunningly turned out to be a Common Merganser, a sleek diving duck of rivers and big lakes. Soon we saw that it was not only a merganser, but a mother with four extremely skittish young ones. As they hid out in the creekside brush, the thought occurred that maybe we were the first humans who’d even come this way in the calendar year. It’s a place that really is that remote.
It turns out that Common Merganser nesting is becoming more common in Ohio, though the number of sites harboring them is probably fewer than a dozen. It’s astonishing to this son of the Buckeye State. My old Peterson guide barely shows the birds’ range touching the eastern United States. In my mind, these birds have always been ducks of the far north, places like Cass Lake, Minnesota, and points in the Canadian boreal.
Common Mergansers are cavity nesters, taking advantage of woodpecker holes that are sometimes as high as 100 feet above the ground. They eat mostly fish but also aquatic invertebrates like mollusks, crustaceans, and worms. No doubt the many crayfish in southern Ohio’s creeks provide a source of food also.
What is going on with this range expansion is a bit of a puzzle. Mergansers now nest in places like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia also. They are finding what they need in these remote Appalachian riparian areas. Some speculate that healthier forests have created healthier waterways. Nest boxes have been placed in some locations. It’s also likely that mergs were once more plentiful in the eastern United States before European settlement. Ducks have always been popular on the dinner table; it’s possible the birds in the mountain waterways were relatively accessible going back centuries and hence vulnerable to population loss.
I think of Common Mergansers often in wintertime, when they’re seen in the Chicago area on icy large lakes and rivers. Southern Ohio is like a steamy rainforest in summer, the trees so tall and dense that sunlight hardly reaches the forest floor. To think that mergansers are breeding at a latitude south of us in those rugged woodlands is still hard to fathom.
The epochs of erosion there have worn away at the plateau and left strata of coal, sandstone and shale. There’s a seemingly endless number of hollows, lined with big ferns, hemlocks and giant oaks. And now there are Common Mergansers, too. And their expansion into Appalachia is something to celebrate.
Festival’s departure frees up park for fall migration
I wrote a piece last year, “The problem with mega-events,” that highlighted the massive environmental impact of festivals like Riot Fest and Lollapalooza. As someone who’s attended these events—and enjoyed them—I acknowledge having been ambivalent about the situation. What put me over the edge was Chicago’s downtown NASCAR race—and the inexorable march of time. I’m just a lot less interested in standing in the heat for hours with few amenities and 100,000 of my closest friends. I’d rather stay home and meditate and drink herbal tea.
A major domino fell when Riot Fest announced earlier this month that it would finally be moving out of historic Douglass Park and to a stadium in the suburbs. Area residents and advocacy groups had enough of the event, and maybe the Park District did, too, if you believe the festival organizers. Douglass Park has seen more than 200 bird species through the years, and certainly many will be delighting in the fact that the festival is gone this September.
It seems that whatever the city was receiving in return for hosting Riot Fest couldn’t have been worth the disruptions brought on by throngs of people, bright lights, thundering speakers, and trampled vegetation. Communities still recovering from actual riots that took place in the 1960s are calling the fest’s departure “a win.” I’m sure the birds that utilize the park during fall migration would agree.
Everything you wrote was fascinating and uplifting today!