Biologist paddles urban streams, finds ‘amazing’ wildlife diversity
PERRY BEEMAN Jun 7, 2016 | 8:52 pm
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Consultant and kayaker-biologist-ecologist Jim Pease spent much of last summer padding 1,400 miles of streams around Iowa, including 150 miles in Polk County, where the Des Moines Area Metropolitan Planning Organization is finishing a big report on how to make it easier for people to have fun along the area’s rivers and creeks.
Pease’s observations will be part of that document.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of his trek: Iowa has more wildlife diversity than he expected. The sightings in the cities, including Des Moines, were particularly uplifting, said Pease, who is a retired associate professor of all things wildlife at Iowa State University.
“It’s an amazing amount of diversity,” Pease said.
Along the way, he saw eagles, turtles, water snakes, deer — and a fair amount of evidence that Iowa needs to clean up its act on water quality.
Pease was somewhat surprised, in Central Iowa and beyond, at how much wildlife called the urban areas home. There were beaver tracks “everywhere.” Deer at the water’s edge. Three species of turtles. Cliff swallows nesting under bridges. Blue herons.
And eagles. Pease recalled that when the eagles began coming back from DDT in the late ’70s, he figured Iowa would be lucky to have a few nests. He expected to find eagles along the Mississippi River and almost nowhere else in Iowa. “We have more than 300 nests now, all over the state,” he said.
Rivers have become more important as other habitat disappeared. Some farmers removed fence rows from crop fields and plowed grasslands. Park workers sometimes have mowed to the water’s edge — a practice that Pease considers misguided.
But the loss of other habitat makes protecting the rivers more important, he added.
Rivers are the last sort of vestige of wild habitat left,” Pease said. “They are the most continuous habitat we have left in the state.”
The wider the swath of grass, or woodlands, the more wildlife, Pease found.
“I think the populations were higher than I expected,” he said. “It depended on the width of the buffer or woodland around them.”
Work left to do
Pease suggested that Iowa may someday decide that voluntary measures aren’t enough to solve the state’s considerable water quality issues — problems he could see by observing excess algae and other problems while he was kayaking. That may mean regulation — perhaps focusing on requiring buffer strips or other conservation practices, he said.
“If the voluntary methods don’t work, I think society will impose regulations, as it did with DDT,” the eagle-harming pesticide that was banned. “Eventually, those regulations will be accepted as the right thing to do. But many people will be unhappy at first.”
Pease said buffer strips would help, but drainage systems in farms eventually will have to be addressed, too. That most likely means that the water will have to be run through wetlands or bioreactors, which use buried wood chips to help break down contaminants, he said.
Pease to speak in West Des Moines
Pease will give a presentation on his paddling trips at 7 p.m. June 14 at the Raccoon River Nature Lodge in West Des Moines.
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