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With a square kilometer of biologically rich land in the heart of Georgia's Piedmont,
Shoal Creek Sanctuary is a showcase of ecological succession and recovery.
It supports science, conservation, environmental education, and recreation.
Our focus is to find ways to better understand nature and manage land wisely.
Here we give an overview of the sanctuary, our challenges, methods, and key findings.
We invite you to come to study, learn from, and enjoy the sanctuary's richness, peace and beauty.
Please join us remotely with Listen,
our means to understand what is driving insect and bird declines across the continent.
This is a long document. It includes sections on
- controlling invasive privet and irises successfully without herbicides,
- the increase in our moths, beetles, and caddisflies over the past decade,
- determining what is causing the loss of birds and bees elsewhere across the continent,
- and, our future plans for the Polistes Foundation, Discover Life, and the sanctuary.
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The sanctuary stretches over a kilometer from Blue Heron Pond in the foreground
to the powerline and housing subdivisions beyond. The buildings on the horizon are of the University of Georgia
and downtown Athens.
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Sad History, Bright Future
Based on pottery shards found in Shoal Creek, we know that Lamar Period Mississippian
agricultural societies farmed the land between about A.D. 1350 to 1600.
By the time the English colony of Georgia was established in 1733, the region was in the territory of Muskogee,
homeland of the confederated Muskogee/Creek people.
They held the upper river forks of the Oconee basin with the highest regard,
designating it as Ekun-uchaku, Beloved Land. Following the American Revolution,
the State of Georgia granted land certificates to veterans of the war, and by 1784 surveys were begun along Shoal Creek.
The Creek Nation protested these trespasses, urging the state to end surveys in the Forks.
Georgia refused to stop them, setting the stage for a tragic 10 year land struggle called the Oconee War.
It took sustained federal intervention under the Washington Administration to bring the war to a close in 1796.
By then, power was ebbing in Native America. In the decades to come another war, growing poverty and fraud
paved the way for the gunpoint eviction of both the Creek and Cherokee people from their homelands
along a trail of blood and tears. Along with other American Indian nations, they were forced into the territory
of Oklahoma where many of their descendants live today.
The white landowners, exploiting slaves and later prison labor, cleared the forest and grew cotton on it for over a century.
Except in a few small areas where it is too rocky or steep to plow, this farming caused massive soil erosion.
Soil maps of our upland and slopes now show two soil types, 'eroded' and 'severely eroded.'
Our slopes are scarred with terraces. From our high point there are 11 terraces on the slope to our bottomland.
Cotton farming became unprofitable after the boll weevil's arrival in the 1920's.
Aerial photographs taken in 1938, 1951, and more recently, show when cropland was abandoned,
returned to forest, and in some cases harvested. They show how ditches were dug to drain the floodplain;
how Shoal Creek was channelized, straightened and disengaged from its floodplain by a man-made levy, and where
roads were graded and retention ponds built as part of a failed attempt to build a subdivision on the property.
The 2008 housing crash was the turning point that stopped further ecological degradation.
The subdivision developers went bankrupt. Their land defaulted to a bank, which in turn sold it to Mr. K.
In 2015 Mr. K. put it into a conservation easement under the stewardship of the Oconee River Land Trust.
This easement legally protects the land in perpetuity from development and set the stage for its recovery.
In 2019 John Pickering, a retired University of Georgia ecologist, and Stella Guerrero, a high school
science teacher, bought the land. They combined it with their two adjacent lots and founded Shoal Creek Sanctuary.
With community engagement we now intensely manage the sanctaury for its long-term recovery.
Its future is bright. In a couple of centuries it should once again be Ekun-uchaku.
Region, Landscape
The sanctuary is in one of the most biologically diverse regions of the country.
It is in the center of Georgia's Piedmont, sandwiched between the Cumberland Plateau
and the Ridge and Valley mountainous ecoregions to the north and the Coastal Plain to the south.
At the warmer southern end of the geologically ancient Appalachian Mountains,
the region escaped the glaciation of the last iceage, which ended 10,000 years ago,
and is near the heart of the iceage's biological refugium in northern Alabama.
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The sanctuary (yellow) is surrounded by homes (property lines in black) on three sides and Flemmings' family farm (blue) on the other.
The farm adds critical habitat for our wider-ranging otters, coyote, red and gray foxes, and bobcat. The close proximity of Athens is a mixed blessing.
Pesticide use by home owners is a curse, particularly for bees and other pollinators that can forage over several miles.
Conversely, student and community volunteers are essential to our success at controlling invasive plants without herbicides.
For public use outside of deer hunting season, we have a 0.8 mile trail (pink), part of which is along a stream that flows out of our wetland.
It surrounds 12-acre of mature hardwoods for any Last Child in the Woods to explore and enjoy.
The nearest schools are Cedar Shoals High (orange) and Whit Davis Elementary (green).
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Habitats
The sanctuary's habitats are representative of much of the Piedmont.
Its landscape is a mosaic of upland, slope, floodplain and riparian forests
that border Shoal Creek, three streams that flow into it year-round, three permanent ponds,
a wetland, rock outcrops, and open areas along 2.5 miles of unpaved roads and a powerline easement.
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Two key ecological features of the sanctuary are its 0.9 miles of Shoal Creek and the associated floodplain.
The creek's source is near Winterville, over 5 miles to the north.
Its watershed covers a sizeable part of eastern Clarke County. Excluding possible contamination
by pesticide runoff, for which we plan to test, the Environmental Protection Agency rates Shoal Creek's water quality as Good.
This photograph taken on 11 November, 2022, shows a beaver dam below the man-made levy on the left.
Except after heavy rain the levy stops any creek water filtering through the floodplain and recharging the ground water.
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The sanctuary's floodplain is one of the largest in the county. It covers 24 acres. Here it is in flood on 4 January, 2023,
after 5 inches of rain raised the creek level nearly 10 feet. The parallel tops of the breached levies are shown at 6 o'clock,
running downstream towards 10 o'clock.
In the 1938 aerial photographs the floodplain was all open farmland.
The levy on the right was built to reduce its flooding.
By 1951 its northern part was forested, but the southern part shown here was still open.
The flooded canopy trees shown here, largely Tulip Poplar, Sweetgum, and Green Ash, are younger than ones in the slope forests on either side.
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We are restoring the floodplain to regain its former wetland habitat and ecological functions.
We plugged a farm ditch with mud and sand that we took from the man-made levy on 10 March, 2023.
The slowed drainage resulted in the flooding shown below on 2 April, 2023.
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The sanctuary's elevation ranges from the floodplain at 600 ft to the top of a hill that is slightly over 700 ft above sea level.
The above image taken on 27 November, 2021, shows the stratification of three forest types. The trees in the floodplain
have lost their leaves, except for the two large Water Oaks with green leaves on the right. The slope forests
on either side of the floodplain are dominated by oaks and hickories in the full glory of their fall colors.
The upland forest canopy is primarily Loblolly Pine and Sweetgum, which has already dropped its leaves.
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Athens-Clarke County planners categorize areas as legacy forest if they were forest in 1938 and have remained so since.
The above image taken on 26 November, 2021, shows the distinct transitions between the floodplain forest on the left,
part of the legacy oak-hickory stand on Rattlesnake Slope in the center, and upland forest on the upper right.
Rattlesnake Slope faces east. Its legacy stand is nearly half a mile long, totals 13 acres, and is well on its way to ecological recovery.
Its closed canopy has generally protected it from invasive plants that require open sunlit areas to get established.
We cleared it of virtually all of those that did establish,
a notable exception being three Autumn Olives that were protected by the rattlesnake for which the slope is named.
A thick layer of decaying deciduous leaves covers the slope and contributes to the slow process of adding organic matter to its topsoil.
The slope has almost no wildflowers, probably because of heavy herbivory by deer and isolation from seed sources.
We had some success at transplanting a dozen Mayapples to it.
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Shown here on 26 November, 2021, our upland forest will require many years to restore it to the fire-maintained open woodland savanna
that it was before being cleared and put into cotton. The forest that returned after farming was harvested at least once.
Except for Loblolly Pines, that were left as seed trees, and some scattered old oaks, its trees are young, small, and choked together.
Other than sequestering carbon, it is largely an ecological mess full of invasive species, the wrong native species, and nuisance levels of deer.
As a first step in its restoration, we recently cut or pulled most of its reproductive woody invasives.
After we pull its smaller ones and kill any resprouting stumps with a weed burner, we have the land trust's permission to selectively thin trees
and enhance succession towards a community of fire-tolerant species dominated by Post Oak, Southern Red Oak, and Short-leaf Pine.
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Blue Heron Pond shown above on 15 November, 2022, is the sanctuary's largest waterbody.
It was built around 1990 by damming a creek.
Since at least 1995 it has had resident Beavers, which chopped up the Sweetgum
in the foreground. The pond is occasionally visited by members of a wide-ranging, breeding population
of River Otters, which are always a thrill to see, especially with their kits. The pond frequently hosts
Great Blue and Green Herons, Great Egret, Belted Kingfisher,
Wood Duck, and ocasionally Ruddy Duck and Blue-winged Teal. Canada Geese have successfully nested on it.
Laura Naslund, a graduate student in the University of Georgia's Odum School of Ecology, is currently
studying the pond's methane production. We have made considerable progress at replacing dense patches
of invasive Yellow-flag Iris along the banks with native plants. The floating green water meal
is Wolffia columbiana, the smallest flowering plant on earth.
It covers the pond in summer and dies back each winter.
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On the east side of the pond is a small, dense canebreak.
While such canebreaks once covered much of Shoal Creek's watershed,
they were largely cleared over a century ago and are now unusual. We are encouraging their growth
in part because they are native plants that can successfully outcompete
invasive Japanese Stiltgrass, which covers much of our floodplain.
The now possibly extinct Bachman's Warbler may have specialized in habitats
with canebreaks. A long-shot dream is to help give this warbler the habitat that it needs regionally
to be resurrected from "extinction."
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On the west side of the pond is the sanctuary's largest rock outcrop and oldest forest.
Because of the rocks and steep slope, this small area was never plowed. Its soil is rich, not eroded,
and may as a consequence contain unusual, remnant species. The forest is an uneven age stand that
is undergoing gap dynamics, with younger trees replacing older ones that die, fall, and make light gaps.
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Biodiversity Inventory
To help understand and manage the sanctuary's rich diversity, we plan to complete an inventory
of all its species over the next two decades, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 species, including microbes.
So far we have documented over 2,000, mainly vascular plants, lichens, birds, moths, and soil arthropods.
We eventually plan to set up an on-site DNA extraction laboratory that will enable us to broadly document
the sanctaury's prokaryotes and fungi and enable a search of their genomes for novel proteins.
With Brian Wiegmann and other researchers at North Carolina State University, we will also use DNA methods to inventory eukaryotes,
tackling some of the vast diversity of difficult to identify flies as a first step. Eventually we envision using Malaise traps and other methods
to inventory our arthopods and other species more fully.
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The sanctuary has a rich herpetofauna, including many snakes and frogs.
We find Timber Rattlesnakes, Eastern Box Turtles, and a gamut of frogs every year, for example.
The Eastern Newt, the Red Eft terrestrial form of which is picture above, breeds in several
of our ponds. According to Tobias Landberg from the Amphibian Foundation of Atlanta,
who help us survey them, this contrasts with the hundred natural areas within the I-285
beltway around Atlanta, only two of which appear to contain this species based on
their extensive sampling.
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Don't tread on me!
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Lichens are very sensitive to air pollution and their diveristy and abundance are biological indicators of air quality.
The sanctuary has excellent air quality and a profusion of lichens on its trees, rocks, and other substrate,
some of which appear above. Sean Beeching and Malcolm Hodges have documented about half of our estimated 100 lichen species.
Because of the pollution from heavy traffic, Atlanta's lichens have declined precipitously since the end of the Second World War.
We have found that moth species that feed on lichens have also almost completely disappeared in Atlanta. In contrast, lichen moths
are prospering in the sanctuary, totalling about 6% of the moths that we find at our lights.
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These Native Azalea flowers were photographed on 2 April, 2020. This species is one of approximately 350
vascular plants, including non-native ones, that we found in our initial plant surveys of the sanctuary.
Although comparable data are scarce, this richness is undoubtedly lower than what it was before
over a century of intensive farming and now menacingly high herbivory by deer.
Wildflowers and bees in our open areas seem particiularly sparse, as are herbs in the understory.
With help from Heather Alley at Georgia Botanical Garden,
Charlie Logsdon at Roundstone Seed, and Julie Duncan, Cathy Payne, Caroline Deluski, and other
generous wildflower enthusiasts, we have acquired potted plants, seedlings, and seed mixes of over 50 wildflowers and grasses that are native
to Clarke and surrounding counties. I wish our success at establishing them were higher. We will keep trying.
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The success of our inventory depends on experts who can find and identify taxa.
Above on 2 March, 2019, lined up under some now-cut privet, from left to right, are JP Schmidt, Mack Duncan, Steve Bowling, Laura Hall, Julie Duncan,
and Nancy Lowe. They along with Bobby Hattaway and Dan Crescenzo are responsible for our inventory of vascular plants.
We greatly thank them and all the other taxonomic experts who are helping us.
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Understanding the Birds and Bees
The widespread use of dangerous chemicals is a great threat to human health and our environment's wellbeing.
While we worry about the long-term effects of climate change, we are largely ignoring the ongoing toxification
of the planet. Could the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and a degree or two average rise in temperature over the last fifty years
possibly cause human sperm count to drop 60%, cause an 85% decline of insect biomass in German conservation areas, or
cause the loss of nearly 3 billion birds across the United States? Certainly not. Such reasoning is totally implausible. Sound another alarm.
Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring called to task the makers of DDT for its unintended environmental dangers.
The growth of public environmental awareness after her book and the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire led to the
creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972.
Since then our society has become too complacent to the threats now posed by about 85,000 different chemicals, the safety and side-effects of most untested.
The chemical industry learnt from Silent Spring. They are now better at marketing their products as safe, lobbying for fewer regulations,
and convincing government agencies, businesses, land managers, and consumers to use them, sometimes in massive, unwarranted quantities.
Is the chemical industry responsible for us believing that climate change is causing considerable loss of biodiversity
and possibly threatening many species with extinction, when in fact their chemicals are the problem?
Is it too cynical to think that the forces driving us to switch to green energy are the same ones taking the spotlight off those selling us poisons?
The fossil fuel industry may have much to learn from the chemical industry in how to manipulate public policy.
The sanctuary's two daily monitoring programs focus on insects and birds. Their findings contrast
sharply with other studies that report these groups are in distress.
In 2010 Discover Life started an ongoing study to document changes in creatures found
at lights at 275 Blue Heron Drive, a property that is now part of the sanctuary.
With over a decade of nightly samples and half a million photographs,
this may now be the most detailed long-term study of any diverse insect community in the world.
At a nightly level, our data show seasonal and yearly differences in the abundance of over 1,500 insect species,
some of which are shown above.
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In contrast to other sites finding alarming declines in insects, our numbers have increased, as shown in the two figures
above. Comparing 2011, our first year with 365 nightly samples, and 2023, for example, our counts of moths (yellow),
beetles (blue) and caddisflies (orange)
went up over the 12 years by 90%, 293% and 899%, respectively. We use no pesticides. Are the declines reported
elsewhere largely caused by them? It's a parsimonious explanation.
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The White-headed Prominent, Symmerista albifrons, pictured above is in the family Notodontidae.
Its host plants include oaks and beech. The graph of when this moth flies in the sanctuary is below.
It is an example of the detailed nightly data that we are
collecting on each species to analyse how day length, the lunar cycle, and differences in weather patterns across years
affect flight activity. As a proportion of the 399,000 moths that we have identified so far from 4,970 nightly samples,
this prominent ranks 55rd most common of our 1,500 moth taxa. The graph shows when we photographed 1,322 individuals in 2011 through 2023.
This species has two flights per year. The timing of its first flight is more variable than that of the second one in August,
reflecting how winter temperatures largely determine when these moths fly in the spring. Some individuals fly between the two flights,
notably in 2023 when we recorded 9 in and around June.
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In 2022 we started recording sounds each sunrise by our lights.
We use Cornell University's Merlin app to do so. Merlin uses AI to list the bird species
in each recording. With Discover Life's Listen, we upload, tabulate and display these lists,
dropping obvious errors, such as dog barks that the AI occasionally mistakes as an owl.
In tests at our site, Merlin has made lists close to those made by expert human birders.
The icons above are of the 139 birds Merlin identified in over 2,000 recordings totalling 35,000 minutes.
While we do not yet have enough data to compare trends across years, this rich diversity
of species, which includes Piliated Woodpecker and Wild Turkey, both of which breed in the sanctuary,
suggests that the sanctuary is a good place for birds. Is it because our insects
are doing well at feeding the insectivorous ones? We suspect so.
[Click on the image to explore species abundance and seasonal differences.]
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SHIELD -- Understanding Larger Geographic Patterns, Interactions, and Driving Forces
In 2018 three dozen scientists, including EO Wilson, Kama Bawa, and leaders
from the Smithsonian Institution, National Ecological Observation Network, and the Organization of Biological Field Stations,
attended a workshop at Harvard University sponsored by the Polistes Foundation.
They conceptualized SHIELD,
the goal of which is to run standard monitoring protocols across
a continental-wide network of study sites to understand environmental interactions, changes, and threats.
When implemented, SHIELD will measure the importance of variables that drive biodiversity and environmental processes
by analyzing natural experiments in which measured variables differ over time and across sites
(ref Hargrove and Pickering,1992). To measure the importance of drought on insect communities, for example,
SHIELD would statistically compare insects sampled across wet versus dry sites and wet versus dry years.
We do not know what factors are causing the sanctuary's moths, beetles, and caddisflies to prosper
and how these differ from unfavorable ones in places where insects are suffering.
We plan to find out using SHIELD.
By 2025 we will have built and tested methods to study birds and bees
across the United States and Canada. These methods include Listen for birds
and Nest for bees.
We have nearly finished testing Listen.
It is simple enough that Jojo, our 6-year-old grandson,
enjoys using it and has learnt most of our birds in the process.
For Nest, in partnership with Shelby Schulman and alveole.buzz, we will develop inexpensive,
standard methods to sample cavity nesting bees and wasps. Two of Discover Life's bee experts,
Sam Droege and John Ascher, are helping us to build identification guides
for cavity nesting bees that are specific to US states and Canadian providences.
With the help of teachers and bee keepers at Alvéole,
we envision empowering middle school students through retirees to determine where pollinator
communities are healthy, where they have been wiped out, and through SHIELD, why.
Currently Discover Life has 5 virtual servers and 25 terabytes of data in the campus cloud of Sam Houston State University, Texas.
We seek funds to expand this capacity to support up to 50,000 sites reporting high-quality bird and bee data.
There are 3,143 counties in the United States and 298 in Canada. We aim to recruit up to 200 teachers and citizen scientists
per county, thus creating SHIELD's network with the geographic structure and statistical power to answer questions both within and between regions,
and across a spectrum of land uses from urban, to rural, to wildlands.
One of the first tasks for SHIELD will be to address the unintended consequences
for wildlife of spraying naled and other insecticides to control mosquitoes. Naled is a powerful organophosphate insecticide.
It is banned by the EU but is registered for use in the US. According to the EPA it is sprayed over 16 million acres
each year, largely in southern states. For example, after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 the US Air Force, using low-flying C-130's,
and two contractors sprayed 6.8 million acres of east Texas with 101,253 liters of Dibrom® containing naled and 48,735 liters of Duet™
containing 1% prallethrin and 5% sumithrin, two other insecticides. In some years possibly as much as a quarter Florida is sprayed one or more times
for mosquitoes. Other than the impact of naled on uncovered commercial honeybee hives,
little work has been done to document its impact on non-target arthropods, birds, and other wildlife.
Frighteningly, our anecdotal observations in Miami-Dade, Broward, Alachua and Duval counties
suggest that swathes of Florida may now becoming largely devoid of bees, moths and insectivorous songbirds.
Depending on what we find with SHIELD, it may be time to change national policy on the widespread use of broad-spectrum insecticides.
Stopping vectored disease transmission by mosquitoes is critical for public health, but there are better ways
to control mosquitoes without devastating wildlife.
Invasive Species -- Control Without Chemicals
Besides needing legal protection from development and resource extraction, conservation areas must be cleared of aggressive invasive species
or they will be overrun by them. Since 2019 we have found and are tackling 29 species of invasive plants in the sanctuary,
with Chinese Privet, Autumn Olive, and Japanese Stiltgrass being the most widespread and menacing.
We also have four invasive arthropods of major concern, the Emerald Ash Borer, Asian Lady Beetle, Joro Spider, and Imported Fire Ant.
Fearing any unintended consequences to non-target organisms, we do not use any herbicides, insecticides, or other pesticides in the sanctuary.
We rarely even treat our dog, Echo, with drugs that prevent ticks, fleas, and heartworm, because it is known that manure of treated
cattle has wiped out dung beetles in some areas of the US. Instead we are studying our invasives, finding their weaknesses, and testing
different ways to control them.
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Chinese Privet was brought to this continent in 1852 as an ornamental. By the 1930's it had escaped from cultivation in the Southeast.
As the above photograph taken in the sanctuary on 9 May, 2022 shows, privet's floral display can be impressive.
However, it is a major invasive nuisance in many areas, particularly in wetter ones.
On our floodplain it had formed a dense midstory that shaded our native plants.
Our largest privet exceeds a foot in diameter and 50 ft tall. It is a specimen tree which we have kept alive as an educational eye-opener.
Except for the Two-spotted Spider Mite that we have found attacking it, our privet lacks arthropod herbivores.
Thus, it contributes virtually nothing to the foodchain of feeding our birds and other insectivores.
In the image it is noteworthy that there are no bees or other flying insects,
possibly reflecting our perceived sorry state of the sanctuary's pollinators -- a problem we plan to study and must address.
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These aerial photographs are from qPublic.net and were taken when our deciduous trees had dropped their leaves.
In each image Shoal Creek is marked with a blue line. The floodplain is to the left of the creek.
Rattlesnake Slope, a deciduous oak-hickory stand, is to the left of the floodplain.
On the upper, far left are some Loblolly Pines in our upland forest. There is also a dense stand of pines in the lower right.
The dammed end of Blue Heron Pond is in the middle on the right edge.
The green in the 2013 image shows that much of the floodplain was then covered by dense privet trees.
The 2021 photograph shows that we cleared them.
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We have learnt much about controlling privet without herbicides.
Our methods are successful and should work to remove privet elsewhere.
They may be generally applicable to other woody invasives.
We are now testing them on Autumn Olive.
Our methods to control privet in a nutshell:
- We stop reproduction completely in one area before moving on to another.
- We chainsaw larger trees that cannot be uprooted at beaver-height, cutting any basal shoots or ones on the stump at the same time.
There is no need to paint the stumps with herbicide. Most resprout in 6 months but then die within 3 years.
- We learnt the hard way NOT to cut privet at ground level. Doing so increased to over 60% the survival of 2,500 large individuals
that we cut at beaver-height, flagged, let resprout, and then cut again at ground level.
In contrast, with some exceptions, expecially in the wetter parts of the floodplain, virtually all of the ones that we cut just once at beaver-height died.
- Ideally we cut invasives after they flower and before their fruit is ripe, thus draining energy stored in their roots.
- We uproot any that we can pull up in preference to chainsawing them.
- We manually pull smaller plants when the ground is moist. We make repeat passes in subsequent years to get the ones
that we missed. Fortunately, Chinese Privet does not have a seed bank. Its seeds germinate in the first growing season after dispersal.
- We use a propane torch that throws out half a million BTU to target and burn resprouting stumps that we cannot pull. We do so again if necessary.
- And then we're on to Japanese Stiltgrass, which is joining our fun now that it no longer has to compete with midstory privet.
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The above image faces downstream with Shoal Creek on the left, the man-made levy in the center, and the floodplain on the right.
It was taken on 17 January, 2023, two weeks after the floodwater had receeded, depositing the white sand below this breach in the levy.
In the foreground the red dirt is where we dug into the levy, lowering the threshold for future floods to
reengage the creek with its floodplain. The dead stumps on levy and floodplain in the background are privet that we cut approximately 30 months before.
This is the height at which beaver cut privet, causing most to die. We learnt from our beavers.
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Many students, community volunteers, and employees help us to manage the sanctuary.
Here two of Georgia's national champion football team, Jared Wilson and Amarius Mimms, demonstrate how to
wrench out an Autumn Olive root by applying their 640 pounds to the equation. They won. Go Dawgs!
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Volunteers from Terrapin Brewery cross the creek to pull privet on 22 April, 2022.
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Someone actually has to weed the privet. Thank you Ian, Brian, Keira, Jackie, and Tiffany.
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Like privet, Yellow-flag Iris can be both a horticultural beauty and possible invasive nightmare.
Unbeknownst of their danger to aquatic areas, I planted some by Blue Heron Pond in 1996.
I was thrilled when they established and flowered. A decade later I was horrified when they had spread around the
pond. Their dense stands, such as the last remaining one featured above, crowd out native vegetation
with the exception of the cane and woody species.
In 2011 we made a futile attempt with machetes to control their spread.
In 2019 we started again in earnest with this strategy to eradicate them:
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Every year we cut all flowers and seed pods around the pond to stop recruitment,
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then chop off leaves to weaken large plants,
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and finally, a month or so later, dig and pull up any resprouting tubers and small plants.
When we started this endeavor Albert Meier,
the plant ecologist who founded the Green River Preserve in western Kentucky, a director of the Polistes Foundation, and a dear friend,
warned that this was an unwise, impossible task that would consume the rest of my life and ultimately end in failure.
Assuming that I live another couple of years, I will prove Albert wrong. This year we are removing the last of our iris stands.
Over the next two years we will root out any missed stragglers and so completely eradicate the pond's population.
Our success rests in part on the dedication and hard work of our helpers, such as the Rev. Alan Jenkins featured below, having fun doing
some of God's dirty work, in this case, pulling irises from the mud. If this is not for you, the solution is very simple. Plant
native species local to your area. Avoid my mistake. NEVER PLANT EXOTIC SPECIES THAT COULD BECOME INVASIVE.
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Brittany Barnes, Mitchell Green, and Whit Bolado from the University of Georgia's Warnell School of Forestry on 11 April, 2022.
As part of Mitchell's Master's degree, they are trying to establish two species of parasitoid wasps
as biological control agents of Emerald Ash Borer. Their release sites are on our floodplain and at four sites in other north Georgia counties.
Our floodplain has about 100 large Green Ash trees with an incipient attack of these invasive Asian beetles.
With help from our 7 species of woodpeckers, we hope that the wasps will save
at least some of these trees and our White Ash above the floodplain. Note two more dead privet stumps by Brittany's knee.
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Other management issues -- powerline easement, planting natives, deer
The sanctuary has 18 acres of open areas that we are restoring with local native wildflowers and grasses,
making them more friendly for bees and other pollinators. In doing so there are considerable challenges that we must overcome,
some of which are external to the sanctuary and outside of our direct control.
For example, we must work with Georgia Power, which oversees the management of the power easement along our northern border.
We must also engage our neighbors and teach them environmentally sound practices that
are safer for themselves and for the bees, birds, and other wildlife that we share.
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The above photograph taken on 28 February, 2022 faces north. It shows part of the powerline that follows our 1.1 mile border
between the sanctuary on the right and Falling Shoal subdivision on the left.
The seeding Cattails on the left are in a wetland that is fed from the subdivision. It drains under the rutted road through
a colvert into our West-East Creek, which flows into Shoal Creek. The road is part of the 0.8 mile pink trail mapped above.
The powerline easement is an opportunity for Georgia Power, our Falling Shoals neighbors, and us
to restore open habitat and build a wildlife corridor. We plan to sow native seeds and control trees under the powerline with a winter mowing regime
that encourages the reproduction of desirable species. We will neither spray herbicides to kill small trees
nor mow any part of the wetland, as Georgia Power's contractors have done in the past three years. It is easy to control
trees with chainsaws and by uprooting them. There is absolutely no need to kill them with dangerous herbicides.
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The subdivision developers cleared 8 acres of forest along 1.4 miles of roads that they
graded but failed to pave. The above picture taken on 6 May, 2021 is a section of our East Road.
It shows how little plant succession had taken place over the 13 years since the building of the subdivision's
infrastructure ended. Except for some colonizing Loblolly Pines and Sweetgum trees along the road's edges,
there are few plants on the hard-packed, eroding red clay. As a first step in its restoration,
we put a metal plate and built a small dam to divert some of the road's run off into a storm
drain that is near the orange flags on the left.
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Above are Bill and Sammy Pickering on 15 March, 2022 standing around on part of our South Road,
an area that we wish to restore into native wildflowers and grasses.
Our steps are to mow the land, till it, spread compost, till it again, roll it, sow a diverse mix of native seeds,
roll it again, and then wait for nature to take its course.
In this photograph we have mowed and tilled the land and are in the process of spreading compost,
the black patch between the truck and Jeep in the distance.
We thank the Athens-Clarke County Solid Waste Depatment
for its donation of 100 cu yd of compost to the sanctuary.
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Above shows the same area on the South Road on 21 April, 2022 after we had finished
spreading compost, tilling it in, and sowing seeds. The white spots are milkweed seeds
that we added to the seed mix. Unfortunately, presumably because of dry weather in May and June,
virtually none of what we sowed germinated. We'll try again.
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Fawns such as this one are super cute and we would be pleased to have some deer in the sanctuary.
However, our deer population, lacking its larger natural enemies, is way too high. They are
considerably detrimental to many species of desirable plants, some of which are disappearing from the sanctuary.
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Besides Echo shown above, we have about a dozen hunters each year trying to control our deer population. Go Dawgs!
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Safety
Because of hunting and various other dangers, please do not go into the sanctuary without permission.
Amy's Garden is always open to you. It is after the East Gate at the end of Falling Shoals Trail.
If you have permission to enter the sanctuary, ALWAYS WEAR ORANGE during deer season,
which is from early September through the end of January. Do not risk getting shot by
one of our hunters or a poacher.
Outside of hunting season, from February though August, we will soon open for public hiking and discovery the Pink Trail
and the Last Child in the Woods area that it surrounds. We need to put up some trail signs before we do.
Outreach -- learning, volunteering, enjoying
People and knowledge are the critical resources needed to study and conserve nature. Fortunately, we have a wonderful community
of supportive neighbors and are near a major research university that provides much of the expertise that we need.
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We welcome both individuals and groups who wish to come to the sanctuary and participate.
Audrey Hughes is our Outreach Coordinator. Here she is, with the net on the left, teaching a middle school class
the art of mucking about to sample amphibians. Please contact her if you are a teacher or group leader and wish to arrange
for us to host a field trip for your class or organization.
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On 13 March, 2023, the Rev. Alan Jenkins and Georgia Interfaith Power and Light team visited the sanctuary
(from left to right: Alan and GIPL's Joanna, Codi, Jay, dog Echo seeking attention, Hannah, and Tsharre).
We are partnering with GIPL to help religious organizations better steward the Creation.
We will meet with them and 15 religious leaders from Athens on 19 April, 2023, to start our journey together.
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Coriander McGreevy is a senior at Cedar Shoals High School. She has worked with us for two years and is our Youth Leader.
Here she is, not dressed for the prom, enjoying the muddy task of laying rocks in ruts. Echo abounds. Coriander
has entered over 100 bird species into Listen that she recorded at her house with Merlin.
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This is the largest Loblolly Pine on the property, probably dating from around the Civil War and
a parent of some of the seed trees in our upland forest. Vanessa Ponce de Leon is also featured.
She is advising Discover Life on how to build a leadership program called People with a Purpose.
It is modelled after Miss World's Beauty with a Purpose. We intend for it to provide free technology
to help organizations successfully manage and evaluate volunteers working on projects that benefit society
and our environmental wellbeing.
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Periodically we host Sundays in the Sanctuary, guided hikes for the community.
Here is one along our West-East Creek on 12 December, 2021. It is on part of the 0.8 mile trail
mapped above and has the worst of our erosion. Soil washed down the hill and built up the creek bank.
The creek bed is at the same level it was before farming. Most sediment that falls into it eventually
is washed away and ends up on floodplains or in the Atlantic.
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The Future
Shoal Creek Sanctuary is privately owned, legally protected through its conservation easement
overseen by the Oconee River Land Trust, and supported financially through donations made to the Polistes Foundation.
The foundation's mission is to assemble and share knowledge in order to improve education, health,
agriculture, economic development, and conservation throughout the world.
It is starting a capital campaign, Discovering for Life, which if successful will support
Discover Life and Shoal Creek Sanctuary so that both can
expand their programs and continue them into the future.
For Discover Life it is setting up an endowment at Sam Houston
State University to make sure that there is sufficient support
to keep the website running indefinitely. For the sanctuary it plans to
double the amount of land under conservation, build a field
station that will facilitate more intensive study the sanctuary's natural history
and ecological processes, and most importantly, protect our long-term
studies from the whims of the availability of soft money to support them.
In this regard, we need to understand ecological changes and processes over centuries,
not just decades. Governments fail, universities and religions last longer, natural processes remain.
It's time to build a sustainable future.
On at a continental scale we support the concept of Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful,
a federal initiative for a community-led campaign to put 30% of the nation into conservation by 2030
-- a goal known as 30x30. Lessons from the sanctuary may help understand the obstacles that 30x30
must overcome to be a success. We have been struggling for nearly a year with
county planning and tax program constraints to add 6.8 acres that Elizabeth and John Barton have
generously offered to donate to the sanctuary, for instance. We need to change local, state, and federal
regulations rapidly for 30x30 to have any chance of success (by 2050?).
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Meet Sammy Pickering, standing beside a giant Chicken-of-the-Woods, prize breakfast for a month or two.
This edible fungus is growing on a large dead oak log, over two feet in diameter.
Because we have many rotting logs, which we do not salvage, the sanctaury is well endowed
with a diversity of fungi, beetles, and other species that depend on rotting wood. As a delightful sign of
our healthy, mature forest, over 200 uncollected Hercules and Giant Stag Beetles,
both species of which are detritrivores as larvae, have come to our lights.
Regarding Sammy, he graduated with a degree in horticulture from the University of Georgia
and now works as a part-time land steward with the Oconee River Land Trust.
He helps manage the sanctuary, most notably by growing native species on it.
He will manage the sanctuary when his parents move on.
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And then there's Jojo, here planting an Atamasco Lily under the tutelage of Sammy.
We hope that he's interested in continuing in the job when Sammy moves on.
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Contacts:
• John Pickering -- pick@discoverlife.org -- 706-254-7446
• Kevin Weick, Polistes Foundation -- weickkd@gmail.com -- 617-484-6428
• Audrey Hughes, Outreach -- awh1922@gmail.com -- 706-612-6897
Updated: 2 February, 2024
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