A Mission of Mercy to Save Nation’s Wetlands

Thanks to several kind and helpful readers, I’ve learned more about wetlands during this last week than I knew questions to ask about them.

A former marine biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game, John F. Janssen of Stanton, has corroborated the estimate quoted in last week’s column that we have lost the greater part of the important wetlands.

“We have lost over 80% of our California wetlands. I think the figure is closer to 90%.”

Janssen presented me with a copy of “The Nature Conservancy News,” a publication of the Nature Conservancy, headquartered in Arlington, Va. It boggled me to read what this nonprofit, tax-exempt organization had accomplished since its incorporation in 1951.

To date, the conservancy and its members have been responsible for the protection of 2,649,390 acres in 50 states, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean. The conservancy owns and manages some 900 preserves--the largest privately owned nature preserve system in the world!

It seems, judging from the conservancy’s wetlands report, that the preservation of wetlands is a top-priority project. Over the last eight years, the Richard King Mellon Foundation has approved grants of more than $100 million for conservation, and almost all of these funds have been designated for the protection of our nation’s wetlands. In the beginning, $25 million was given to the conservancy’s National Wetlands Conservation Project, with the understanding that the conservancy would raise at least $50 million. The conservancy has succeeded in raising more than $86 million toward the Mellon match and has protected a number of America’s most significant and most beleaguered aquatic systems.

These include the Chimon Island coastal refuge off the Connecticut shore, a significant heronry; a Sandusky Bay wetlands system of Lake Erie; the Platte River Whooping Crane Critical Habitat Refuge in Nebraska; the Peach Point, Tex., wildlife management area, an annual wintering site for some 60,000 Canada geese, and crucial wetlands habitats in four prime “pothole” states--Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota--where 80% of all ducks on the Great Plains breed.

Why all this trouble and expense, you may well ask, to save these damp, mucky, watery places?

Thanks to information from Lorraine Faber of Westminster, I am able to answer this:

In our own remaining tidal wetlands of Southern California, the ebb and flow of tidal water carries plankton from the marsh throughout the estuary. The organic food material supports clams, oysters and other plankton feeders and thereby is basic energy of the food chain. The decomposition of plant matter from the marsh areas releases minerals to be recycled through the food chain for fish and wildlife alike.

For example, 61 species of fish have been recorded as spending some part of their life cycle in Upper Newport Bay. Many of these species are the sources of extensive commercial and sport fisheries. These include croaker, corbina, white sea bass, starry flounder, sea and surf perch, Pacific herring, smelt and sole.

As for birds, San Diego Bay and marshlands provide yearlong seasonal habitat requirements for about 180 species of birds. South San Diego Bay is the only known U.S. nesting site of the threatened elegant tern. About 160 species are resident or regular visitors to Upper Newport and adjacent uplands. Alas, San Diego Bay’s marshlands have been reduced by development by 85%. Upper Newport Bay, thanks to the untiring efforts of the Friends of Newport Bay, has been made a protected enclave in the midst of burgeoning urbanization. The surrounding development endangers the bay with pollution and silting. Bolsa Chica marsh east of Huntington Beach has been preserved to a large extent by efforts of Amigos de Bolsa Chica, although its existing integrity may be threatened by pending development.

I shall now leave it to John Madson, a wildlife biologist writing in “The Nature Conservancy News,” to sum up the importance of our national wetlands.

“A resource economist can make a good case for native wetlands by pointing out their value as natural filters for water systems, as maintainers of critical water systems, as maintainers of critical water tables. . . . A biologist, meanwhile, might defend North American wetlands for the millions of ducks, geese and furbearers produced there or as estuarine spawning and rearing areas for commercial fisheries. . . . Beyond the numbers and dollar values is the character of wetlands and their essential value as places. “

Madson, who has spent a lifetime in these places, expresses his love for their beauty and diversity of life, especially when their diversity is compared to the homogeneity of surrounding tamelands. Wetlands, he says, are the best of wild places, “as unique and special as any alpine meadow or grove of sequoias.”

“In the world of biology, as in the world of finance, such diversity is our only hedge against unknown and future risks.”

When the last prairie pothole has been put to wheat, when the last tidelands marsh has been filled for development or readied for a marina, our wild original wetlands will have been lost forever.

Madson observes chillingly that these places cannot be recalled from computer banks, and no spacecraft can take us to where they have gone.