Articles

Even the Smallest Places Have Value

Timothy A. Snyder
Ohio Division of Natural Areas and Preserves

It didn’t look like much, a narrow strip of bumpy dead grass on the shores of an ice-covered lake.

What were we doing out there, braving the chills of January?

Nothing much, really. Just trying to save one of the last remnants of the real Ohio, that’s all.

You see, the clumps of "grass" are actually sedges, some of them rare in the state; and the narrow strip of wet land is almost all that remains of the wetland that once filled the headwater valley of Mosquito Creek in Champaign County.

This is no ordinary wetland. It is a fen, an alkaline wetland fed by ground water seeping out of calcareous gravel left behind by the last glacier.

The plant community it supports is also a glacial relic. It thrived on waterlogged ground in front of the advancing ice and did even better in the icy floods released as the glacier melted. When the ice was gone, this northern community managed to hold on where hard-water springs chilled the ground and recreated, on a much smaller scale, the conditions that had once been found at the edge of the ice sheet.

The fen where we were working was originally part of a much larger wetland mosaic of march, swamp and wet prairie that filled a trough cut through the Farmersville Moraine by a stream of meltwater coming from the retreating glacier. When the ice retreated, the meltwater stream vanished, leaving behind its gravel-bottomed bed and the steep slopes of the valley it had carved. There is not much slope to the floor of the trough, however, so little, in fact, that both Mosquito Creek and Nettle Creek head near where we worked, but flow in opposite directions. The cold, calcareous ground water coming out of the valley slopes was not encouraged to move on very fast, so it pooled, saturating the ground and creating the conditions needed for wetlands.

In 1939 a dam was built across Mosquito Creek on land donated by the Kiser family and Kiser Lake State Park was born. Some of the ancient wetland had long since been drained and farmed or pastured, and much of what was left was drowned by the rising waters of Kiser Lake.

A remnant above the reach of the lake and the small strip along its shore are all that remain.

Here Shrubby Cinquefoil and Kalm’s Lobelia, plants that trace their occupancy of this site back to a time before any man walked it, can still be found. Here still rings an echo of the Ice Age. They are small, these remnants -- only a few acres broad -- but their importance cannot be measured by their size. Neither can it be determined by humanity’s skewed definition of "useful."

To the plants and animals that depend on these slivers of wilderness, they are priceless.

The winter-browned plants covering the ground beneath our feet are only the most recent manifestation of a history extending beyond comprehension enshrined within the black muck.

For those with eyes to see and a mind to understand, this tiny, bedraggled-looking sliver of land is worth more than all the houses clustered on the heights above, more than the lake lapping on its shore, more than the acres of farmland rolling away to the horizon. These you find everywhere in mind-boggling quantity.

But a fen -- ah, you have to be fortunate indeed to walk in one of these.

Although the lake section of Kiser Lake Wetlands State Nature Preserve requires a permit for access, the headlands section is open to the public and can be reached by a trail and boardwalk at the upper end of Kiser Lake within Kiser Lake State Park.