Flood plain offers waters chance to calm
- John Lorson: The Rail Trail Naturalist
- March 15, 2022
- 741
Long on both function and beauty, a harvested cornfield — situated within a flood plain recently inundated by a combination of snow melt and heavy rains — froze in the overnight when temperatures plummeted into the teens. As waters below the thin skim of ice receded, the surface took on the look of waves crashing against the shore.
A few weeks back, I wrote about my dog digging up a dead fish in the middle of a snow-covered cornfield. While I’m almost certain I’ll never learn the curious circumstances that placed the fish there in the first place, I was able to rule out the possibility that the bluegill had arrived there under its own power. The field sat high and dry. Had that not been the case, the mystery may have been easily solved.
If the weather events of the past several weeks have proven anything, it might be the likelihood of finding a fish in a field is on an upward trend. I’ve seen water in places I’ve rarely seen it before, and darn near all of it was connected to the channel of a full and angry stream running through the bottom of the flood plain.
Simply put, a flood plain is a low-lying area adjacent to a river or stream that is prone to flooding. If you dig a little deeper — and I mean literally dig — you’ll likely find sediments of silt and gravel throughout that have been deposited, one on another, over the course of thousands of years of high-water events. If you’ve traveled anywhere within our region recently, you’ve witnessed area flood plains mapped in real time. Don’t blame the stream; it’s just doing what comes naturally.
In a natural, undeveloped circumstance, high water in the flood plain is a critical giver of life to a whole multitude of flora and fauna. When a stream tops its banks, it only stands to reason that the things that normally live within the confines of its corridor can travel right along with the spreading flood waters. Seasonal high water spreads soil, seeds and all sorts of organic material across the plain. As waters recede, those passengers, along with a mind-boggling list of fish, amphibians, reptiles and insects that have hitched a ride on the tide, are gently deposited into new and fertile territory. Watch for vast blooms of wildflowers this spring in the very spots that stand inundated today.
Puddles left behind as the world warms in the springtime become tiny ecosystems unto themselves known as vernal pools — critical breeding habitat for toads, salamanders and various other creepy-crawlies. Many a wood duck family has taken advantage of the bounty offered by these seasonal wet spots, networks of which often dot the forested lowlands adjoining streams.
In the developed world, folks often lose sight of the benefits of the flood plain. Beyond biology, the flood plain acts as a calming mechanism to a hydrologic event run wild. Velocity means power, and left unchecked, that power rips soil from banks, weakens root structures of stream-side trees and eventually leads to the loss of those same trees into the stream channel, creating even more problems.
Water that spreads across a vast, flat landscape loses its velocity and drops out suspended sediments, pollutants and trash that it has picked up along the way. Slow-moving water does considerably less damage than an overload of water forced to flow through the narrow banks of a stream or river.
While property owners sometimes decry regulations that keep folks from building whatever they like, however they wish, in an area mapped as a flood plain, events like our recent late-winter flooding should remind everyone of the critical importance of heeding nature’s lessons and working with rather than against natural systems.
Remember, if you have comments on this column or questions about the natural world, write The Rail Trail Naturalist, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email jlorson@alonovus.com. You also can follow along on Instagram @railtrailnaturalist.