THE Oxbow - Honorable battle with the water chestnut

What ho my (three) loyal followers?!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to venture out into the “oxbow” an isolated chunk of the Connecticut River, displaced from its original course through a process of erosion and deposition of river bank sediments. Oxbow is a general term for what happens when a chunk of a river gets cut off from the rest of the river in a certain way. We here in the Pioneer Valley like to think of ourselves as the center of the universe (because we are) so we have THE oxbow which doesn’t have any particular name attached to it. There are in fact other oxbows out there but we don’t talk about them.

The Oxbow has a problem with water chestnut, an Asiatic invasive with pretty white flowers that proliferates throughout waterways and chokes out the local flora. Actually, more than that… river ecology 101 tells me that the water chestnut out-competes local plants absurdly well, with clusters of the weed so dense that no light can get through. Because of the diminished levels of light, photosynthesizing plants can’t work their magic making really hard for fish to survive. Native plants die of shade, fish and invertebrates die because of suffocation and the bacteria levels raise in the water making it all sorts of nasty.
That is where our rockin’ Youth Conservation Corps (YCC)groups come in. I was at the oxbow to chat with some youth and their project leaders, get some pictures and pull up some chestnut. I also had the opportunity to work with our youngest STEP (Student temporary employment program) student who with a little encouragement wrote a fantastic article on the YCC group and the work that they do to protect our waterways.

Also, while you’re at it – check out the new section of the USFWS Northeast region website on “Connecting People With Nature”. I helped design this with a few co-workers of mine and have a few articles up for your viewing pleasure. Here is the link:

http://www.fws.gov/northeast/cpwn/