Those who drive by the end of Morris Road on Bethlehem Pike in Fort Washington in Montgomery County have probably asked that question time and time again. The answer is fairly simple.

 

Two years ago, the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association (WVWA) created a new wetland on that site. Our goal was to reduce the amount of stormwater runoff and sediment washing into the Sandy Run and Wissahickon Creek, and to reduce flooding at that site during extreme storm events.

 

With major funding from the Growing Greener program and help from the Environmental Protection Agency and PECO/Exelon, WVWA turned a soggy, unusable baseball field into a small wonder, providing plants and a wetland setting to support a whole range of insects, amphibians, reptiles and mammals.

 

The miracle begins with insects. Many people mistakenly believe that wetlands are huge breeding places for mosquitoes. This is only true if you constantly inject the site with chemicals in an attempt to control the insects. If you plant the right species of plants, you will attract predator insects and animals that will eat the mosquito larvae as they lie in the water. The few that hatch will be picked off by the many species of birds who are attracted to this setting.

 

Frogs also love these places. The plants give them a place to hide, reproduce and hatch their eggs. The small pools, called vernal pools because they often are only wet during the spring months, provide a nursery for tadpoles to grow in where they are safe from the fish that would eat them if they were in a stream. The second summer after WVWA installed the wetland, our vernal pools were swarming with tadpoles. What do they love to eat? Mosquito larva, of course, but they eat many other insects as well when they grow up and become frogs.

 

Plants, frogs and insects bring the birds. Kingfishers, redwing blackbirds, mallards and great blue herons love these places for the safe refuge and food they provide. Unfortunately, so do the Canada geese, which have become so overabundant that they are a problem, destroying the wetland plants that are necessary for food and habitat for all the other wetland animals. They also pollute the Sandy Run with their droppings.

 

Which brings us to the string. WVWA spent many hours stringing that strange-looking net of white twine over the whole project to keep the geese out. Geese hate taking off and landing through that web of stuff, and most of them just go somewhere else. Every so often a few intrepid geese manage to get in there, and others soon follow. So, if you see some guy in there waving his arms and chasing the geese out, that would be one of WVWA’s staffers enforcing the goose ban. In a few years, when the wetland plants have matured in their tall, bushy form, the geese won’t want to go in there because they can’t watch for predators with all that stuff in the way. We will take the string down then, and have a truly natural-looking restored wetland.

 

What was once an unusable field, nearly empty of life, will be a green gem, noisy with life, birds swooping through it as they search for their next snack. The wetland will catch and hold storm runoff, and in extreme events, floodwaters. This will improve water quality in the nearby Sandy Run and lower the level of flooding in the Wissahickon, which the Sandy Run empties into a short distance from the wetland.

 

So this summer when you drive by, take a minute to pull off and visit. Walk down to the edge of the original project and listen. You’ll hear and see the buzz of life. Then walk ten feet away into the lawn area and see what you hear. Not much of anything going on there.

 

Think about what that means, and what it’s worth to the animals, to our health and our watershed. We hope you’ll agree that this project is a great step towards restoring ecological function to our community.

 

Robert B. Adams is Director of Stewardship at the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association.