Christmas Trees Repurposed as Fish Habitat

Sometimes you have to dig deep within yourself to come up with a blog post, but on other times, it just bubbles to the surface. Last week we received an email from the Deer Creek Watershed Alliance (DCWA), a project of the Missouri Botanical Gardens. It explained the progress made on the ratification of the Deer Creek watershed management plan and something dearer to my heart, lots of maps.

Studying these maps, it turns out that the open storm sewer that flows through the neighborhood actually has a name, Claytonia Creek. One of the activities of the DCWA is naming all of these once nameless storm sewers within the watershed. The idea is that people might care more about Claytonia Creek than some nameless storm sewer.

One of the maps shows that our storm sewers are combined with the sanitary sewers. This is a product of the history of our subdivision. Our house was built-in the 1930s, so the streets and the sewers must have been laid out then or earlier. That’s the way they built back then. This means that the metropolitan sewer district must treat both our sewer water and our rain runoff. Most of the city of Saint Louis is like this too, heavy rains, result in sewage spills.

Anne and Joanie drove up north to the Riverlands, along the Mississippi, today, to look for eagles. They saw Bald Eagles, Trumpeter Swans, Canada Geese, Mallards, Golden Eyes, seagulls, a Great Blue Heron and a Kestral. I elected to bicycle in the park instead. I got 15 miles. I took the picture with this post. It shows Christmas trees that have been repurposed as fish habitat in Jefferson Lake. The park is outside the Deer Creek watershed. It is part of the River Des Peres watershed, which Deer Creek is a tributary of. For those of you planning to paddle to the sea, the route runs Deer Creek, River Des Peres, the Mississippi, to the sea.