Place entry #6: There's something in the water

I had wanted to write this place entry yesterday (Friday), but something was troubling me about Nine Mile Run. There was something in the water, and I couldn't quite tell what it was. The creek had taken on a milky blue-green hue that I hadn't yet seen, and I couldn't figure out what was causing it. At first, I thought it might have been some kind of oil or petroleum product that had been washed from the watershed from the past day or two of light rains, but it didn't have an odor and there was no oily light refraction on the surface. The only other times I've seen waters naturally look like this have been after the glacier and winter snow melts in the Rockies. Mountain glacial ice often has the same blueish hue from trapped minerals, and when they melt at the start of Spring, those minerals are washed into the rivers, turning them cloudy and bluish-green. But this is Pittsburgh - a land not known for its vast fields of glacial ice. So when I was stream-side yesterday, I was at a loss as to just what was happening to the creek.

NMR on Firday near South Braddock Ave, close to where it leaves its underground tunnel.

We haven't seen more than a scattering of snow for the past several weeks, and there hasn't been enough rain to cause a heavy runoff for about a month. The waters are back down in the creek, but they're cloudier than they were even a week ago when the runoff was in full swing. I did notice that much of the surrounding hillside - at least the parts that were exposed enough to examine - had the same steely blue-green tint. Shale, I think. 

Right behind where the previous photo was taken.

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, NMR only runs above ground for a little over two miles from South Braddock Avenue down to the Monongahela River. Prior to that, the stream is housed by a tunnel that runs under the borough of Edgewood. I'm not sure where the headwaters are, but I am fairly certain that most of NMR is housed in that tunnel. If most of the ground around here is that blueish shale, and most of NMR runs through a tunnel dug under Edgewood, then perhaps the saturated ground was leeching minerals into the creek. Then again, the ground has been saturated for weeks, and the runoff was never this cloudy. With all my clever postulations, I'm no closer to understanding what's happening in the waters. I decided I would go back there again this afternoon to see if anything has changed. In the past 24 hours, ain't a single thing changed with the waters.

NMR today, still looking the same.

But ah! the sun today! The past few days have been the first real taste of Spring, and the animal presence in the park is the loudest and most active yet this year. On my excursion yesterday, I heard a raucous chattering in the central span of marsh and reeds the lies a few yards in from the creek. It wasn't nesting birds - it was coming from the reeds, and the ground was too wet for ground-nesting birds. It nearly sounds like the chatter of birds Could they bee tree frogs? Some species of chorus frog or the northern cricket frog? Whatever they were, they must have just hatched in the past day or two. Going back today, I could still hear them in the same little marsh. I was tempted to sneak into the reeds and try to spot one, but I held myself back. As much as I was curious to see just what was out there, I had to remind myself that I didn't have a place in the marsh, and no matter how careful I was, I could still spook the frogs and disturb their ecosystem, the world into which they were just recently born. The best I could do was shoot a quick video to record their chatterings and give some idea of the marshland where they've suddenly come to life. Squatting at the edge of the established trail, I squinted into the reeds and grasses in a vain attempt to spot some kind of movement to pair up with the sounds, but all I saw were grasses bending in the wind and a single robin hopping in the mud, picking something or other out of the ground and hopping away. 

(A word of advice - you may want to turn up your volume in order to hear the frogs.)