What's Wrong With The River?
(River • Ecology)
It started last Wednesday with the turkey vultures.
Normally you might see a couple of pairs scouting for roadkill together. But here were a dozen roosting in a neighbor’s cottonwood tree. The next day there were 30.
Taking the kids to school on Friday, I glanced over at the trees between the city park a few houses down from ours and the river, and had to stop.
There had to be at least 200 buzzards in those trees.
On Friday evening we went down to the Brazos and noticed the water seemed fairly clear. Vultures were circling overhead in groups of 50 or so here, 50 a mile up in the sky, 50 downwind to the east. A lone dead catfish bobbed in the water at the foot of a willow.
By Saturday morning the water had turned noticeably green, and a large dead carp had washed two feet up a shallow bank, in a place that is normally about three feet under water. The river has been low for months, and water volume is way down.
This morning the water was noticeably greener than on Saturday, and I found two more dead catfish, another large dead carp and a dead drum within 20 yards of each other. Vultures had landed on a sandbar and were snacking on something that was probably disgusting.
At work for FortBendNow I found a local game warden who confirmed that golden algae has finally moved down river from the Waco-area reservoirs and, under ideal weather and dead-water conditions, is busy replacing oxygen with toxins that kill fish.
Golden algae likes sunny days, cool nights and fairly salty “fresh” water. The game warden told me the flow in the Brazos has pretty much been reduced to what’s coming out of water treatment plants – high-nitrogen, low oxygen “dead” water.
It’s just a theory, but I wonder if golden algae isn’t an environmental indicator, and hasn’t become more and more prevalent since the 1980s as the population increases around the Brazos and the water quality slides. Farm chemicals and cow poop in north Texas, salt and silt from sand and gravel operations in its mid section and more of both here in the lower Brazos basin probably will contribute to an increasingly polluted and lifeless river absent some quick and herculean environmental efforts, which I don’t see emanating from the likes of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality any decade soon.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 02, 2009, 08 15 pm
I don’t know, because I am not sure precisely where you are on the river. It is possible that salt water has made it that far up-river. I know that we have what the water department guys call the “salt water plug” in times of low water/drought that progresses up the river, causing them to change the source of their potable water intake. I know guys are catching redfish – bit ones – farther up the river than they ever have before.
The runoff and thus algae bloom is probably more likely correct.
I guess you could test it for salt content – it would be on the bottom, more dense than fresh.
— jdallen Feb 3, 05:51 am #
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Thank God for the vultures! Ugly suckers though they are – can you even imagine the stink that fish kill would cause without them to clean up the mess?
I have no idea if this is true, but my Grandpa used to tell me that elephant and vulture poop were the two best fertilizers in the world. Being a lifelong Democrat, I suspect he was just making up the elephant part.
— Susan Bankston Feb 3, 12:14 pm #
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From what I’m hearing it sounds like the increased salt content comes as a result of sediment dissolving instead of being swept away in the current as is usually the case when the river is running normally.
It might be worth having salty water if the redfish would come up this far, but I’m all the way in Richmond, which is a long trip for them.
Susan, I don’t care how good a fertilizer vulture poop is, you’re not going to catch me outside with a trowel and a bucket trying to collect it.
I just hope they don’t take up permanent residence and start crapping down the sides of our pecan trees.
I went out under the carport to get the garbage cans and take them out to the curb this morning before sun-up. Two vultures had been roosting just over my head in a pecan that grows out of the middle of our drive in the back. They made me jump a foot; it sounded like Batman taking off.
— Bob Feb 3, 01:55 pm #
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