WASTE-WATER TRIBUTARY CREATURES

      For a couple hours one mid-afternoon in June of 2021, I visited a local factory's waste-water outlet that gushes into a clear tributary stream of Mill Creek in farmland a mile outside of New Holland, Pennsylvania.  I do that occasionally to see what aquatic creatures live in that cleaned waste water.     

     Using binoculars, I soon spotted some of those water critters, including bluet and black-winged damselflies, banded killifish, green frogs, a young snapping turtle and a couple of painted turtles.  I also saw a couple of muskrats, and a few types of birds adapted to farmland and streams, including a couple of red-winged blackbirds, a few American goldfinches and a pair of song sparrows.

     Males of the two kinds of damselflies are beautiful perched on tall grasses that hang over the tributary stream.  The bluets are small and thin, but their light-blue coloring is lovely.  Black-winged damselflies, with their four, black wings and iridescent-green abdomens in sunlight, are quite striking perched or flying about.  These insects catch smaller insects in mid-air to eat.  And some individuals of each kind that day were paired to spawn eggs into the little waterway. 

     Little schools of two-inch, pale-brown, striped killifish undulated into the current as they watched for invertebrates to ingest.  I see the shadows of these little fish quicker than I see the fish themselves because of their camouflage above the muddy stream bottom.  These slim fish also hide among the alga, duckweed and other water vegetation in the clear stream.

     I heard, then saw, a half-dozen green frogs sitting, half-hidden and camouflaged, among shoreline aquatic vegetation, and watching for invertebrates to grab with their lengthy tongues.  I'm glad to see those frogs because they have sensitive skins, so their calmly sitting in the water indicates that the waste-water had been treated and was clean as could be, to the credit of that factory.

     Snapping turtles and painted turtles, and northern water snakes, that also live in that little waterway, prey on some of the frogs, and their tadpoles in shallow, shoreline water with little current.  Water snakes are also quick enough to catch some of the killifish.   

     Muskrats live in the burrows they dig into streambanks, with entrances at the normal water level and angling up to the grass roots on the bank.  These handsome rodents eat grass and other kinds of plants.

     The striking red-winged blackbirds raise young in grass nurseries on tall grasses and cattails along waterways and impoundments.  They consume a variety of invertebrates.

     Some of the lovely American goldfinches and song sparrows find food along waterway and impoundment shorelines.  The goldfinches eat alga, while the sparrows consume invertebrates and seeds along the water's edge.  Both species, like all the species along this stream of waste-water, drink that water, seemingly with no ill affect.   

     Some summers, I see one or two striking spotted sandpipers and/or killdeer plovers along this waterway with cleaned-up waste-water in it.  Being birds of inland shores, those species might have raised young along that waterway.  

     It is gratifying to me to see those creatures living in, or by, that waterway with waste-water flowing into it.  The waste-water had been treated enough that it doesn't seem to have any ill affects on the creatures living in it.  And those species of wildlife are adaptable enough to live in less than pristine conditions, which will help them keep their numbers up in ever-expanding, human-made habitats.  These are some of the critters of the future.