NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/1008599
NEBRASKAland Magazine • Nebraska's Saline Wetlands I t is just before dawn in Nebraska's eastern saline wetlands. You sit quietly on the edge of a salt marsh – a nearly level pan of sparse vegetation and mud. Just in front of you water laps in rhythmic beats at the shoreline. On the opposite shore, the growing light gently begins to fill in the dark spaces, giving definition to the dusky shapes that have been murmuring in the distance. They are a mixed flock of shorebirds and waterfowl on migration – lesser yellowlegs, Baird's sandpipers, killdeer, blue-winged teal and northern shovelers. As the sun crests the horizon, cliff swallows that have wintered in Central America tug nesting materials from a muskrat hut. Painted turtles periscope up from below the surface. All around you, red-winged blackbirds and sedge wrens begin their morning chatter. Then a northern harrier swoops down, strafing the cattails, and blows the entire crowd off the water. You leave the water's edge and follow a game trail that takes you to a creek crossing littered with mink and raccoon tracks. The trail eventually leads you to the base of a hill where cattail and cordgrass meet big bluestem, and where a thread of flowing water bubbles up from a clear cold spring. From the spring, you begin to climb up the hillside prairie while meadowlarks and dickcissels sing in stereo declaring their territories from shrubby perches. And as you reach the top you look around and begin to see more clearly where you are – the farmland and acreages, the powerlines, and the county road, and off in the distance, the hazy line of Lincoln punctuated by the state capitol. If someone would have blindfolded and dropped you here in the half light of dawn, you might have felt you were in wilderness. But you are just a few miles away from the city of Lincoln, population 300,000, the second largest population center in the state, and growing. An Ancient Wetland This saline wetland landscape is a remnant of a once vast prairie wilderness that comprised a rich diversity of life in North America's Great Plains. We can only imagine what it was like in this part of eastern Nebraska when this country was truly wild. When long before Euroamerican settlement, Plains Indians and the indigenous cultures before them 1500 miles from any ocean, water infused with salt from an ancient sea rises up, forming one of the rarest natural communities in Nebraska. A generation ago, all could have been lost to urban growth and the plow, but today restoration and hope are on the rise. The sun sets as shadows fall over a saline wetland and a muskrat hut at the Little Salt Fork Marsh Preserve.