Enright: You know, almost everyone I meet in the conservation profession started off as a kid playing in woods and creeks, with that personal connection to nature at a young age. It was the same with me — I was swinging on grape vines and splashing around in creeks, and was lucky enough to find out that you could do that for a living. I got my bachelor's at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Most of my training there focused on wildlife, and then I met Jim Amon at Wright State when I was in grad school — he was one of the very best wetland biologists around, and I joined up with him and learned a great deal. I got my master's from WSU in biology and minored in environmental science — my master's project was building the first groundwater contamination treatment system of its type anywhere, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I signed my thesis on a Friday and started at MetroParks on Monday. That was September 2001, and I've been here ever since. I was the first wildlife biologist in MetroParks.
Q: The first?
Enright: It was a new position created to deal with a number of issues emerging at the time with wildlife and natural resources in the parks — deer overpopulation, large numbers of Canada geese, fish management. When the MetroParks levy passed in 2000, the first priority was to hire somebody to deal with those issues.
Q: Are you from this area originally?
Enright: I'm from Cambridge, in eastern Ohio. I laugh when people say Dayton's a small town — I came from a place with about 40,000 in the whole county. I've traveled a good bit, and I find Dayton a wonderful place to live. And as far as support for conservation measures and issues in the community, I've not seen any place like it. In fact, bigger cities like Columbus and Cleveland look to us, for some of the groundbreaking things we've been able to do in MetroParks in terms of wildlife management, habitat protection and the like.
Q: What’s an example?
Enright: Well, a big one is the Great Miami Wetland Mitigation Bank — it's the only one in Ohio that's owned, designed and managed by a local park district.
Q: What is the mitigation bank? How does it it work?
Enright: State and federal environmental laws protect wetlands and streams — so that when somebody builds something that impacts a stream or wetland, they have to replace it. The developer can do that a number of ways — they can create a new wetland somewhere else on the property they're working on, or they can do that at another site. But if they do that, typically they're making tiny wetlands that are surrounded by a mall or parking lot or housing development, and they tend not to survive in the long term. They're just tiny islands of green in a sea of asphalt.
Q: So, that’s where the mitigation bank comes in?
Enright: Right. The other way, and what we think is the better way, is that the developer can purchase credits from a bank that has already created wetlands and streams on a larger scale. Mitigation banks are huge — ours, with the new land acquisition we just made of the defunct Larch Tree Golf Course, is pushing 550 acres. So when you're creating wetlands in this area, it already has critical mass, and what we're creating is big enough to attract rare species, and really function as a working wetland. And since it's part of MetroParks, it's high quality and will be around for a long time. It actually takes centuries for a wetland to fully develop.
Q: How does it work financially?
Enright: Say a company like Walmart builds a store or parking lot that impacts a wetland. They have a strong financial incentive to buy a credit in the mitigation bank, rather than try to restore on their own — because we'll work with them so they know how much they need to spend to mitigate their obligations, and then they can budget and plan around it. One credit costs $50,000, set by law. One acre of wetland equals one credit, give or take. One foot of stream equals one credit, $300 per linear foot. So for the banker — MetroParks, in this case — we buy the land where the wetland will be created, and as we sell credits we have the money to do do the work. This is our third year selling, and we're well on our way to getting into the place. In two years, we're pushing over $600,000 in credit sales. You can only sell so many at one time, by law, and we've almost sold our first batch of credits.
Q: How many can you sell over time?
Enright: Based on current projections, our bank will have about $10 million worth of credits on it, over several years. After it pays for the wetland at that site, funds will come back to help MetroParks.
Q: Where is the wetland area that the bank pays for?
Enright: It's just south of and adjacent to Sycamore State Park in Trotwood, in an area bounded by Snyder Road to the east, Little Richmond Road, Lutheran Church Road and Post Town Road. We purchased the site in 2008 from Waste Management — it was the land where they were hoping to put in a new landfill, but they couldn't get the permission to do that and they wanted to get rid of the land. It was perfect for a new wetland. We'd been looking for sites around the county for quite a while. We're restoring 100 acres in the first phase, which we started in 2011, and we'll do 260 acres in the second phase. That land is currently farmland. It's not currently open to the public, but will be someday. And when you combine the wetlands acreage with Sycamore, it'll be 3,000 open acres — the largest stretch in Montgomery County.
Q: Talk about the value of wetlands.
Enright: So, they're basically nature's kidneys. They do a great job at removing nutrients from water — such as phosphorus, nitrogen, other types of pollutants. For instance, the problems they're having in Lake Erie right now with algae growth and pollution is that the area doesn't have enough wetlands anymore to absorb the pollution off the land there. Too many of them have been tiled and developed. Wetlands also act like giant sponges, holding water during rain events and releasing water smoothly into your creeks, so they help alleviate flooding. They also provide habitat for endangered species. Ninety-five percent of Ohio's wetlands have been destroyed, so it's a case of, if you build it they will come — we've already seen that at the mitigation bank, a number of new species of birds nesting and living there. My favorite is the sandhill crane — those are the big ones that look like storks, and they arrive in the spring and fall. We have a whole variety of birds, shorebirds like rails, American bitterns. In the fall of 2011, it was a cornfield — and how you have these bird species calling it home.
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Q: What does the site look like now?
Enright: Well, we pulled out the drainage tile that the farmer had in there, and created a creek for runoff. We've planted 50,000 new trees, seedlings of all varieties, so if you look out there now they're all covered with these little blue protective tubes to keep the deer off them — it looks like the land is sprouting them. The water has started to gather and we have some very nice marshy areas with rich, dark soil — sedges, rushes, cattails growing nicely.
Q: What happens to the old golf course?
Enright: It will eventually be phase three of the project — we've got some structures to demolish, some logging debris to clean up, and we need to study the drainage and hydrology. But it will become wetland.
You know, another fun aspect of the bank I should mention is a joint project with two professors from the University of Nebraska/Lincoln, a husband-and-wife team who used to be at Wright State — Amy Burgin and Terry Loeke. They’re environmental scientists and saw the bank as a unique opportunity to study how greenhouse gas uptake changes from farming soil as it’s turned into wetland again.
Q: Uptake?
Enright: So, when a wetland soil is farmed, a lot of the carbon in the soil is broken down and released into the atmosphere. But when you turn it back into wetlands, you're trapping carbon dioxide back into the soil. They got a NASA grant to study this, and they started measuring before we started — so now they have several years of data and have really found some interesting things in terms of how this works. They have one of the world's best wetland sensor systems there, built by a local company, Fondriest Environmental, that makes automated sensor systems. They're getting an unprecedented look at how wetlands function.
Q: So, apart from the wetlands, what’s the state of wildlife in the parks?
Enright: Well, the brown bear we had for a while in Twin Creek MetroPark is gone, as far as we know — he wandered back to Kentucky, probably, and I hope he found a nice female bear to settle down with. But really, a lot of people don't realize the great wildlife success right here in their own back yard. We've got bald eagles fishing in downtown Dayton, the falcons on the towers downtown, otters at Eastwood MetroPark at our new kayak area, at least a pair of bobcats at Twin Creek MetroPark. In the last decade, wild turkeys have colonized nearly all our parks. They were gone for 150 years and now they're back — poof! — running around all over the place.
We still have challenges. We have to manage our deer herd, since we don’t have any big predators anymore. We still have a lot of Canada geese, and we do a whole bunch of things to control them — like taste repellents in certain areas, to make the grass taste bad. We do pyrotechnics to chase them away sometimes, but a lot the time they just look at us when we do that and don’t mind a bit.
Q: Does anything work with them?
Enright: Well, funny enough, yes — if you just let the grass grow tall in certain areas. Like an area we're letting grow between 75 and the Main Street bridge near downtown, as a test to see if it keeps the geese off the bike way. See, to geese, tall grass equals predators, which they assume are lurking in the grass. It seems to work, and it creates a little mini-haven other wildlife will use.
Q: Are invasive species a challenge in your work?
Enright: Whether you're talking plants or animals, invasives are the single greatest long-term threat to healthy ecosystems in the MetroParks. They have the ability to alter the fundamental structure of the ecosystem in a way that native species can be permanently wiped out. Just look at honeysuckle — most people know it as a shrub that grows like crazy, which it is. But did you know it also produces an herbicide at the roots that can prevent native seeds from growing, even after it's removed? And it has a chemical in its leaves that prevents native insects from eating them, so they're starved out, which affects anything that depends on the insects, like birds. That's just one example.
Q: You mentioned the lack of a lot of big predators here. I’ve read about cougars in Michigan and Illinois — how long before they end up in southwest Ohio?
Enright: Well, the last edition of the Ohio Outdoor News website quoted an off-duty game warden who confirmed a cougar sighting in eastern Ohio. So is it possible? Sure. Will they be any threat to people? No. Almost always, it's young males wandering through looking for territory. We get reports, but as for one here yet, unlikely. But as for the way they deal with people, California has a lot of them in cities. There've been some minor issues, but usually they don't bother anyone. It depends on how understanding people are when these big predators — cougars, bears, wolves — come back. The limiting factor is people's acceptance. There's plenty of deer for them to eat here, so the question is, would people here coexist with them? Yet to be answered.
Q: What’s your guess?
Enright: I think people would accept it, with the understanding that living with those big predators may require some lifestyle differences, like taking care of your trash differently. But these animals are so charismatic, I think people would connect with it.
Q: So, why has the wildlife come back so strongly? It seems fairly sudden.
Enright: It has been sudden. One of the biggest reasons, especially in Montgomery County, is that 100 years ago the whole county was farmed and there was no space for wildlife to exist. Now, thanks to MetroParks and the Miami Conservancy District and other park systems, there are greenspace corridors along all the rivers that wildlife can travel through, right in the middle of the metropolis. They can grow and thrive. The other thing is that 100 years ago, the only thing wildlife was good for was eating — and now, people have come to the understanding that having wild animals around for viewing and enjoying is just as important. And the biggest thing, really, is that wildlife have learned to live with people — just look at deer. They don't need to be in a forest anymore, they're just fine and happy in the suburbs.
Q: You seem pretty happy about it, too.
Enright: I am. It brings joy to my heart, as somebody who loves wildlife. There's nothing better than seeing people connect to wild animals, when they understand why we protect them in our parks and why natural resources are so important — that personal connection to nature that sticks with people and motivates them to action in the future.
Q: Well, it also seems like a nice environmental good news story, when those are in relatively short supply these days.
Enright: Very much so. I could run through a whole long list of environmental problems — global warming is just the start. But the return of local wildlife is a small bright spot despite our other problems, and gives us hope that things that might get better.
Q: The environment is your business — what do you think is the future, on global warming?
Enright: I really don't know. But I do know as we plan the parks' future, we take it into account — in terms of forest protection and planning, we think of species that are more suited to a hotter, drier climate. That seems the way we're headed, and we want our forests to be resilient enough.
Q: Do wetlands figure into the climate-change conversation?
Enright: They do. That's one of things the professors are looking at with their sensors study here. Wetlands restoration could become an important part of mitigating global warming in the future. Who knows? Maybe in 100 years you could buy carbon credits for carbon uptake and help the environment. I sure hope so.
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