By Burch Barger

Published in November 2020, the tenth edition of the Georgia Water Coalition’s “Dirty Dozen” list highlights the issues that threaten twelve waterways throughout the state. Five of these are located in our coastal region: the Altamaha River, the Satilla River, the St. Simons Sound, the Okefenokee Swamp, and Cumberland and Little Cumberland islands. Below is a brief synopsis of each threat and information on the conservation groups working to protect these vital waterways.

Altamaha River: The discharge from Rayonier Advanced Materials chemical pulp mill in Jesup has landed the Altamaha River on Georgia’s “Dirty Dozen” list more times than any other waterway. Altamaha Riverkeeper is advocating for Rayonier to upgrade its wastewater treatment standards as it seeks a renewal of its pollution control permit.

Satilla River: A proposed 463-acre landfill project located two miles from the river in Brantley County raises concerns ranging from pollution of groundwater and surface water to the risk of increased flooding. Satilla Riverkeeper notes the proposed landfill “is in a very vulnerable area, surrounded by a rural community that sources its drinking water from groundwater wells. Proper site limitations are essential to protecting the Satilla River, its tributaries, wetlands, and groundwater resources from contamination and pollution. The proposed site is not appropriate for a solid waste handling facility.”

St. Simons Sound: After more than a year of preparations and delays, the cutting and salvage process has begun on the Golden Ray, the 656-foot cargo ship capsized in the St. Simons Sound. As the massive boat is cut into eight sections, its cargo of 4000 cars and tens of thousands of gallons of oil threaten to contaminate the sound, surrounding marshes, beaches and fisheries on St. Simons and Jekyll islands. Altamaha Riverkeeper is monitoring the salvage process and recommends that NOAA conduct a Natural Resources Damage Assessment of St. Simons Sound, determining the environmental impacts and identifying restoration projects to compensate for losses associated with the disaster.

Okefenokee Swamp: Changes to the Clean Water Act went into effect earlier this year, removing from federal protection 376 acres of wetlands located within Twin Pines Materials’ proposed 12,000-acre titanium mining site near the Okefenokee Swamp. “A federal hurdle removed, if Twin Pines can now secure necessary state permits, mining operations can commence.” Conservation groups working to organize citizens and to inform Governor Kemp about the importance of protecting the Okefenokee include One Hundred Miles, Suwannee Riverkeeper, and Georgia River Network.

Cumberland and Little Cumberland Islands: A proposed rocket launching facility, Spaceport Camden, would sit on the banks of Todd Creek, an important tributary to the Satilla River located four miles from the shores of Cumberland and Little Cumberland Islands. The small launch missions proposed for the Spaceport Camden site have averaged a 43% failure rate between 2009 and 2016.  This puts the human and wildlife populations — as well the natural wonders — of Cumberland Island and Little Cumberland Island at heightened risk of fire, pollution, and loss of life. One Hundred Miles continues to track this proposal and to express grave concerns for the impacts it would have on the Georgia coast.

By Dorinda Dallmeyer

Looking at a map of Georgia, you see its boundaries marked by straight lines and sinuous river valleys. The most striking is our southern boundary with Florida, where a line arrows east-southeast to meet Georgia’s Big Bend – the 126-mile-long St. Marys River.

In 1800, it took the skills of Andrew Ellicott, a noted surveyor of the early American Republic, to mark the Georgia-Florida line. The west end was easy – the confluence of the Flint River with the Chattahoochee. But the eastern end was something entirely different – described as “the headwaters of the St. Marys River.”  The St. Marys rises in the Okefenokee Swamp, 700 square miles of wildness and myth that has come down to us today as a mixture of “the land of trembling earth,” the movie “Swamp Water,” and the antics of the swamp animals in the beloved Pogo comic strip. But it was a real-life problem for Ellicott. To run that line to its eastern terminus, he had to determine where swamp ended and river began.

To avoid clashes with the Seminoles who were increasingly hostile to surveying parties dividing the land between the United States and Spain, Ellicott sent most of his men eastward on foot to the riverside settlement of St. Marys. Ellicott sailed with the rest of his party and the instruments on a schooner around Florida to rendezvous with them there. Then the mapping task began, not on foot but by canoe upriver. If you have crossed the Okefenokee on a multi-day paddle, it’s a wonderful outing in wild nature. Ellicott’s paddle was strictly business. He and his men paddled back and forth, into and out of the swamp, until Ellicott was satisfied that he had located the St. Marys headwaters – where swamp became river. The survey party marked the site with a mound of soil which came to be known as “Ellicott’s Mound.” Now supplemented with an official federal benchmark, Ellicott’s Mound can even be located on Google Maps simply by entering its name.

Boundaries – natural and artificial – continue to influence management of the St. Marys watershed. Along its length, the river is bordered by two Georgia counties – Camden and Charlton – and two Florida counties – Nassau and Baker. Because they border both on the Atlantic and the more navigable sections of the St. Marys, Nassau and Camden historically have had higher population densities, which have only increased with the advent of coastal tourism and development. Charlton and Baker have remained more sparsely populated, although each is facing a growing need to implement smart planning and sustainable development.

According to Anna Laws, St. Marys Riverkeeper, a key to managing the watershed holistically is the St. Marys River Management Committee, composed of representatives from all four county commissions, their technical staff, private citizens, and entities like the Riverkeeper. All the counties are focused on improving water quality in the watershed. According to Laws, “These counties have porous soil and a shallow water table, especially in periods of heavy rainfall. So throughout the watershed, all the counties are grappling with high fecal coliform counts and nutrient inflow into the river. Traditionally, the more sparsely populated rural counties have relied on septic tanks for sewage treatment. In the past, homes along the river tended to be concentrated in fishing communities or privately-owned cabins used sporadically on weekends and vacations. Now more people are buying these sites and converting them for use as single-family, year-round homes.  If tanks are not pumped out on a three to five-year interval, the older septic systems simply can’t keep up with the demand on them.”

One innovative approach by Camden County and the Riverkeeper was obtaining grant funding to cover the cost of pumping out or replacing old septic systems bordering Horsepen Creek, a St. Marys tributary. The drop in fecal coliform counts was immediate and long-lasting.

An additional role that the Riverkeeper has taken on is water-quality monitoring throughout the watershed. “Our efforts are focused on supplementing the states’ monitoring programs. We are developing a baseline data-set both to look for monthly trends and, especially, to identify ‘hotspots’ in need of timely action. We have trained high school students and their teachers to conduct water quality monitoring tests so that they become our eyes on the watershed.”

Whether at the coast or inland, all four counties face the potential for explosive population growth, particularly because of the St. Marys’ proximity to northward sprawl from Jacksonville and Duval County. However, the needs of the counties are different. According to Laws, “Nassau and Camden Counties are densely developed and now must grapple with the results of past laissez-faire growth which has produced congestion and over-taxed wastewater treatment facilities. As counties in the immediate coastal zone, they also now are more focused on flood planning, either due to hurricane impacts or long-term sea-level rise. At a different stage of development, Charlton and Baker would welcome growth, as long as it’s smart growth and not at the expense of losing natural amenities or in repeating the mistakes made elsewhere.”

But desires for smart growth could be overwhelmed by powerful economic interests. Like many rural counties around the South, Charlton County is grappling with disposal of coal-ash waste from power plants. Despite the toxic heavy-metal content of coal ash, Georgia currently regulates coal-ash waste disposal no more stringently than it does household garbage. South of Folkston, the Chesser Island Road Landfill continues to receive ash not only from Georgia but also from a plant in Puerto Rico. That ash arrives via bulk-cargo ships which dock near Jacksonville and offload the ash into dump-trucks for transport to the landfill – a site less than five miles east of the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge.

An additional threat to the Okefenokee, the St. Marys, and potentially the water supply for the whole region is the proposed expansion of surface mining. According to Laws, “Mining heavy minerals concentrated in the sands of ancient beach ridges has been carried out for many years at a relatively small scale in the region. However, this new proposal envisions an extremely large mine site close to the Okefenokee with unknown impacts to the hydrology of the swamp and the St. Marys, our invaluable groundwater supply, and impacts on endangered and threatened species.” Currently the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is considering whether or not the proposal requires an environmental impact statement before its approval.

The St. Marys ties Camden County’s coast to the wild places it shares with Charlton County. For many years, the Okefenokee has been a tourist destination, not just to see alligators and cypress but to also for visitors to envision what the earliest people arriving there might have seen in 3,500 B.C.E.  To help build the sustainable growth of ecotourism in the region, the St. Marys Riverkeeper is in the process of working with the counties to improve access to the river by developing riverside parks and installing more boat ramps and canoe/kayak launch sites.

According to Laws, “Between Folkston and Moniac, which is close to the headwaters, there are not many places to get onto the St. Marys and enjoy what its blackwaters and riparian forests have to offer.  We’re currently working with Georgia River Network to expand access to paddling north of Folkston, the traditional head of navigation for traders plying the river.”

And so, maybe soon you will be able to re-enact Ellicott’s decision 220 years ago on where to draw the line — where a swamp becomes a river.

St. Marys Riverkeeper has two conservation projects underway that need philanthropic support. The first is the outreach program to educate homeowners along the watershed on best septic system maintenance practices. The second is the expansion of the water quality monitoring program to include not only bacterial tracking but also the collection of chemical and macroinvertebrate data. To support these efforts, contact Anna Laws at anna@stmarysriverkeeper.org.

By Abby Sterling

With all of the uncertainty caused by the global pandemic, there is a tremendous amount of solace to be found in nature. As Manomet’s shorebird biologist for the Georgia Bight Shorebird Conservation Initiative, I am being kept busy with our nesting shorebirds, like American Oystercatchers and Wilson’s Plovers, and our migrating shorebirds that are heading up to the Arctic, like Red Knots and Dunlin. Ever an optimist, I look for silver linings in every situation. While this crisis highlights many challenges for all of us in the non-profit world, there have been some interesting opportunities as well.

I’ve been working on a project with partners from National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), National Audubon and Virginia Tech to better understand how both birds and people use our publicly accessible beaches. This March, while the beaches were closed for two weeks, I was able to continue monitoring. And while that short window wasn’t enough time to see a true shift in how the birds were using the beaches, we did see Wilson’s Plovers starting to explore sites where we had not observed them nesting before. Tybee Island, normally so busy with people, had hundreds of Tree Swallows roosting on the empty beach. During one survey, I saw three Black-necked Stilts at the surf, a long-legged black and white shorebird that is typically found in quiet beach ponds or impoundments. And at another site, just last week, a Wilson’s Plover nest hatched all three eggs, and now fuzzy chicks are zipping around on a beach that is still closed to the public.

We’ve also been so lucky that we are able to work with our partners to continue to prioritize data collection and management, while carefully following local ordinances and health guidelines. We were able to install symbolic fencing at Gould’s Inlet on St. Simons Island to protect nesting Wilson’s Plovers and Least Terns, many volunteers are still collecting International Shorebird Surveys, and we are coordinating an evening count of Whimbrels this week. Every evening at sunset, Whimbrels leave the marshes where they feast on fiddler crabs and fly to remote sandbars to roost for the evening where they can be safe from disturbance and predators. It is an incredible spectacle that lasts through May, until the well-fed Whimbrels fly to the Arctic to nest. The Whimbrel count is part of a project supported by NFWF to determine what sites could serve as long-term counting locations to help us better monitor the populations of this declining species.

At Manomet, we’ve been working hard to fill in the gaps that were generated by cancelled events and talks to connect with people digitally. Some of you may have tuned in for our Whimbrel webinar, which can be accessed here, and we hope to have more of these offerings in the future. We are working hard to continue building strong connections within our communities to address some of the most pressing challenges that shorebirds face in our region. We are using this time to continue planning programs to reduce recreational disturbance, build partnerships to support habitat protection and conservation, and raise awareness for the fragile resources that exist within the Georgia Bight. To support our efforts, please click here, and specify in the comment space that you’d like your gift to be designated for Georgia’s shorebirds.

We thank you for your interest, and we look forward to the next time we can all be together safely!

By Burch Barger

Chris Jenkins, CEO of The Orianne Society, acknowledges that these are challenging times for conservation nonprofits.  After making adaptations to keep staff safe from the Coronavirus pandemic and reducing their budget for the fiscal year, The Orianne Society remains committed to its mission: conservation of reptiles, amphibians, and the ecosystems they inhabit.

What does Orianne’s work look like in these uncertain times? Staff travel is restricted, outreach events are cancelled, volunteer efforts are postponed. Funding for new staff positions and some seasonal technicians has been cut. In the interest of staff safety, they have reduced the size of field crews and developed policies for disinfecting gear and maintaining hygiene in the field.  The bright side: most of Orianne’s work is conducted in wild places which, by definition, accommodate social distancing.  The work continues, and the commitment to the mission remains.

Orianne’s coastal work most affected by the pandemic is gopher tortoise and Eastern indigo snake habitat restoration. They have a team of land managers (Mopani Strike Team) who work inland year-round implementing prescribed fire and restoring native grasses. The team has continued its work, but where and how widely they burn has been impacted by concerns of smoke and respiratory issues. Plans to add a second strike team in 2020 — focused on Georgia’s coastal counties and muhly grass habitats on barrier islands – are dependent upon donor funding. Chris remains hopeful that our Stewards of the Georgia Coast network can help. To make a gift supporting Orianne Society’s efforts, you can visit their website or contact Chris Jenkins by phone at (208) 241-9124.

Chris notes that the pandemic, though it has presented multiple challenges, also has offered opportunity.  It has led the Orianne Society staff to produce more internet-based education and outreach material and to recognize the power of online communications for promoting conservation. We are the beneficiaries of their efforts, as we now can gain an insider’s view of the gopher tortoise, the Eastern spadefoot frog, Dante the Gila monster, and much more with a simple click of our mouse.  Visit their website or Facebook page for information on upcoming virtual events and webinars.

By Burch Barger

The St. Marys River has been named to the 2020 list of America’s Most Endangered Rivers by environmental group American Rivers. A proposal to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by Twin Pines Minerals, LLC to mine titanium along the eastern boundary of the Okefenokee Swamp, headwaters of the St. Marys and Suwannee Rivers, is the threat that has propelled local citizens, environmental advocacy groups, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to sound the alarm.

According to the report from American Rivers, mining threatens to disturb not only the distinct layers of semi-permeable soils that allow for water storage and circulation within the Okefenokee Swamp but also to endanger the state- and federally- listed species that depend upon the Okefenokee refuge, including the eastern indigo snake, wood stork and red-cockaded woodpecker – as well as the small populations of endangered shortnose and Atlantic sturgeon that call the St. Marys River home.

American Rivers urges the public to continue to advocate for the protection of the Okefenokee Swamp and the St. Marys River, demanding undeniable evidence that these national treasures will remain undisturbed. The deadline to submit public comments to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been extended to May 28^th, and an Action Webinar is scheduled for May 19^th at 5:00pm. To register, click here. One Hundred Miles and Georgia River Network stand among the local organizations leading this charge, and donor support for their advocacy efforts is appreciated.