
Escape to ‘beautiful face’
Outdoors with teachers Yadaa.at Kalé means beautifully adorned face, of slopes rising northeast from the highschool named for them (JDH).…
DiscoverySoutheast.org
Surfbirds and dunlin hunt through a clump of barnacles, mussels and rockweed in the mudflats at the mouth of Wushi l’ux’u heen, milky water (Mendenhall River)
Salt marshes are visibly rich, but the productivity of ‘bare’ tideflats—the other component of Southeast estuaries, is less widely appreciated. Researchers straining sediment samples through a sieve have counted tiny worms, bivalves and crustaceans in densities of thousands per square meter. Willson & Baldwin (link below) found greater density in sediments than in mussel-cobble beds or rockweed clusters.
Tiny pink Macoma clams are major prey for shorebirds. Corophiid amphipods (small crustaceans) were found in great numbers in tube colonies on the bottom of low-salinity sloughs. Submerged, these crustaceans feed salmon smolts. Exposed, they fuel migration, when vast swarms of northbound sandpipers descend on flats such as the estuary of Sh’taxhéen, water biting itself (Stikine River—thumbnail, upper right)
Mud-&-sand flats at Asx’ee, twisted tree, (Eagle River). Close to the probable location of a L’eeneidi winter village, this is where Honker Slough drains the Goosetongue Flats. My 1983 habitat map shows the location. CBJ image, 2003.
Acreages in 3 wetland types mapped by NWI, for the 10 largest estuaries in Southeast Alaska.
The NWI (National Wetlands Inventory) database delineates 3 community types in estuaries: vegetated salt marsh, bare tidal flats, and the “algal bed” of rockweed, barnacles, and mussels. This table lists the 10 largest estuaries of Southeast, based on the total of all 3 intertidal habitats. Relative proportions of the 3 types differs considerably. Mendenhall Wetlands have the third largest acreage of salt marsh in Southeast, but rank much lower in total estuary size. In contrast, the Chilkat River mouth has only 95 acres of salt marsh, but thousands of acres of bare tidal flat.
Algal bed communities are abundant in some estuaries such as upper Lukaax, in haste (Duncan Canal), but essentially absent at many river mouths. Algae, barnacles, and mussels need to anchor on coarse material like cobbles or at least large gravel mixed in with the low tidal muds. Algal bed communities are especially common in the small estuaries of southern Southeast islands like Tàan, sea lion (POW Island)
Outdoors with teachers Yadaa.at Kalé means beautifully adorned face, of slopes rising northeast from the highschool named for them (JDH).…
Zonotrichia passage through the Highlands May 3rd, 2022. Golden-&-white-crowned sparrows are flooding through our neighborhood’s garden rows and brush borders.…
2021&22 | Richard Carstensen | short captioned videosDuring the Armstrong-Willson-Carstensen Hotspots study, 2002-03, Mary Willson teamed with Aaron Baldwin to sample intertidal invertebrates throughout the Mendenhall Refuge.…
2004 | Mary Willson & Aaron Baldwin | 42 pagesYellowlegs, peeps, and northbound songbirds on the Refuge dike trail.
2017 | Richard Carstensen | 90 secondsIn 2009, with support from the Southeast Alaska Land Trust, Bob, Mary, Marge and I distilled much of the information…
2009 | Armstrong, Carstensen, Willson and Osborn | 82 pagesTrophics and geography Nexus explains how estuaries develop, their food webs, and their importance to the greater archipelago. Includes field…
2004 | Richard Carstensen, Kathy Hocker | 12 pagesThis full-color, 170-page guide to invertebrates and selected fish of our region covers everything from soft corals to rockfish. In…
2015 | Aaron Baldwin|Paul Norwood | 170 pages