camille at my gate

My laguna is dying.


I can see that much.  So could you if you came to visit.


What was it Tolstoy said about families?  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  Of course, it sounds far more bleak in Russian.


Well, waters are similar.  Dying waters die in many different ways. 


I shot the photograph at the top of this post in July 2008.  A year and a half later, this is the laguna.  What was blue is now green.  From the air it appears to be a field.

 

I shot the photograph at the top of this post in July 2008.  A year and a half later, this is the laguna.  What was blue is now green.  From the air it appears to be a field.

And that green is the problem. Almost all of that verdant carpet is Eichhornia crassipes -- the dreaded scourge of tropical waters: the common water hyacinth.


Water hyacinths do to waterways what my triglycerides do to my bloodstream; they stop the flow. 


In the process, they gather silt that will eventually turn what was an area to catch water into an area that floods homes and businesses. Floods that cause inconvenience, a lot of property damage, and occasional deaths.


However, a dead laguna is far more than a potential flood problem. 


While it is slowly gathering silt to create a new Bonneville Salt Flat, the plant cover starves the water of oxygen.  Dead fish.  Dead turtles.  Dead frogs.  And the hyacinths provide perfect cover for mosquitoes to do what they do best -- plot the elimination of the human race, one bite at a time.


But people are newcomers as far as the laguna is concerned.  Before people arrived, animals ruled its shores.


The laguna is famed for being the home to 75 different bird species -- more during migrations.  The warblers that visit my bougainvillea every morning would not be here without the laguna.  Rumor has it that the bird population has dwindled by half during the last two years.


And that sentence elicits this caveat.  I have been conducting research and interviews the last two weeks to prepare this post.  My hope was to uncover facts about the laguna.  But there are none.  No studies.  No bird counts.  No lab reports.


But there are lots of anecdotes and opinions.  Many of those opinions are driven by the same interests that divide every small town.


When I am told most of the iguanas have disappeared, I can only report that I have seen very few on my walks.  The same goes for the snakes, turtles, crocodiles, and small mammals that usually thrive around tropical waters.  From my observations, they are very rare.


So, here is the question.  You have a friend who is dying.  What do you do?


A good topic for tomorrow's post.