BY JANE BLOODWORTH ROWE
VIRGINIA BEACH — Sometimes, natural areas aren’t all natural, beautiful and pristine. Stumpy Lake Natural Area, with its towering cypress trees reflecting in the calm water, appears to be an undisturbed haven for wildlife tucked away inside suburbia.
Too often, however, human activity endangers the egrets, herons and other birds that shelter near Stumpy Lake, according to Michele Cleland, a volunteer with Tidewater Wildlife Rescue, who added that the birds that shelter there can become entangled in fishing lines or other debris.
This winter, she and other volunteers rescued five birds between late November and late December. Only two of these – an egret and a cormorant – survived.
That’s why the Virginia Beach Department of Parks & Recreation scheduled a clean-up of this area as part of this year’s Winter Wildlife Festival, according to Cleland and Michael Moore of the Department of Parks and Recreation. The event was inspired by Meredith Broadhurst of Evelyn’s Wildlife Refuge, who received the 2021 Mary Reid Barrow Wildlife Advocate Award.
“This is personally very important to me,” said Cleland, who added that Stumpy Lake stands out among the city’s waterways as a particular trouble spot for birds.
So parks staff members and eight adult volunteers met on Friday, Jan. 28, to clean up the area.
As one of the volunteers, I quickly saw what Cleland meant. The bare tree limbs revealed a couple of last season’s bird’s nests, and a clump of snarled lines and lures dangling from a power line was located just next to the nests.
The lake’s shore appeared relatively clean at first glance, but a closer inspection revealed bottles, cans, drink lids and other debris.
One problem, Moore told me, was that some recreational fishers just aren’t educated about the dangers of entrapment from fishing lines.
Unskilled, novice fishers also often cast too high, and their line becomes entangled in tree limbs or power lines, Cleland added.
I tagged along with Cleland. Although it was a relatively balmy 40 degrees, I had no desire to get wet. I was very careful when stepping into the rough, wet areas around the lake’s edges, where a little ice was forming from our recent freezing weather.
Cleland, however, was obviously a seasoned veteran and nimbly, efficiently reached into the shallow water with her long-handled trash grabber, plucking out debris and tossing it into her orange garbage bag.
She’d waded into the water many times to rescue birds, she said, so traversing the banks – no matter how wet or uneven they were – was not much of a challenge for her.
After a while, I joined a couple of other volunteers who were picking up an open area near the golf course. They collected a couple of bags full of garbage, including many golf balls, a few golf clubs and even some iron pipes. It’s not unusual to find wiffle balls and other children’s toys that wash into the lake from streams that run through nearby residential areas, Moore said.
I was impressed by the volunteers’ energy and enthusiasm. As the afternoon wore on, the wind picked up and the temperature seemed to drop as a winter storm approached, but some of them still seemed reluctant to stop their work.
Unfortunately, other festival events, including a trash pick-up at Lake Smith and Lake Lawson natural area, were canceled because of the winter storm.
But the Stumpy Lake event afforded a good opportunity for a winter outdoor excursion.
And it was a chance to learn something about the impact of human activity on even seemingly unspoiled cypress swamps.
Those who find injured or entrapped wildlife are urged to call the Tidewater Wildlife Rescue hotline at (757) 255-8710.
Visit www.vbgov.com/winterwildlife for information about the annual Winter Wildlife Festival.
The author is a contributor to The Independent News. Her journalism has also appeared in The Virginian-Pilot.
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