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Urban pond profiles: Nutts Pond By Karen
Marzloff On a breezy August afternoon, the air at Nutts Pond is sweet and cool. Fragrant wildflowers grow along the shore. Bumblebees suckle on purple loosestrife, dragonflies alight along the knee-high pickerelweed, and at nearly every footfall fat green frogs leap out of the mud and plop into the water. Mallard ducks paddle lazily, pecking at underwater weeds along the shore. It's such a pretty picture, such a large and wild surprise, that it's easy to forget that the pond is dying. Only a five-minute walk in either direction and you step into the vast network of roads and parking lots that connects the strip malls, fast food outlets, auto dealers, and retailers of South Willow Street. It's a watershed composed almost entirely of asphalt and storm drains, and it's slowly choking the pond. Art Grindle, coordinator of the city's Urban Ponds Restoration Program, likes meeting people walking along the paths who remember swimming here, or who tell about the ice harvested here a hundred years ago. "These are the stories that really motivate me, that keep me going," he says. Given $1 million and five years, the city's goal is to restore Nutts and the city's six other urban ponds as closely as possible to their historic water quality. Nutts Pond has the furthest to go. The 22-acre pond is the lowest spot in a heavily developed triangle bounded by Beech Street, Gold Street, and the Memorial High School neighborhood. To find it, you drive through the heart of South Willow Street, the city's most congested artery, and turn down the road between Osram Sylvania and Wendy's.
The pond is the only natural drain for the area. Once renowned for its purity, swimming abruptly halted here in 1968 when the water was filthied by sewer overflows, and city officials would have drained and filled it during the 1980s if it weren't for the natural flood control it provides. Though there are no longer any sewer overflows, the runoff receives little or no treatment before merging into the pond at four locations. Sedimentary deltas store the invisible artifacts of modern living: arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc, among others. Though their levels are low enough that they don't threaten our health, what's of more concern are the excess nutrients that naturally attach themselves to the abundance of sediment pouring into the pond. "Basically, the pond is overfertilized," Grindle says. "It's not that it's toxic. It's that it's soupy." Simply put, the phosphorous and nitrogen overfeed the plants, particularly the algae, which choke the water; when the abundant plants die off, they consume more oxygen, a cycle that gradually sucks life from the pond. It's hard to imagine that a pond can die. Early settlers found Native Americans fishing and living here. Cross the brook on a footbridge over the Tannery Brook outlet, and a sandy path under shady oaks leads past a stone wellhead, the last ghost of a wooden garrison built by Archibald Stark along the shores in 1746 to shelter settlers against Indian raids. Talk to any handful of longtime Manchester residents, and chances are that a few of them will remember swimming here as kids. Further along the path, you'll find the sandy beach, now thick with leafy young birches, and the old bathhouse foundation in the woods. Once called Swager's Pond, then Fort Pond, even the name is a reminder of the days when the Nutt family farmed hundreds of acres in the area, and the ice harvested by a succession of companies was described by The Mirror in 1899 as "the purest, cleanest and best of ice" thanks to the fact that "there isn't a dwelling house, or a house of any sort, near the pond shore." A trace of that purity remains. The water is still home to a healthy fishery. Bluegill, sunfish, pickerel, largemouth bass, and yellow perch do well here. Samples taken in the last two years show that though they have traces of metals in their tissue, the fish are quite edible. There are no plans to make the water swimmable again (after three studies, swimming was closed permanently in 1975, "part of the price we pay for progress" noted Public Works director Bernard M. Reen at the time), but for every challenge, Grindle also sees hope. Though the inlet at Tannery Brook is dry now except during storms, the pond continues to be fed from clean underwater springs. There are aggressive invasive plants, such as purple loosestrife and the only known New England infestation of Brazilian elodea-probably spread when someone dumped their aquarium down a storm drain, and which has surprised and dismayed everyone by surviving the winters to begin pushing out native water plants-but volunteers could keep these in check. And wildlife continues to thrive around the pond. Grindle suspects that he spotted a pair of black crowned night herons earlier this year, of which there are no known nesting pairs in New Hampshire. Grindle has just about three years left to accomplish the goals of the Urban Ponds Restoration Program. He stands on the shore of the old beach ticking off plans for Nutts Pond, a tipped over shopping cart in the water behind him. It's possible that creating artificial swales and trenches to mimic the ones that naturally occurred before development will clean up runoff before it enters the water. Community education-to reduce fertilizers and pesticides, to improve storm drains when new stores like Stop N Shop come in-can reduce the pollution entering the system. With a little redevelopment help from the city's Rails to Trails program, maybe the trails and nearby railroad bed can connect the area to other city green spaces. The landscape is thick with the challenges of the urban pond. On this August day, it's an idyll, ripe with the full bloom of summer. Birds chatter in the oaks and maples overhead. Above the far shore, plane after plane lifts off from Manchester Airport, evidence of the ever-growing city. To learn more about the Urban Ponds Restoration Program, or to find out how to help clean up your neighborhood pond, contact Art Grindle at the Planning Department, 624- 6450. Karen Marzloff can be reached at hippo@hippopress.com
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