The Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary:
A Quiet Tidal Pond in a Very Loud Place
Along the southbound side of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, just north of Reagan National Airport, in Arlington County, Virginia, lies the Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary. An important gathering spot for wintering waterfowl and home to some interesting native plants, Roaches Run is a quiet remnant of nature in a very loud place. The loud part is easily explained: it can be hard to ignore the rush of parkway traffic, the planes landing and taking off from National, and the occasional train rumbling along the track that skirts part of the tidal pond. But there is a kind of quiet here too, if you look within the Sanctuary itself.
Along the water, visitors can see green herons, ospreys, red-winged blackbirds and mallard ducks, as well as dragonflies and damselflies dancing along the water’s surface. A walk along the banks of the pond might turn up an eastern painted turtle, a black snake, or other herps (“herps” are reptiles and amphibians). Fishermen pull bass and crappie out of the pond. And along the least accessible portion of the shoreline there is an interesting wetland plant community where the shallows are covered with arrow arum (Peltandra virginica) and the bank itself is home to spikes of cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), and the occasional clump of the locally rare Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica).
We began learning about Roaches Run in 2008; the next year, we started talking with the National Park Service, which owns the Sanctuary, about helping to restore the native plant communities between the tidal pond and the Parkway. This area is badly infested with a number of highly invasive alien plants. Just off shore, there are large patches of phragmites (Phragmites australis), a big reed-like plant whose dense, monospecific stands can displace nearly all native marsh. Along the shore and up slope, many areas are dominated by Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), a very large Eurasian shrub that can also form monospecific stands—as it has done in several places at Roaches Run. Much of the other vegetation, as well as some of the Amur honeysuckle itself, is burdened with invasive alien vines, especially Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), and porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata). But there is at least one unusual advantage for restoration at Roaches Run: no deer browsing! Development around the Sanctuary is so dense and extensive as to be virtually impassable to deer.
Our first planting was in the spring of 2010. (We held off for a season or two while an NPS crew worked to break the grip of the invasives with applications of herbicide.) Our volunteers put in a variety of native shrubs and small trees along about 2,500 feet of tidal pond shoreline. The planting included both moist-soil species and species better suited to drier soil, since in some areas the slope is so steep that it doesn’t benefit much from the pond, even though the shore may be just a few yards away. The planting included common elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), spicebush (Lindera benzoin), buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), swamp rose (Rosa palustris), silky dogwood (Cornus amomum), blackhaw (Viburnum prunifolium), common alder (Alnus serrulata), black willow (Salix nigra), and smooth sumac (Rhus glabra). Many of the plants came from our own Wild Plant Nursery.
Throughout the summer of 2010, we focussed on controlling invasives in and around the plantings. (The NPS’s herbicide treatments had helped but they couldn’t eliminate the invasives completely.) In addition to our usual volunteer events, we organized a group of “Weed Warriors” to come out once a week or so for a good part of the summer, and keep yanking invasives. Along the northern reach of the planting, where the Sanctuary grounds broaden out somewhat, our volunteers also helped NPS staff push back a massive Amur honeysuckle infestation. The NPS crew used chain saws; we only had handsaws but even so, all that extra cutting really made a difference.
Back in the planting, areas cleared of invasives were rapidly occupied by dense stands of pokeweed (Phytolacca americana), a “native invasive.” Pokeweed belongs in such places—it specializes in colonizing disturbed areas. But we didn’t want it to overwhelm our plantings completely, so our volunteers made their way back into the planting to cut it back. Once the pokeweed was down, the plantings were once again accessible to NPS crews, who watered from pickup trucks that they drove along the side of the Parkway.
We did another large planting in the spring of 2011. We added another 400 plants, consisting of more or less the same species that we had planted before. The survival rate for the 2010 planting seemed to be fairly high, given the previous summer’s drought and the competition with invasives. (We didn’t do a full count—that would have been difficult under the circumstances.)
Thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who have been helping out at Roaches Run, a native riparian community is beginning to emerge in our planting area. We’re planning to continue collaborating with NPS to improve and extend the site.
Where to Find More Information
Our work at Roaches Run is covered in the Roaches Run slide show. For recent activities on sites described in the Special Places page, look at the Special Places News.