04/18/2012 - Upper Dog River

Header image is another photo of a pair of wood ducks.

I went kayaking today to see if new trash swept into upper Dog River during the night. Thankfully the less than a quarter inch of rain did not generate any storm water trash accumulations. Other than this dead gar, the waterway looks clean, eh?  Wrong!

Don, pictured here, works for Mr. Seibert and was removing trash from a neighbor's shoreline, not far from where photo #1 was taken.

Pickerelweed flowers are starting to bloom.

Blue Iris flowers are still in bloom. Aren't the flowers beautiful?

I believe the white flowers are growing on a shrub called Privet.

This is a colony of bryozoans attached to someone's styrofoam plate. Isn't nature beautiful?

Male and female wood ducks.

A Green Heron.

A turtle, out on Styrofoam, was getting some sun.

Bad Day: When you do not get to see the sun anymore.

Someone recently tossed this TV into the canal by Dog River Park. It blends right in with the rest of the City of Mobile's garbage.

03/25/2012 - McCullough Creek and Moore Creek

Header image is a merge of several photos showing the shoreline of Moore Creek.

Water levels were high enough that I was able to paddle way up into McCullough Bayou. Note the scenic shoreline.

End of the line on McCullough Bayou - a 4-foot high beaver dam. Do you see the box turtle in the middle of the dam? I was surprised that there was so little trash caught up in the beaver dam.

People certainly aren't throwing tires out their car windows so where are all these tires coming from? Do you see the Mardi Gras beads?

Wasp and Hornet killer spray certainly cannot be good for Dragon Flies.

Saw a couple of fish today. Here is a dead gar.

Another dead fish. Why are so many fish turning up dead on the shoreline? Do you see the sneaky snake hidden behind the household garbage? How about the snake's head? At least the snake was alive.

Speaking of live, Nutria are alive and well in Moore Creek.

Not much change in the regular trash bergs in Moore Creek.

8-Ball in the Corner Inlet.

On the way back home I went through a small petroleum sheen. There were 3 motor boats in the area earlier. Did the petroleum come from a boat or from the garbage allowed to rot in the water? Based on consumer demand, humans might as well get used to waterways polluted with petroleum.

03/18/2012 - Three Mile Creek & One Mile Creek

An article on March 17th, 2012 by Ben Raines, Mobile Press Register, talks about how Groups want to turn Three Mile Creek into a park.

Local, state and federal officials toured Three Mile Creek on Friday and included Rae Richardson with the City of Mobile, and Nancy Stoner - a senior EPA official. Ben quotes Stoner as saying that a first step toward creating a Park would be conducting a survey of wildlife. Yup, here we go with wasting taxpayer money on studies instead of using taxpayer money to remove the trash. Heck, I can tell you what kind of wildlife is present in that area. Look at the first six photos below for a sample of what life you can see.

Local, State, and Federal officials and local environmental groups should be ashamed of themselves. Get the trash out of the water and wetlands FIRST before considering spending money to construct a Park! Mobile is about to close some of its parks due to budget problems, so to consider constructing a new Park is pure stupid.

The article had a photo showing the group walking past a "heap of stuffed animals and garbage that volunteers had pulled out of the creek." Volunteers didn't pull an entire bag of stuffed animals out of the creek. Someone drove into the vacant lot and dumped their household garbage there. Look at the photos below to see what is in the creek. Anytime you want to go kayaking to see what I'm seeing in the creeks Ms. Stoner, I have a spare kayak.

Header image is a merge of two photos taken in Maple Street Canal showing how Mobile is taking care of its property, even after multiple complaints about the litter on their property.

Because ADEM won't deal with all the abandoned tires despite complaints, there are definitely many breeding grounds for mosquitoes in that area.

There are crabs (8 visible in this photo) along the banks of the creeks. If you look closely at the plastic bottle with the yellow label, 9 states offer a refund if you recycle this bottle. Alabama isn't one of them. Contact your Alabama legislators and encourage them to pass a disposable container recycle bill (bottle bill).

There are raccoons in the Three Mile Creek, One Mile Creek, and Maple Street Canal areas. This one was dead.

Apple snails are abundant as you can tell by all the pink egg sacks.

There are turtles in the creeks. This one just recently died. Could the plastic bag have played a role in its death?

Here is a turtle that was very sick with fluids dripping from its swollen eyes, barely able to move, and looked like it was about to expire. Are the turtles dying from natural causes or from cancer? Looks like a reason to fund another expensive study of the wildlife of the area to see how the trash is affecting them instead of removing the trash.

Could chemicals in the water be hurting turtles? Here is a can that says it contains chemicals known to cause cancer. Xylene, Toluene, and Acetone are listed as some of the hazardous chemicals. When a can rusts the remaining chemicals inside will disperse into the water and air.

Most pressurized spray cans that blow never show signs of what happened however, in this photo the results of a can that rusted through while on a creek bank can clearly be seen.

Did this floating sheen come from a spray can or is it organic? If the waterway wasn't currently used as a garbage dump, that question would not need to be asked.

Here is a little waterfall coming from the old Hickory Street Landfill into Maple Street Canal. I wonder what chemicals lurk in that water. ADEM officials have ignored my email complaints and concern about the old Hickory Street Landfill. Looks like I need to write a paper letter.

How ironic, a City Of Mobile garbage container in front of City of Mobile property.

Trash piling up in the water at the RR track by Telegraph Road. That RR trestle is a blessing because it blocks large trash bergs from entering Mobile River.

This polluted waterway (Maple Street Canal) is a little over ONE mile from Mobile Baykeeper's office. These pictures show how effective Mobile Baykeeper is at keeping their nearby downtown creeks clean. 

Local environmental groups, and local, state, and federal officials should be ashamed of themselves. When are you people going to get this trash removed instead of holding fund raisers and open houses, taking boat tours, proposing studies, making videos, and talking about constructing new parks even though local, state, and federal governments are broke?

About a half dozen garbage bags can be seen in the water.

The tragedy of this wasteful situation is the creek beds are littered with rubbish too (pardon the pun) and the poor turtles have to live in it.

City of Mobile beautiful shoreline. This is Owens School Park according to Google Earth. Parcel ID: R022906151000001.

City of Mobile beautiful shoreline. This is Owens School Park according to Google Earth. Parcel ID: R022906151000001.

Some trash bergs have a lot of green vegetation, others don't. If this pollution comes from the public, the public should have to pay to get it cleaned up and kept clean. 

Most of the trash I see coming from vehicles is coming from trash hauling trucks, so, if trash hauling trucks are a major cause of the litter, they should have to pay to get the trash removed from local waterways.

In Ben's article Casi Callaway of Mobile Baykeeper was noted as saying about Three Mile Creek, “Think of how great it would be if people could use the creek. It’s right downtown." Casi must not get out of her downtown office enough to know people are already using the downtown creeks for fishing and kayaking, even though ADEM doesn't give the creek a Fish and Wildlife designation. ADEM calls Three Mile Creek an agricultural and industrial creek. To be fair, not every area of these creeks are covered with trash as you can see in this photo, but the shorelines are.

03/07/2012 - Moore Creek

Header image is a photo of a green headed red-orange eye'd wood duck hiding behind the orange and green shoreline trash. I wonder if those trash colors are pleasing to its eye. Maybe someone can get congress to fund a million dollar project to study which colors are pleasing to aquatic birds. That way we can encourage plastic bottle makers to use the right plastic bottle colors to make the birds happy. Then someone else can fund a project to study what those new plastic dye colors may do to the fish. Oh, then we need a billion dollar study to see if the new plastic bottles will ever biodegrade - that'll take a LONG time... Then we need to fund a project to have researchers to study the results of the other researchers. When it comes time to publicly fund a project to simply remove the trash so that there is no need for all the pollution research projects, "Oh, we're out of funds." When private funds are found to help get the trash removed from the waters, well, if you don't bus in America's current slaves (Mexicans), who are willing to work as under paid slaves, then there won't be anyone to remove the trash from the water. Why? The majority of Americans are so fat that manual labor is too much for their heart. How'd they get so fat? Well, some say it's from the chemicals used to make plastic... It's a vicious cycle. The universities doing health studies win. The corporations increasing their profits win. The people who bottle your local ground water for 6 cents per gallon and charge you $1.59 for 24 ounces win. Only humans are idiot enough to pay 3 times the cost of gasoline for mostly unregulated water that a chocolate company (Nestle, a company recently fined for labor violations connected to using foreign workers as slave labor thru layers of subcontractor schemes) siphons from your ground water, who then puts the water into a PLASTIC bottle made from petroleum, and sells back to you at an unheard of markup rate, without the quality of the water being regulated like your tap water is. You lose.

The City of Mobile dredging people managed to re-float their dredging pipe and floats which had sunk during the last heavy rain storm. The pipe can now be seen blocking boat traffic in Moore Creek again.

Not much change in this dead dog since Feb 3rd as it continues to negatively embellish the scenery of the nearby Moore Creek residents in more ways than one.

Think Aroma of Decay... Hey, that sounds like a slogan for a new cologne or perfume that I could give to my favorite elected officials at Christmas time who continue to bow down to the corporations instead of the people they represent. Yeah, Aroma of Decay, bottled in Moore Creek, Mobile, Alabama would make a fine gift for state leaders who can't seem to help get the pollution removed out of Alabama waterways. Sending them a bottle of Aroma of Decay would be my way of saying thank you for caring for our environment so much that we currently have ZERO public employees removing river trash that continues to come from Mobile's maintained storm water system. Thank you for having ZERO curb side recycling available to most Mobile residents. This scent is for you. Hehehe. I know...this post is a real stinker eh? All in jest.

Back to reality, unfortunately, when dead bodies end up in water, especially in acidic swamps, the skin on the deceased animal can last for a very long time. Bodies of people who lived thousands of years ago have been found over the years in acidic bogs so well preserved that it BOGgles the mind. (Sorry for that pun.) Ancient Bog Bodies This doggie may be around for a long time.

This trash berg lingers, but it does function as a food station for critters like this 6 spotted fishing spider seen in these two photos and water fowl that dine on embedded vegetation.

Plant life continues to reach for the sun while anchoring its root in the nearest floating styrofoam. I smile knowing life will go on after humans are extinct. Well, maybe. What if there were no bees to propagate plant life?

When the birds and the bees start dying in quantity, mankind might be in trouble, right? What say? Our bee population is down 50%? Not to worry, Alex Wild cuts through all the misinformation the Internet is known for. We're still okay for now.

In a nutshell, if we don't start living in harmony with the earth and the other life on it, we're going to suffer the consequences. We've already allowed corporations to ruin our food supply in America at their profit and we are already suffering the consequences of their experiments on the American people. You can watch Robin's short TED speech on YouTube to hear enough about your food supply to make you red in the face and cause you to change your eating habits.

If you want to put an end to plastic bottle pollution, the solution isn't to pick up each and every bottle that gets discarded and waste money moving them to a distant landfill. The solution isn't to find grant money to fund a one time cleanup of area waterways and beaches only to waste more money moving the plastic to a distant landfill. The solution is curb side recycling everywhere and putting a bounty on each one of those disposable containers, glass, plastic, and styrofoam, so that it encourages you to take it to a recycling machine in your nearest grocery store. Yeah, that will require legislation from leaders not owned by the corporations that paid their way into office.

Huh? You mean they got recycle machines like that already in place in stores? Yeah, we are so far behind the rest of the world in Mobile that it makes me want to move away like many other people I know are doing or have done. That's why the population of Mobile is going down instead of up. No one wants to be in a trashy city run by leaders who can't manage money and who have no backbone. Maybe I can give a few bottles of Aroma of Decay to my local elected officials, too. Sorry, my stinking discontentment for Mobile, the Port of Decay, rises with the increasing density of trash in the water.