SWAN QUARTER — Turns out that those million big, invasive fish that were supposed to be swimming in Lake Mattamuskeet didn’t show up, as contractors conducting a mass removal project that began last year reevaluate the estimated population of common carp in the state’s largest natural freshwater lake.
“What we found is we’re not finding the carp numbers in the lake that we thought were there,” Kendall Smith, refuge manager at Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge, told the Lake Mattamuskeet Watershed Restoration Plan Core Stakeholder Team at a recent meeting.
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“So far we have not detected any aggregations of fish. We are finding concentration, places where you find more fish than others, but nothing that would be considered an aggregation,” he said.
Smith explained that the refuge will continue to work with the contractor during the year to review other techniques, assess the issues with the carp’s habits and reproduction, and determine the next approach.
“We’re learning a lot about their movements, confirming whether or not they do activate in the wintertime or early spring,” Smith continued.
But reduction of carp, aggressive bottom feeders that are blamed for much of the lake’s turbidity, is just one of the multiple challenges being tackled. The team, made up of folks with local, state and federal expertise, including representatives from governments, nonprofits and landowners, is proving to be as resilient and adaptive as the lake itself.
“Like anything worthwhile, it’s the hard stuff you’ve got to pay attention to,” local farmer and former refuge biologist Kelly Davis told Coastal Review, “because the easy stuff works itself out, right?”
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A member of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Davis, along with her late husband Blythe, for decades farmed 2,000 acres of farmland in Hyde County, of which about 150 acres drain into Lake Mattamuskeet.
In his observation, the lake’s biggest issue in restoring the submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, is the haziness of the water, to which the carp contribute by churning up the lake bottom.
“Whatever’s killing the grass,’ he said, “it’s sedimentation. It’s cloudy waters.”
Often referred to as a jewel of Hyde County, Lake Mattamuskeet, the centerpiece of the refuge, is 6 miles wide, 18 miles long and averages 2 feet deep.
The 40,000-acre lake, expansive and often shimmering, is famously photogenic. Serene cypress swamps along its border could be described convincingly as habitat for elves and gnomes.
But its beauty belies its environmental vulnerability. It is situated on low land, surrounded by pocosin forests and rich farmlands, intersected by gated canals that drain water, sediment and nutrients into the lake.
In addition to nearby rivers, the vast Pamlico Sound, to the lake ecosystem’s benefit and detriment, contributes some of its marine life and waters, whether pushed in by wind-driven tides or flooding.
Since the 1990s, the submerged aquatic vegetation in the lake had gradually then suddenly disappeared, depriving the hundreds of thousands of waterfowl along the Atlantic Flyway that had stopped over for food and shelter.
Once Hyde County’s community hub, the lake, the refuge and the long-closed Mattamuskeet Lodge, which the county plans to restore and reopen, is still supporting hunting, fishing and farming activities. And ducks, swans and geese still alight at Mattamuskeet, but now mostly at the seasonal duck impoundments created around the lake.
Since 2017, the stakeholder team has been focused on solutions to the lake’s water quality problems, including loss of SAV and persistent algal blooms, as well as flooding and drainage of the surrounding land.
Guidance for the work has been provided by a watershed restoration plan facilitated by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, in partnership with Hyde County, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. The Coastal Federation is the publisher of Coastal Review, an independent online newspaper that covers coastal issues in North Carolina.
Despite uncertainty with staffing and funding concerns related to recent cuts in the federal government, work at the lake and surrounding land is ongoing and planned for upcoming months, according to a discussion during the Jan. 30 team meeting in the Hyde County Government Complex.
Five projects, funded by a $16.86 million Regional Conservation Partnership Program grant awarded to the North Carolina Coastal Federation, are designed to enhance water quality within the Lake Mattamuskeet watershed.
Project planned are improvements in the Fairfield Drainage District including installing a pump station to reduce drainage into the lake and enhance crops, restoring 1,000 acres of wetlands on converted agricultural land, constructing a 4,506-linear foot living shoreline to protect a Natural Resources Conservation Service dike in Swan Quarter and other critical infrastructure, facilitating agricultural best management practices to mitigate discharge of agricultural runoff into the lake, and outreach to aquaculture producers in an effort to boost participation in oyster restoration.
The Coastal Federation is currently working to finalize a partnership agreement with the Conservation Service, targeted for April, according to the federation’s coastal advocate Alyson Flynn, the meeting’s moderator. She also said that the federation has contracted with consultant Jonathan Hinkle to assist in the design and modeling of the large-scale restoration projects.
Part of the work, which has a four-year timeline, with a potential 1-year extension, involves diverting, pumping and draining water on the land in a way that would avoid adding sediment or nutrients to the lake, a hydrology challenge to engineer and a problem when there may be divergent goals. Drainage improvements also include cleaning out major drainage canals.
“We all agree that the lake is in poor health, and we want to help fix it, but what that looks like seem to change,” Flynn said in an interview, referring to the proposed Fairfield project. “And so, yes, by diverting that fresh water up into the north, we’re hoping that the lake water will naturally filter out through that designed wetland before it gets to the intercoastal waterway in the north, with the assistance of pumps.”
Davis, who attended the stakeholders meeting informally as an area landowner, said that water is affected by changes in sea level and by wind tide, and there’s no choice but to work with the conditions, whatever their whims.
“There will be times where some of that water movement is hampered until the wind shifts and blows the sound back out, but that’s part of water management in Hyde County, or really on the peninsula,” Davis said. “Whether the water body is the Pungo River, the Intracoastal Waterway, the Pamlico Sound, or Lake Mattamuskeet, the whole idea is to try to get the sediment trapped somewhere before it hits that water. And as the water slowly move through wetlands, the slower you can move the water, the more time it has for the sediment to fall out, and the more what you’re sending to the water bodies is mostly just water.”
What is important, she added, is that all the projects’ stakeholders are engaged and involved — and patient.
“They’re big projects, but they’re also projects that should have decades of value. The projects don’t have to be perfect,” she said, adding that every challenge that is addressed at the time makes a difference. “Because the needs are now, and they will be in the near term and the long term, and the wind still blows the sound out.”
