For decades, Fairfax County has refused to meddle in the ebbs and flows of the wetlands that define Huntley Meadows Park.
Beavers, instead, are the engineers of the watery environments, and their dams determine in large part where and how the wetlands that make up about half of the 1,400-acre park dry up or regenerate.
As a result, park officials have essentially been at the mercy of the whims of fickle rodents to shape the environmentally crucial feature and biggest attraction at their second-largest park.
But now a group of beavers is moving downstream in search of food and could abandon a number of important dams, officials say. The county might for the first time install a multimillion dollar control system that would allow them to manipulate water levels and mimic the dams’ natural effects.
The Park Authority will discuss the plan at a May 30 information meeting at Groveton Elementary School. A recent survey indicated local support for the project, Park Authority spokeswoman Judy Pedersen said.
“I think the majority support it,” said Charles Smith, a Park Authority naturalist whoworks closely with Huntley Meadows. “But there is a feeling that [some] don’t want to see us go in there with equipment and manage nature. The massive leap of actually going in there and changing topography … that’s the psychological leap that’s hard for people. And I understand that.”
The installation of new water-level controls is made more pressing by the external changes brought on by large-scale upstream development, which, according to Smith, has resulted on average in a foot of new silt across the entire wetlands in the past 20 years. The county also might install a device to catch and remove new sedimentation.
A wetlands study in the early 1990s examined changes to the park and recommended human intervention, Pedersen said.
Huntley Meadows, which sits south of Alexandria in the eastern end of the county, is considered a premier birding spot and is unique as a freshwater wetlands basically surrounded by development, said Kathi McNeil, president of the Friends of Huntley Meadows Park.
Besides the hundreds of different species that take refuge in the park’s wetlands, the area lessens the damage of storms and filters pollutants in runoff.
