Oh, and here's an interesting computation exercise to determine whether the US Feds would consider an area to be a wetland that I just learned about this past weekend:

1. First you determine the number of days in the growing season for the specific area you're examining. The growing season is determined from "first bud break" to "first frost."

2. Second, you count the total number of days the area you're investigating as either inundated or saturated with water with specific regard to consecutive days of inundation or saturation.

3. Finally, you determine whether the total number of consecutive inundated or saturated days for the area you're investigating is at least 7.5% of the total growing season days.

If an area had a growing season of about 185 days, in order for a saturated area to qualify as a wetland by the Feds, it would only have to be saturated for about two weeks of consecutive days of saturation.

Officially, only about 5% of the US land currently qualifies as wetland areas, although we have lost fifty percent of the wetland areas we once possessed. Because of the loss, there are many grants and programs out there to encourage groups to create wetland areas to build back up our infiltration of land with water and to do something about the runoff of precipitation. One of the state park officials I talked to this past weekend said that because our county is under continual construction, runoff ends up flooding the state park water system with much eroded material that contaminates the lakes there by far more than any pollutants. The idea is to try to fight the adverse effects of construction-caused erosion.

There is a huge beaver lake at the park, by the way, that's been there for years and will continue to stay there. The beavers are active on this lake, but they move to different sections of the park for their activity. The area we examined hadn't had beaver activity in years.