Loamy High Lime Till Plains

Morse Reservoir's water level began dropping an estimated 3-4 feet on October 14 for dam repair purposes. The drawdown affects boat access and habitat, with shoreline exposure creating potential mud flats that migratory waterbirds use in fall.

Asian Clam (Corbicula fluminea) was recorded September 27, 2026, in Fall Creek near Lawrence, continuing its spread across area waterways. This invasive bivalve competes with native freshwater mussels for food and space, slowing the growth of species like plain pocketbooks and reducing overall mussel diversity.

Plain pocketbook mussels (Lampsilis cardium) were documented on September 26, 2026, in the White River near Indianapolis, and on September 27, 2026, in Fall Creek near Lawrence. These native freshwater mussels are sensitive to pollution and habitat degradation, with larvae that parasitize centrarchid fish including bluegill and bass.

Morse Reservoir water level was lowered beginning October 14, 2026 by an estimated 3-4 feet for dam repair. Eared Grebes favor deeper water and shallow alkaline lakes; a significant drawdown reduces resting habitat availability during migration season when the species is still actively moving through the region.

Amur honeysuckle was recorded 32 times within the past 30 days, most recently on October 11 at Westfield Subdivision Trails. This invasive woody plant remains distributed across the metro area from Fishers to Carmel to Indianapolis, but shows no sudden increase in sightings.

New England aster was observed flowering on October 15 at Hague Road, Indianapolis, with multiple blooming observations recorded through mid-October. This native fall aster is in its typical bloom period for the region, with flowers and open flowers documented as recently as October 12.

An Eared Grebe (*Podiceps nigricollis*) has been sitting on the water at Morse Park, on the shore of Morse Reservoir in Noblesville, since at least the second week of September. Birders have reported a single bird there thirteen times, most recently on September 14. This is a western bird. Eared Grebes nest on prairie marshes and shallow alkaline lakes from the Dakotas west to the Sierra, and most of them never come this far east. In central Indiana the small grebe that usually shows up on the reservoirs in fall is the Horned Grebe, and by mid-September the two look alike enough that the differences matter. Both have shed their breeding colors; the Eared Grebe's black neck and gold ear tufts are gone by now. What is left is a dusky little diver with a peaked crown. The peak sits at the center of the head on an Eared Grebe and toward the back on a Horned Grebe. The Eared Grebe's forehead rises steeply, its neck is thinner, and its bill is finer, with the lower edge angled slightly upward so the whole bill looks tipped up. Its face is the best mark at a distance: on a Horned Grebe the white cheek and neck are clean and bright, with a straight border against the dark cap; on an Eared Grebe the gray bleeds down into the cheek and the neck stays gray rather than white. An Eared Grebe also rides with its rear end cocked up out of the water, which a Horned Grebe does not do. How this species spends its autumn is unlike almost any other bird. From late summer into November nearly the whole North American population, close to 99 percent of it, flies to two salt lakes, Mono Lake in California and Great Salt Lake in Utah, to feed on brine shrimp and alkali flies. There each bird more than doubles its weight, from around 260 grams to over 600, while its digestive organs swell and its chest muscles shrink by about half. The birds become flightless for three to four months while they fatten, then rebuild the flight muscles and leave for the Gulf of California and the Salton Sea. Because a version of this cycle repeats several times a year, the Eared Grebe spends roughly nine to ten months of each year unable to fly, longer than any other bird that still flies at all. The bird at Morse Park is not doing any of that. There are no brine shrimp in a freshwater reservoir, so it is diving with its feet for what the impoundment offers: small fish, insect larvae, and small crustaceans. It flew here and will have to fly on, so its chest muscles are intact. It is a bird that peeled away from the movement toward the salt lakes, or was never headed there, and settled on the largest open water it could find in a county of till-plain farmland and subdivisions. Morse Reservoir is a dammed stretch of Cicero Creek, and to a grebe that is what matters: deep enough to dive in, wide enough to be seen from and to leave from. Anyone checking from the park should look for a lone, low-floating bird well out from shore, smaller than a coot, diving often and staying down long. If it is still around, the face pattern and the tipped-up bill will settle the identification.

Streamflow gauges across the Loamy High Lime Till Plains are still reading well below the recent seasonal average this week (August 4-10) - at Fall Creek at Millersville, the latest reading was 7.23 ft3/s against a 90-day average of 230 ft3/s - even though the county's drought was officially declared over back in spring 2026. That gap between the paperwork and the water itself is worth watching. A multi-month drought built through last fall and was technically cleared months ago, but soils and stream baseflow don't reset the moment a monitor lifts a designation; recharge lags behind rainfall, especially once the evapotranspiration demand of August heat sets in. That means the streams and the ground around them are heading into peak summer stress already carrying a deficit, with less water in reserve than a normal late-summer week would offer. For the native forb stands and specialist insects reported here in July, this matters less as a direct threat than as a thinner margin: a dry spell or hot stretch that a fully recovered system might absorb without strain now lands on ground that hasn't finished catching up. Against that backdrop of reduced baseflow, wastewater discharge quality carries more weight than it would in a wetter year, since there's less clean water available to dilute it. The BELMONT & SOUTHPORT ADVANCED WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANTS have an open permit violation on record, though no parameter-level details on the discharge itself were available this session. A stressed, low-flow stream is generally a condition under which effluent problems have less capacity to be diluted, but we don't have data here confirming what, if anything, this facility is currently discharging or what effect it's having downstream - that's a gap worth watching rather than a conclusion to draw yet. None of this is catastrophic on its own, but it stacks: a slow hydrological recovery, a summer heat load, and a permitted discharger out of compliance are converging on the same stretch of the plains at the same time. Watching how the till plains' streams and their associated prairie remnants fare through the rest of August will say a good deal about how much resilience is actually left in the system versus how much is being assumed because a drought declaration expired.

Cup plants, brown-eyed Susans, great blue lobelias, and tall blazing stars are all leafing into their July bloom across the native forb community of the glacial till plains. Observed at multiple sites within fifty kilometers of the city center, these species are ecological remnants of the tallgrass prairie mosaic that once stretched continuously across this landscape, shaped by Pleistocene glaciation into some of the most fertile and botanically diverse terrain in eastern North America. This July flowering window was once tended deliberately. The Miami and Potawatomi peoples managed these prairies with fire for centuries, maintaining the open structure that blazing star and lobelia depend on for dominance. Without regular disturbance, woody encroachment displaces them within years. In the fragments that survive here — cemetery prairies, restored roadsides, park edges — this midsummer bloom is among the most important of the year for the specialist native bees that evolved alongside these plants and have no functional substitute for them.

Wild Indigo Duskywing butterflies (Erynnis baptisiae) appeared along the Fall Creek corridor near the old Arsenal grounds on June 13 — a small but ecologically precise signal. These skippers are obligate specialists: their caterpillars feed only on wild blue indigo, and an adult turning up at this urban site suggests something more than a passing vagrant. Wild blue indigo was once a dominant forb in the wet prairie and savanna mosaic that blanketed this part of the landscape before large-scale conversion to agricultural and urban use. It is not a plant that colonizes new ground easily, and its presence — reliable enough to draw a Duskywing — points to either a surviving prairie remnant or a native planting mature enough to sustain reproduction. In a fragmented city landscape, that is a quiet measure of what ecological restoration can accomplish, even in pieces.