Ammonia overruns at Little Palm nearly double as the Muskingum runs low
July 30, 2026
An ammonia nitrogen violation at Little Palm Properties has moved from bad to worse rather than resolving itself. The facility exceeded its permitted ammonia limit at the outfall by 720% in the quarter ending last December, then by 1,290% in the quarter ending this March, nearly doubling the overrun in just three months. Under the Clean Water Act, discharges at this level qualify as significant non-compliance, a designation reserved for the more serious end of permit violations.Ammonia at these concentrations is directly toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates, and it exerts an additional pull on dissolved oxygen in the water it enters. That toxicity matters more than it might in a normal year because the Muskingum River at Dresden is currently running at roughly 10 cubic feet per second, a small fraction of its spring peak near 5,600 cfs. A river reduced to this trickle has little capacity to dilute or flush what's discharged into it, so the same volume of ammonia lands in a much smaller, much less forgiving body of water than it would in April.It's worth being straight about what isn't actually being measured here. None of the five USGS gauges within 25 kilometers of this stretch, on Wakatomika Creek, Salt Creek, and the Muskingum and Licking themselves, track dissolved oxygen, pH, or ammonia; they record only streamflow and gage height. The exceedance is documented on paper, and the low-water conditions are real and measured, but no instrument nearby is actually watching what happens to the water chemistry as the two combine. For now, the link between the violation and the drought is a matter of ecological inference, not direct measurement, in a landscape shaped by the Ohio/Kentucky Carboniferous Plateau, where narrow valley streams like this one have never had much dilution capacity to spare.
Zanesville plant's compliance lapse lands on an already-impaired Muskingum
August 19, 2026
The Zanesville Wastewater Treatment Plant, which discharges directly into the Muskingum River at Zanesville, is currently listed by EPA as in significant non-compliance with its Clean Water Act permit. The specific pollutant and the magnitude of the exceedance aren't part of this cycle's public record, but the setting alone makes the finding worth attention.This reach of the Muskingum, running from the Licking River confluence down through Meigs Creek, is already on Ohio's list of impaired waters requiring a formal cleanup plan. Of 28 stream segments assessed within 15 miles of Zanesville, 25 are impaired. A permitted discharger falling out of compliance on a river system regulators have already flagged as overloaded doesn't just add one more violation to a file; it adds pollutant loading to water that state assessors have said can't absorb more.It's worth ruling out the obvious alternative explanation: this isn't a story about drought concentrating pollutants in a shrunken river. Flow and gauge height at Zanesville are within normal range for the season, and the county has gone fourteen weeks without drought conditions. Whatever is elevating pollutant levels here is a matter of what's being discharged, not how much water is on hand to dilute it.Friends of Lower Muskingum River, a watershed group focused on this exact stretch of river, is a useful point of contact for anyone tracking how this compliance issue is resolved.
Cedar waxwings strip redbud fruit at Blue Rock
June 25, 2026
The eastern redbuds along the forest edge at Blue Rock are carrying fruit now. The flowers are long gone, replaced by flat, papery seed pods that hang in clusters from the branches like rows of green tags. The leaves have filled in fully, and the tree looks ordinary from a distance, the kind of understory tree you walk past without stopping. But the pods are there, and the cedar waxwings have found them.Cedar waxwings move through the canopy in small, loose flocks. They are compact birds, smooth-plumaged in warm brown and gray, with a black mask across the face and a yellow band at the tip of the tail. The red waxy spots on their secondary wing feathers, the ones that give them their name, are visible only up close. They tend to arrive without much announcement, a high thin seee from somewhere in the canopy, and then suddenly several birds are working the same branch. They pick through the redbud pods efficiently, taking seeds and pulp and moving on. If you watch long enough you may see one pass a food item to the bird beside it. This happens regularly in flocks, a behavior that appears connected to pair bonding, though it is common outside of courtship as well.The eastern redbud is a native understory tree, common on the slopes and hollow edges of this part of Ohio. It blooms early, before the leaves emerge, covering bare branches in pink-purple flowers that are visited by native bees pulling nectar in late winter cold. By summer the flowers are gone and the pods have formed, each one containing several hard, oval seeds. The pods persist on the tree for months, drying and darkening as the season advances. For the waxwings, this is a reliable food source that bridges the gap between the soft fruit they prefer, wild cherries, serviceberries, mulberries, and the berry crops that will come later in summer and fall. Waxwings are among the most fruit-dependent birds in North America. They time their movements and breeding around fruit availability, nesting later in summer than most songbirds so their chicks can be fed on ripe fruit rather than insects.The redbud offers something else, too. Because the pods hang exposed on the outer branches, they are accessible to birds that prefer to forage in the open rather than deep in the foliage. The wood thrush foraging on the forest floor below, or the red-eyed vireo working the interior of the canopy for insects, are not competing for the same resource. The waxwings occupy a foraging zone that is largely their own. Where Morrow's honeysuckle, an invasive shrub present in this area, produces berries later in the season, waxwings will take those too, which makes them occasional agents of its spread. But at this moment, in high summer, it is the redbud pods they are after.
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