The Youghiogheny River is famous for whitewater rafting near Ohiopyle but there’s a tributary downstream where white water is bad.

On the GAP Trail north of Buena Vista — near marker 121 — you can hear a rushing waterfall before you see it.  When you reach its location it’s not a pretty sight. The waterfall stains everything white.

Early this month I looked at the water and its outflow in the Youghiogheny River and discovered that the water is clear and colorless, though it leaves a white residue on everything it touches.

Here are some closer looks.

The water is clear because it’s acidic. The residue is from abandoned mine drainage (AMD), a problem that pollutes more than 2,500 miles of Pennsylvania rivers and streams.

Most AMD in western Pennsylvania is orange like this outfall into Chartiers Creek at Wingfield Pines Conservation Area. The rust color comes from dissolved iron.

The white waterfall is caused by dissolved aluminum sulfate from an old coal mine in the hill above the waterfall. 

As water from the abandoned mine travels downhill it blends with clean water that raises the pH (i.e. lowers the acidity). At some point the diluted mine water isn’t acidic enough to dissolve aluminum sulfate so the aluminum precipitates out as white residue.

This color is somewhat unusual but there are other white streams in Allegheny County including Milk Run in North Fayette Township along Mahoney Road.  This year the Allegheny County Conservation District is reclaiming Milk Run at the cost of nearly a million dollars.

I can’t imagine the price tag for fixing the White Waterfall.

(photo credits: waterfall by Kate St. John. Aluminum sulfate crystals from Wikimedia Commons; click on the caption to see the original)

24 January 2018

What do you do with a stale loaf of bread?  Do you feed it to the birds?  On no!  Did you know that bread is bad for birds?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not going to poison them. It’s just that for birds, bread has no nutritional value.  They’ll fill up on it instead of the food that’s good for them.

Bread is junk food for birds.  So are crackers, chips, french fries, donuts, cereal and popcorn, to name a few.  These foods are especially bad for ducklings because their little bodies have special nutritional needs.

Since the birds won’t control their own junk food intake, you shouldn’t feed them bread.  This isn’t an edict from the Food Police.  It’s just common sense because …

If you’re the only person feeding the birds you can give them good food all the time and feed bread sparingly as a junk food treat and it won’t cause trouble.

But you never know how many other people are feeding them bread. At places where lots of people feed birds, your bread adds to the problem.  Here’s a visual example.  Do you recognize the spillway at Pymantuning?

When you visit a park or waterway where other people feed birds, bring good food for ducks and geese such as:

• Cracked corn, barley, oats or other grains
• Birdseed
• Lettuce and cabbage (cut or torn)
• Grapes (cut in half to prevent choking) and fruit (cut up)
• Frozen peas or corn kernels (defrost them)
• Duck feed pellets (from farm supply stores)
• Worms, mealworms and night crawlers (fish bait)
• And by the way, ducks love dry cat/dog food but the park won’t want you to bring it.

Read more about feeding bread to ducks, including the health problems it causes, at National Geographic’s Education Blog: Stop Feeding Ducks Bread

Yes, bread is bad for birds.

p.s. Click here for a list of what’s good to feed backyard birds.

(photos credits: duckling photo by Jourdain Nicolas via Flickr, Creative Commons license; Pymatuning photo by Brian Byrnes via Flickr, Creative Commons license)