As development marches westward from Franklin County, conservationists raise the alarm about preserving biodiversity in these national scenic rivers.
By Randy Edwards
Freshwater mussels, clam-like creatures that spend remarkably long lives at the bottoms of rivers and lakes, are among the most endangered animals in the world. Big Darby Creek, a mostly sleepy stream that passes just a few miles west of Downtown Columbus, is one of the best places in the Midwest to find these mussels and, in fact, hosts some very rare species.
And yet, not counting shells of dead specimens, most people don’t see the mussels, which (if we’re honest), resemble rocks and often are similarly encrusted in algae and sediment. They are nearly invisible to the untrained eye. That’s why I’m standing knee-deep in the Darby with two men whose eyes are well trained: Nate Shoobs, the curator of mollusks, crustaceans, and general invertebrates at the Museum of Biological Diversity at Ohio State University, and a genial middle-aged librarian named John Tetzloff, president of the Darby Creek Association and for nearly three decades a stalwart defender of Big Darby Creek.
Both men could fairly be called malacologists, the name for someone who studies mollusks, the phylum of invertebrate animals that includes mussels and clams as well as snails, squid, and many other slimy things. Tetzloff is self-taught and is laser-focused on mussels, while Shoobs is university trained and specializes in snails. Both are peering through clear plastic boxes that they lower into the water to cut through the reflections and movement on the surface. Only Shoobs has a permit to handle mussels—which are legally protected in the U.S.—so when Tetzloff spots an interesting critter, he calls on the museum curator to confirm its species.
Many of their common names are absurdly comical: snuffbox, heelsplitter, kidney shell, spike, pistol grip. Shoobs pulls them, dripping, from the water and points out various features that make them unique, and then releases them back into the cool, late-spring flow of the creek. After about an hour Tetzloff, who is wearing chest waders and a Harry Potter ballcap, announces that he’s found a clubshell. This mussel is one of the Big Darby animals that are so rare they have been added to the federal endangered species list, making them among the most protected species in the United States. Shoobs avoids touching it, but instead uses his viewing box and an underwater camera to confirm that yes, it’s a clubshell.
I’m no malacologist, but it seems important that we’ve spent only an hour in this 50-yard riffle, and this is our second clubshell of the day. A bit excited, I point out the obvious: “That’s the second live one we’ve found.”
Tetzloff looks up with a crooked smile and the reassuring voice of a librarian who must tell a 12-year-old that all copies of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban have been checked out.
“Well yeah, but remember, we put them here.”
Indeed, we’d selected this particular stretch of river because it is one of the locations where more than 2,000 rare mussels were transplanted about 10 years ago, having been re-located from a bridge construction site on the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania. As if to remind us, Shoobs spies a dead clubshell in the same riffle, and its empty shell still carries the transponder that researchers glued to it for tracking purposes.
So, it should be no surprise to find rare mussels here, in this riffle deep within the Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park. We also should be finding them throughout the Big Darby Creek and its principal tributary, the Little Darby Creek. The creek is, after all, considered one of the best places in Ohio to find them.
Mussels are, however, in decline. The most recent biological survey of the creeks, completed 10 years ago, documented promising improvements in the aquatic life of the Darby creeks, state and national scenic rivers that have been the focus of intense conservation efforts for decades. Fish and small invertebrates seem to be improving. But mussels have steadily declined over the past few decades, despite a half century of work by scientists, government agencies and advocates like Tetzloff to protect their habitat.
“There are a lot of mysteries in the Darby,” Tetzloff says, “but the current one is, why are the fish doing so well, and the mussels doing so bad?”
To be fair, freshwater mussels are in decline across the continent, and scientists can’t pinpoint why. As they study the sources, and as urban development is increasingly moving into once rural parts of Franklin and surrounding counties, all eyes are on the recent decisions of local and state officials who have the unenviable job of striking the balance between competing visions of the Darbys’ future.
The Big Darby Creek runs more than 80 miles through four counties from its source in Logan County to where it empties into the Scioto River near Circleville. Along the way, the Little Darby Creek joins its larger namesake near Georgesville, at the heart of the Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park. Together the two streams drain 556 square miles, mostly farmland until at least the 1950s, when Columbus and its suburbs commenced a wave of growth that has scarcely ebbed since.
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When he was young, Big Darby Creek was “nothing special” to Tetzloff, 61, who grew up in Columbus’ Hilltop neighborhood.
“Me and my buddies were really into fishing, and we dipped a line in most Central Ohio streams. I remember going out there (to Big Darby Creek) a couple of times, and honestly, mostly I remember it was mosquito infested. It was a pretty wild place.”
A scrap of land purchased by the fledging Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks system was open to the public by then, but it was small and not well developed. Tetzloff and his high school fishing pals were unimpressed. “Back then, we’d look at Field and Stream, or Outdoor Life, all the big outdoor magazines, and they never had a story about Ohio,” he recalls. “We didn’t have trout, or northern pike, or muskies (muskellunge). We had muddy rivers with catfish and carp.”
Tetzloff stayed in Central Ohio for his undergraduate degree at Otterbein College and later went to Pennsylvania State University for a master’s degree in philosophy. By the time he came back, the Darby creeks quite suddenly (it seemed to him) had become the toast of the town’s environmental community.
Actually, efforts to protect the creek had been ongoing, if intermittent, for at least two decades. Two major proposals to dam the creek and create a reservoir were floated between the 1960s and the 1990s. Both proposals failed, due in part to community opposition and fueled by growing recognition among scientists and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources that the creeks had survived an era of unbridled industrial pollution surprisingly intact. After a court battle, the creeks were declared state scenic rivers in 1984 (national scenic river designation came in 1994). In the early 1990s, as Tetzloff was finishing graduate school, Columbus utility planners bowed to public pressure and decided they would find other drinking water sources for the expanding region, ending the last major threat of dam-building on the creek. In 1991, the Nature Conservancy, a global nonprofit conservation group, included the Darby creeks on a list of “Last Great Places,” where they kept company with marquee sites like the Florida Keys and a condor preserve in Ecuador.
And in 1992, while working as a landscaper and developing a bird-watching habit, Tetzloff read a series in The Columbus Dispatch that highlighted the ecological value of the creek and the myriad efforts to protect it. Curiosity led him back to the metro parks and their public nature programs, where he first learned about the fascinating diversity of freshwater mussels.
“I started to get a much better appreciation for the complexity of the Ohio environment, even in its heavily industrialized state,” Tetzloff recalls. “Back then, you could go in the stream and run your hands through the substrate and pull out mussels. And it was absolutely stunning to me that you could sit in this one run and pull out 15 different species that were virtually invisible (from the surface). And that was it for me.”
A poster child for life-long learning, Tetzloff began haunting the mussel collections of the Museum of Biological Diversity. The institution on Kinnear Road boasts the world’s largest collection of species of the family unionidae (freshwater mussels). Eventually, Tetzloff’s fascination caught the attention of David Stansbery, the renowned malacologist who, with other OSU scientists, had provided the scientific evidence to support protection of the Darby creeks. The young landscaper with a philosophy degree was added to the museum’s payroll for more than a year, helping to maintain the collection and soaking up as much information as he could.
As often happens with those who immerse themselves in the natural world, Tetzloff evolved from autodidact to advocate. He joined the Darby Creek Association, a group founded in 1972 to fight the dam proposals and earn scenic river designation for the creeks. At the time, the group was in the midst of a pitched battle over the most grandiose of all the Darby Creek preservation plans. In 1997, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally proposed the Little Darby National Wildlife refuge, which would have set aside up to 50,000 acres of land to protect the Little Darby Creek and restore the prairies that dominated western Ohio until they were plowed under for crops.
The proposal had the support of most state conservation groups, Columbus city officials and then-U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine. Half the land was intended to be kept as farmland, through legal easements, but local farmers, with the support of the powerful Ohio Farm Bureau, stopped the refuge proposal in its tracks. The feds formally withdrew in 2002, two years after Tetzloff became president of the Darby Creek Association, a post he still holds.
Although the refuge never got off the ground, conservation efforts continued, and the public’s awareness and enjoyment of the creeks has only grown over the past two decades.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources has protected more than 1,500 acres along both streams, including the 430-acre Little Darby Creek State Nature Preserve, dedicated just last summer near West Jefferson. The Appalachia Ohio Alliance, a local land trust, has conserved about the same, mostly along the southernmost reaches of the Big Darby. And the Nature Conservancy has protected more than 1,000 acres and completed a restoration of the Big Darby’s headwaters in Logan County, which had been turned into a ditch by an expansion of route 33.
Metro Parks has acquired more than 2,000 additional acres over the past two decades and Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park is now the largest park in the system, says Kevin Kasnyik, resource manager for the system. Fold in Prairie Oaks Metro Park, just upstream, and the system now owns 9,486 acres within the watershed.
With its multi-purpose trails, popular nature center and its herd of bison, Battelle Darby Creek is one of the most popular in the system with more than 190,000 visitors last year, Kasnyik reports, including 5,800 participants in public programs and nearly 6,000 school students.
Despite the efforts to expand public access to the creek and its lands, it can be tough to sell the public on the extraordinary ecology of the creeks, Kasnyik explains. The Big Darby offers no waterfalls or canyons, and its most extraordinary feature, its mussels and endangered fish, lies beneath the placid surface of its meandering streams.
“That’s one reason we constructed the nature center [which features a 53-foot ‘living stream’ exhibit], to open eyes and minds about what’s under the water,” he says. “The more we educate, the more people will understand what a unique opportunity it is to have something like this so close to a major metropolitan area.”
Indeed, the Big Darby including its tributaries is widely considered to be one of the most biologically diverse streams of its size in the Midwest. Of its size is an important qualifier—the Darbys don’t compete with larger waterways, but have avoided the fate of so many Ohio streams, being mostly free-flowing (un-dammed) and spared significant industrial pollution. “More than half of the species known from the entire state can be found there,” says Shoobs. “I’d also say that the Darby creek system is among the most biologically intact systems for freshwater mussels in the state. Even with the recent declines, it has a very high proportion of its original fauna. Most streams around here have lost way more diversity over time. This is reason enough to protect it.”
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In 2006, the political subdivisions of Franklin County approved the Big Darby Accord, which is essentially a development plan for the part of the Darby creek watershed within the county. It has turned out to be one of the more successful efforts to protect the streams. Although the individual communities—which include Columbus, its suburbs and unincorporated townships—have the last say in what kind of development gets green-lighted, they’ve all agreed that home building, for example, will conform to what is loosely referred to as conservation development. At least 50 percent of a development will be open space, and no more than one house per acre will be permitted across the entire project. In practice, this leads to clusters of houses on small lots with plenty of park-like space and water features.
These recommendations were put in place to protect the creek, but they also lead to the type of development today’s homebuyers are seeking, says Josh Barkan, vice president of land for M/I Homes, one of Central Ohio’s largest residential development companies.
“At M/I, we’ve really leaned into smaller lots and more open space,” Barkan says. Families have less time, and “people want green space that they don’t have to take care of. Big open spaces that people can enjoy.”
We’re having the conversation in the model home for Hill Farm, a subdivision still under construction on Scioto-Darby Creek Road, about half a mile from the Hilliard city line and another two miles from Big Darby Creek. When completed, 229 houses will be built, with prices starting at about $400,000. Dozens already are completed, clustered around a series of interconnected ponds, with paved footpaths forming a perimeter around the development.
Barkan is a passionate pitchman for M/I’s developments in the Darby watershed. With 69 percent open space, Hill Farm goes beyond the limits recommended by the Big Darby Accord but is closer to the limits set by Hilliard’s newly approved comprehensive plan, which calls for 70 percent open space within the Darby watershed.
“We certainly believe that protecting the Darby is important,” he says. “To have a resource that is so revered by the community is an important part of creating a great place to live.”
Yet M/I ran up against opposition this year when it proposed phase two of Hill Farm. The Darby Accord Advisory Panel, which makes recommendations to the local governments on proposed developments, declined to support the plan. Although phase two of the development would include even more open space, it appears that when the Darby Accord was approved, the city of Columbus, which controls sewer service to the area, agreed to give the suburb 2,000 additional sewer taps within the watershed. In the two decades since, those taps have been used up.
Members of the Darby Accord Advisory Panel, which includes Tetzloff, say Hilliard is, quite literally, tapped out. The advisory panel voted to reject the proposal in May, and the Hilliard Development Commission followed suit in June. M/I Homes and city officials from both Columbus and Hilliard say the sewer line that serves that section of Hilliard may be able to accept more homes beyond the 2,000 taps, but that conversation misses the point, says Anthony Sasson, a former ecologist with the Nature Conservancy and a longtime advocate for Darby protection.
While other rivers in America may face significant pollution from factories and habitat disruptions from large dams, the threats to the Darby are primarily from water running off farms and urban areas. The more rooftops, parking lots, streets, and other hard surfaces fill the watershed, the more chemicals are washed in. The hard surfaces also cause destructive pulses of stormwater that erode and disrupt habitat. The restriction on sewer taps was merely a proxy for limiting development in the area, Sasson argues, and hopes city officials hold the line on additional development in Hilliard.
“There is a technical limit to how much development you can put into a place before the streams decline. That’s what we were trying to address in 2006. Now, we’re bumping up against that in Hilliard. Those who don’t want to recognize that are louder voices and have significant resources.”
The most recent survey of Big Darby Creek and its tributaries by the Ohio EPA, which is 10 years old now, does support the notion that urban development in Columbus and its suburbs is less than good for the streams. Although there is data showing the health of fish and aquatic insects improved for the Big Darby itself, the tributaries that run through Hilliard—Hellbranch Run and Clover Groff Run—continue to struggle.
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Generally, the Big Darby Accord has done a relatively good job at limiting excessive development in the Franklin County portion of the watershed, Sasson says, although he has complaints about the quality and maintenance of those natural areas.
What concerns Darby advocates now is what is happening in parts of the watershed not protected by the terms of the Darby Accord. In recent years development companies have been leap-frogging over Franklin County and into Madison and other adjacent counties. Unhampered by the requirements of the accord, these projects have more traditional urban densities, and some are being built quite close to Big Darby Creek.
Anticipating increasing demand for additional commercial and residential development, officials in Madison County are planning a massive expansion of its sewage treatment system. To avoid adding treated wastewater to the Darby, they plan to run their discharge lines into the Deer Creek watershed. That solution does not, however, address the issue of stormwater runoff, and Darby advocates say not enough has been done to ensure that growth in these once-rural areas won’t further degrade the Darby creeks.
As the river absorbs more water during storms, the fast-moving current cuts deeper into its course, separating the creek from its floodplain, causing more erosion and disrupting the natural ebb and flow of floodwaters. “The whole creek is already hydrologically challenged by stormwater runoff, some from development and some from farming,” Tetzloff says. “The more stormwater you get, the more downcutting you get, and the harder it is for the creek to escape (into the floodplain) and relieve that pressure.”
Tetzloff and other advocates for the creek have asked the Ohio EPA to extend the protections provided by the accord to the entire watershed, not just the Franklin County portion. In March, the EPA rejected a proposal supported by most environmental advocates to designate the Big Darby an Outstanding National Resource Water, the highest possible protection for a waterway. Instead, in June, the EPA approved a water quality management plan that will tighten stormwater regulations in the entire watershed, including all the counties beyond Franklin.
The new regulations won’t provide the same degree of coordination and review as the accord, but they will toughen oversight of development in the watershed while still allowing growth, says Ohio EPA Director Anne Vogel.
“We’re going to protect forested areas, require additional stream setbacks,” she says. “It’s about protecting wetland and riparian areas, and highly erodible soils.”
In the meantime, ODNR is planning a thorough assessment of the entire Scioto River watershed, which includes the Darbys, says Bob Gable, scenic rivers program manager for ODNR’s division of natural areas and preserves. The effort, which will take place over the next year, will attempt to integrate new EPA sampling data and fresh mussel surveys with some modeling – trying to establish how much more development the Darby can withstand.
ODNR does not have the regulatory authority of the EPA or local communities, when it comes to controlling development, Gable says, but “We’re trying to get as complete a picture of the ecological condition as we can, so we can use this as a tool to reach out to communities and say, ‘if you want to protect the Big and Little Darby creeks these are the things we need to do.’ ”
Will it be enough? Tetzloff isn’t sure. “In the eastern United States, we don’t have coral reefs or rainforests. Our claim to fame is our biological diversity. And as the nation developed, our rivers took a hit. But they survived in some spots, and Big Darby Creek is one of the best spots. If we lose something like Darby, we’re never going to be able to stitch things back together.”
This story first appeared in the September 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.
