Nellita Creek

It's getting harder and harder to imagine what this site looked like just six years ago - when 400' of timber bulkhead marked the shoreline and the channelized creek flowed over the bulkhead in a flume. The small estuary that was created behind the old bulkhead line is smaller than it started, since a lot of sediment came down the stream in the first couple of years, but it still represents new wetland, brackish marsh, and low gradient stream habitat. Salt marsh is establishing near the creek mouth and the forest is rapidly taking over the rest of the site.

AERIAL VIEW

The beach still seems to be naturally starved of sediment to me, and the restored spit has a strange appearance (look at the aerial), but all the pieces are in place and with time they will sort themselves into something that looks like it always belonged.

This is my fourth visit - you've got to go back to the 2009 post to see what it looked like before:

Nellita Creek: October 2011
Nellita: January 2010
S. of Frenchman's Cove: May 2009

By the way, this is part of the Stavis NRCA (WDNR's Natural Resource Conservation Area), since I realized I had never used that name in these posts. I'm still not even sure that Nellita Creek is really the correct name - or if it is, that I've spelled it right!