The mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa)is one of the first butterflies to re-emerge in North Carolina. This species is the longest lived in the United States, surviving up to 11 months. The adults are dormant in winter, and then re-emerge, wings imperfect and worn, during the first warm days of late winter and early spring. 

This time of year, males are quite bold, bravely chasing birds out of their 300 square meter territories. In early spring, males and females perform a beautiful mating dance, spiraling upward through the air. The females will then lay clusters of eggs on their favorite food plants, black willows, as well as other willow species, elms, birches and hackberries. Although the females die shortly thereafter, caterpillars will emerge from the eggs in April. After three weeks, this brood will have pupated and emerged as fresh, young mourning cloaks. 

The adult mourning cloaks are usually found in woodlands, where they feed on tree sap (especially oak sap), rotting fruit and occasionally nectar, and build up stores for the winter. 

Did you know?

• Mourning cloak butterflies spend the winter frozen in “cryo-preservation.”
• They can live up to 11 months in the wild.
• Their common name refers to their resemblance to the traditional cloak one would where while in mourning.
• Caterpillars live communally in a web and feed on young leaves. 

Identification: The mourning cloak has brown wings with small blue spots bordering a yellow edge. It reaches 2 ¼ to 4 inches in length. 

It’s a great day at ECWA when a landowner calls and asks, “Can we talk?”
 
Late in fall 2017, this was the exciting situation when two landowners contacted the land protection team about conserving their properties with ECWA. Both sites, located just north of the city limits, fall within the Ellerbe Creek watershed and were properties that ECWA had long been interested in protecting.

Thanks to Edward and Marlou Bacon and funding from the City of Raleigh’s Upper Neuse Clean Water Initiative, sixty-two acres of gently sloping former agricultural fields with open meadows and both young and mature hardwood forests have been added to ECWA’s Veasey Farm Preserve, creating a green space now more than 250 acres. 

Located only two miles from Falls Lake and five miles from downtown Durham, the expansion includes smaller tributaries to Ellerbe Creek that wind through the property. Along with protecting drinking water for the Triangle, this conservation property may one day allow for agricultural use, educational opportunities, and public recreation.

Just west of the Veasey Farm Preserve is a pie shaped sliver of land adjacent to the Army Corps of Engineers’ Falls Lake Game Lands, and around the corner from the beloved Heron Rookery. These 5 acres were purchased years ago as part of a nearby development, but due to its location and limited access, the site was never developed. ECWA’s ongoing relationship with the landowner, Cimarron Homes paid off. Knowing ECWA’s reputation for protecting, restoring, and connecting Durham to Ellerbe Creek, Cimarron Homes’ President Craig Morrison was moved to donate the property to ECWA.

​The Triangle Community Foundation generously provided ECWA with a grant to cover closing costs and to increase ECWA’s Stewardship Legacy Fund. We are excited that more land protected means more breathing room for the herons, migratory birds, and other wildlife in our vibrant, rapidly expanding city. 

Last fall, ECWA was selected by The Conservation Fund as one of five nonprofit partners across the country to participate in a Growing Greener Foundations through Urban Parks with Purpose program. The initiative is focused on building equity through a park, trail, or water quality project that improves and heals a neighborhood asset chosen by community members.

For this project ECWA is working in an area that is relatively new to us: The Goose Creek Watershed. Goose Creek is a tributary to Ellerbe Creek that runs through downtown East Durham and flows into Ellerbe Creek right behind the waste water treatment plant on East Club Blvd. We are a full year into the Parks with Purpose Project, and we are excited about the relationships ECWA staff and board members have been building with new colleagues in East Durham.

​The streams and creeks that flow out of the City of Durham and into Falls Lake— including Ellerbe Creek—are degraded due to decades of poor stormwater management in our urbanized areas. Many of these problems come from a time before we realized the harm that we were doing to our clean water resources by ditching, straightening, filling, and dumping waste into those streams. We know better now, and the City now invests in ways to comply with the myriad of state and federal requirements to clean up those streams.

​But Durham should do more than just comply with rules and laws; we should be trying to make those creeks and streams assets for the community. The City’s expert staff is innovative and efficient. ECWA and American Rivers have been partnering to work with them to use these requirements and our community’s amazing resources as an opportunity to invest in our own community and restore our streams.

We all can help by starting right in our own backyards! Green infrastructure is an approach to water management that uses practices like land protection, rain gardens, permeable pavements, green roofs, rainwater harvesting, and something as simple as allowing your gutter downspouts to empty into your yard rather than the sidewalk or street.

Green infrastructure mimics the natural water cycle through the use of plants and soils or through engineered solutions that recreate natural processes. This approach can be used to help clean up our creeks through planned, widespread implementation, using both public and private investment. It took more than 100 years to degrade our streams, and they won’t be fixed overnight; it is a slow and steady process to return the balance to the system.

​ECWA and American Rivers are working together to grow Durham’s stormwater management innovation. In 2018, we hope the City Council and staff will pass a budget that will start the process of: 1) Initiating a code and ordinance review, to assure City rules are not a barrier to stormwater innovation; and 2) developing and launching a formal City cost-share program for the use of green stormwater infrastructure.

Raleigh has recently launched a very successful green stormwater infrastructure strategic plan that incorporates these components into their overall program—Durham can and should do the same. Join one of our Creek Smart Tours to learn more!