MARIETTA, Ohio — The Ohio River was 4 feet above normal and moving swiftly as Dick Esker steered the pontoon boat toward Buckley Island one morning in early May. Michael Schramm grabbed his binoculars and trained them on the water.

“Cormorant!” he exalted, watching one, then two more of the long-necked birds skim the river, using its cushion of air to glide.

Buckley is one of 22 islands in the Ohio River National Wildlife Refuge. Mr. Schramm is the visitor services manager at its headquarters in Williamstown, W.Va., across the Ohio from this old riverboat town. Mr. Esker is a retired chemical engineer who has volunteered for the refuge three days a week since 2003.

With Collette Johnson, administrative officer, and Rachel Kreiger, AmeriCorps intern, they were out to monitor the island, check wood duck boxes for nests and count bird species.

Few people know about the Ohio River Island National Wildlife Refuge. The federal Land and Water Conservation Fund established it in 1990 with $3.2 million. It is supervised and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose goal is a 35-island refuge, Mr. Schramm said. Its progress will depend on willing sellers and boosts in federal funding, which has been flat for years.

All islands in the refuge are part of West Virginia except two in Pennsylvania and two in Kentucky. They are open to the public from an hour before sunrise to an hour after sunset. The website provides more details.

Thirty years ago, a case was made to protect the chain when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counted 16 heron nests on Fish Creek Island, 100 miles down river from Pittsburgh. There had been none the year before.

Four years later in 1993, the staff counted 154 heron nests on that island.

Decades of pollution — largely heavy metal waste piped directly into the water — had driven cormorants, herons, ospreys and egrets away.

The islands today are profuse with wading birds and songbirds, although the heron population has declined, from about 300 nests on several islands in the early ’90s to about 150 nests on two islands.

Mr. Schramm said the decline doesn’t mean herons are in trouble on the islands but that, more likely, “the herons have simply found other rookery sites,” he said. “The habitat has not degraded.”

It might be that local forests have been left alone so that trees could mature to the size herons need, he said.

Years of pollution

Over that time, the river has endured different pollutants — fertilizer and silt runoff from farms, sewage overflows and products that treatment systems don’t catch, such as chemicals in soaps, hair products and sunscreen, flame retardant, insect repellent and pharmaceuticals.

Concurrent with product pollution is a collapse of insect populations that has led to drops in bird populations.

“Birds eat insects,” Mr. Schramm said. “People have started to notice the losses because they aren’t having to wipe insects from their windshields anymore. It’s very worrying.”

David Wagner, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut, described the causes of these collapses in National Geographic as “death by a thousand cuts” — pollution, insecticides, loss of habitat, deforestation and the loss of wetlands among them.

Troubling, too, are cutbacks to environmental services. The Ohio River National Wildlife Refuge has been without a biologist since 2017, when Patty Morrison, a specialist in fresh water mussels, retired. Mr. Schramm said a new biologist should be on board by autumn. The refuge recently hired a new manager to start in June, but it has no deputy, no biology technicians and a maintenance man set to retire soon. The entire refuge is operating on $800,000 this year.

The Ohio River Islands have the benefit of Mr. Esker’s energy and ingenuity. The national refuge system named him its Volunteer of the Year in 2017. He cuts grass, maintains equipment, operates the boats, plants trees, makes maps and signs. He designed the visitor center, has mapped mussel survey areas and created hiking trails.

“When I worked at duPont, I worked with a team to come up with solutions,” he said. “This is a way to continue doing that and help nature. It gives me a sense of fulfillment and camaraderie.”

Mr. Schramm, who worked in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan and, more recently, as a park ranger in the Grand Canyon, said he regrets that so much work goes unpaid. He added, “When I retire, I intend to volunteer.”

He said he hopes Ms. Morrison’s replacement has scientific knowledge of mussels.

Comeback of mussels

Mussel populations have been depleted by river pollution, too, but the refuge has been restocking the river with mussels from areas where they are threatened — such as under bridge construction — and Mr. Schramm said the colonies are thriving. Their reproduction success is harder to determine.

Mussels shoot their larvae offspring into the gills of fish to carry as host incubators, and because fish move around, the baby mussels fall off when they’re ready, not necessary near their parents’ colony. Divers have to search to find them.

With help from the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, the refuge staff will survey mussel populations in July and August, Mr. Schramm said.

“Through active intervention, mussels have been introduced to areas where they had been eliminated,” said Ms. Morrison by phone from her home in Washington state. “We have seen mussels recover just like birds and fish.”

Mussels are vital to river health. They filter phytoplankton, bacteria and fungi. They stabilize riverbeds. And they excrete nutrients and organic material that plants, fish and other invertebrates need to live on.

When the Post-Gazette first reported on the improved health of the Ohio River and its islands 25 years ago, Ms. Morrison guided a reporter and photographer in a jon boat onto Fish Creek Island, where a few trees were thick with heron nests.

She was just two years into her long service as refuge biologist and was taking scuba classes at the YMCA in Parkersburg, W.Va. to train for monitoring mussel populations. She made 700 dives in her career, and during that time, saw growing interest in the remaining species of freshwater mussels — more than half of which are threatened or endangered.

“There may have been a handful of people working on mussels 25 years ago,” she said. “I’d go to conferences and talk about mussels, and people would stare at me. I just came back from a national symposium where more than 400 students and professionals talked about mussel status, monitoring and restoration.”

20 seasons with song birds

On the day of the Buckley Island excursion, Mr. Schramm and Mr. Esker identified bird songs from a cacophony of orioles, warbling vireos and yellow-throated warblers at the Marietta boat ramp. Warblers had just begun their spring migration.

“When you get acquainted with bird sounds,” Mr. Schramm said, “you have 20 seasons a year instead of just four.”

Buckley Island is the refuge’s longest, at 3 miles. It is a quarter mile across at the widest. It was once home to an amusement park that was wiped out by a flood in 1907. A long-abandoned homestead is crumbling as knotweed and paw paw trees proliferate among massive sycamores and maples.

Because the river has been engineered for navigation, erosion has turned natural shorelines into walls of dirt, or mud, and left tree roots exposed.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has worked with conservation agencies in West Virginia and Pennsylvania to build low-head rock dikes and backfill them with dredged material to control erosion on a few of the islands, including Buckley.

“We designed the dikes with gaps so fish can swim in and out and beavers and turtles and deer can get through, but the dikes prevent further erosion,” Ms. Morrison said. “The Corps had never done that, but they worked marvelously.”

The islands are stop-overs or permanent homes to 200 bird species. Several islands are home to heron rookeries and bald eagle nests.

“When I was working,” Mr. Esker said, “duPont sponsored reintroduction of ospreys on Blennerhassett Island.”

That was 25 years ago, when Ms. Morrison told the Post-Gazette about the company’s relocation of coastal ospreys, expressing hope that they would flourish in the refuge.

They have, Mr. Esker said. “Now, ospreys are all up and down the river.”

“We have come a long way and still have a long way to go,” Ms. Morrison said, considering the 30-year restoration of habitat in the Ohio River and on its islands. “But I’m an eternal optimist. The Clean Water Act has worked. I feel lucky to have been there to see the resurgence of our water birds.”

Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626. Twitter@dnelsonjones.

First Published: June 3, 2019, 11:30 a.m.