Photo Essay
Soda Lake
Page 1 of 3; Jump to Page 2 | Page 3
Soda Lake is a large playa on Monahans Draw that is privately owned. Midland Naturalists (who have special permission from the landowner) have visited the ranch thousands of times over the last 20 years. In the rainy 1980s it filled up and retained water for at least seven years. It filled up again in the summer of 2007 and still had several feet of water in February, the date of the Master Naturalist visit to the site. Many species of birds have been found there that have never been seen anywhere else in Midland County, including Black Skimmer, Bald Eagle, and in recent years Black-tailed Gnatcatcher and American Raven. On the limestone ridge to the west of the lake several species of wildflowers not commonly found in Midland County are common, including the American Indian spring delicacy Chimaya.
Soda Lake had last previously filled in the late 1930s after a 15-inch rain upstream. However, because the soil in the area is the typical “gyp gray” the lake must have filled many times over the last thousands of years. When it is dry, it is usually covered with Alkali Sacaton grass (and nowadays, salt cedar). The gyppy soil continues down the draw for several miles.
Photographers; Pat Porter, Taffy Armstrong, Chris Cherry, Sean Patty, Nina McCart, Burr Williams, Sharon Jones, R.L. Orth, Leslie Harman
Click on each image to see a larger version; use your browser's "Back" button to return to this page.
On the day of the Master Naturalist visit the wind was blowing over 25 miles an hour. To the north of the lake are many farm fields, which made the sky hazy with dust. In the foreground is lote bush interspersed with mesquite. In between the shrubs are the dead stalks of several types of annual weeds turned yellow to red with the freezes of winter. Much of this area was a prairie dog town until ten years ago, when the colony disappeared, and the brush increased.
To the north of the lake a ridge is covered with lotebush, javelina bush, and mesquite. The red plants are the salt cedar down in the bottom of the draw to the east of the lake.
Underneath the gyppy deposits, caliche or limestone rock must be close to the surface, since javelina brush is present. The lake covers at least 100 acres. Like many locations in West Texas, oil wells dot the landscape.
Some of the salt cedar that had grown in the lake bottom since the 1980s remains, but much of it has floated to shore, leaving plenty of open water.
The east end of the lake is very shallow, providing excellent habitat for shorebirds.
The oil well is above the highest waterline. On that windy day, many of the ducks had beached themselves along the shore to wait out the inclement conditions.
The slope of the hill to the north of the lake has large bare areas interspersed with clumps of alkali sacaton grass and small turf areas of Salt Grass. The pasture has a few bulls wandering around, but they never bothered the Master Naturalists during the field trip.
Alkali sacaton is normally three feet across and about as tall, with the bloom stalks reaching up to five feet tall.
Older alkali sacaton will die out in the center of the clump leaving a dead space in the center. Such a clump maybe 50 years old or even older.
The gyp soil has gray and grayer tones the harder packed the soil becomes. This indicates some organic material has been mixed in. It is probably not cryptogamic soil, but to our knowledge no one has observed the soil after a rain to see if the aglae that is in cryptogamic soil is there and turns green.
Saltgrass is a native turfgrass that can withstand high pH soils (over 10.) We have met a few individuals in the region that have transplant the grass to their yards to create a turf - maybe more people will, some day.
In damper soils saltgrass forms turf, but in the driest and steepest soils it remains as single clumps that lay dormant, sometimes for a year or more.
The fifteen members of the 2008 Master Naturalist class spread out and walked along the lake and the ridge to the north for over 3 hours, despite the "hellacious" winds. All but the last few photographs taken of sandhill cranes were taken by the class members during the visit.
The salt cedars along the shore were festooned with dried algae, indicating the highest level of water in the lake in the summer of 2007.
Many species of birds examine the detritus windrows, looking for insects, or other edible organic material. Either sandhill cranes or great blue herons might have left these tracks.
This area completely covered with tracks was where the sandhill cranes had been earlier in the morning or the night before. During the night they stand in the water and sleep, so the coyotes will not reach them. Visit this essay to learn more.
The organic material once in the lake washes up on shore during strong south winds, leaving successive lines of detritus.
The saturated soil is yucky and mucky, and sometimes will form organic "hazes," cloudy spots that do not reflect and sparkle like the rest of the muck.
Sometimes the detritus windrows are full of tiny down feathers, bird droppings, as well as all sorts of others rotting organic material. Interestingly enough, there is no bad smell.
A photographer was watching the small insect on the floating leaf. After the picture was taken and examined on the computer, the small paired objects aroused our curiosity -- are they eggs of an invertebrate, or seeds of a plant? The white "strings" are puzzling, too.
This tiny hardshelled beetle, about the size of this mark (^) scooted along the surface of the water. It may very well be a species unknown to science, for the aquatic invertebrates of playas are only now beginning to receive scientific inquiry.
Daphnia are aquatic crustaceans that are even smaller the beetle above. It is green with two antennas going in opposite directions. Do you see it?
The frequent wave action leaves ripples on the sand under the water surface,
Organic detritus is found in the water, too, including bird feathers. In this detritus the class members found a number of bloodworms, which mature into the "gnats" that sometimes swarm in the millions along the shores of the lake. The gnat swarms are often found on humid and still mornings when the air temperature is above 50 degrees. The mechanism for such mass maturation and dispersal may be unknown (despite searching in Sibley's library and online, we could find no explanation for synchronous maturation.)
A salt cedar stick in the water was covered with "moss," which included bryozoa as well as algae.
Among the organic material on the shore was a tiny spider, no larger than this mark: #.
A larger bird left this dropping, but the group decided it was too small for a sandhill crane dropping (see later photographs.)
Some members of the class believed this was a fish bone, while others thought it might be a bird bone. The Sibley staff was not sure, either!
When this irregularly shaped object was found, no one could figure out what it was.
Another such object had six legs and a thorax nearby, and "the light began to dawn." Do you know what it is?
This should reveal the answer - the exoskeleton of a larval dragonfly. But is that a smaller one in front of the bigger one. Were the exoskeletons shed, or did they end up on shore "locked in the moment of predation" and then both exoskeletons later become empty due to drying out, or some form of even smaller parasite eating them from the inside. All of these pictures were taken in the detritus windrow along the edge of the shore, under piles of drying algae.
Water snails are also found in the playa. If the lake was dry almost 20 years, how did they get there? (More than likely the snails were transported by birds, either in mud on their feet, or in their feathers. The snails could have arrived in the form of eggs, not in the adult form.)
Several different shapes of dragonfly larva exoskeletons were found in the detritus. The Midland Naturalists have been working on identifying the species of dragonflies for the county, but have yet to correlate larval shapes with the adult.
Almost in the center (but a little down and to the right) is a small "fly" floating on the surface of the water. It is also about the size of the asterisk * mark.
This larger fly if probably a shore fly, and is often found in incredible numbers along the shore. Even during the windy day that the Master Naturalists visited the group decided there might be as many as 6 for every foot of shoreline. Mujltiply that for a mile of shoreline, and that comes out to over a half million present that day (but there were probably more per square foot that the group did not notice.) No wonder shorebirds love to poke in the mud - and they probably have to eat hundreds a day to survive. How many larvae are present at any one time is anybody's guess!
Upon closer examination, this is a mating pair of shoreflies. How many eggs does each female lay? A cursory glance at entomological texts indicate that several hundred eggs may be laid in one female's lifetime.