Selected dispatches from the nine-year record.

The lower weir has been gauged continuously since the spring of the second year of the program. In that interval, mean suspended solids at the measuring station have declined from an annual average of 46 mg/L to a present figure of 11 mg/L. Baseflow persistence through the late summer drawdown — the figure we watch most closely — has improved in seven of the past nine years.

These numbers are, in themselves, unremarkable. They are what one expects when a basin is permitted to resume its former work: when soils are no longer compacted by hoof or wheel, when the riparian margin is allowed to thicken, when the stream is permitted its old sinuosities. What I wish to note here is the character of the improvement — its slowness, its near-linearity, its quiet refusal of drama. We have done almost nothing. The basin has done nearly everything.

A separate question concerns the three surviving check dams in the middle reach. Installed between 1908 and 1914 in an effort to stabilize a mill pond long since drained, they now serve no hydrological purpose and present a small but persistent impediment to sediment transport and to the movement of resident aquatic taxa. I recommend, as I recommended in the previous two autumn reports, their careful and staged removal beginning in the coming dry season.

An institution that holds land for a long time develops, inevitably, a set of standing temptations. The temptation to plant. The temptation to thin. The temptation, most seductive of all, to demonstrate that one is doing something. The Trust's founding covenant was drafted by people who had lived in proximity to these temptations and who understood, we think, that the most useful thing a steward can often do is to refrain, to observe, and to record.

This is not a passive posture. It requires the continuous labor of watching, of measuring, of writing down. It requires a willingness to resist the counsel of one's own enthusiasm. And it requires, above all, the institutional patience to accept that the recovery of a damaged basin is measured in decades rather than in seasons.

The transect study initiated in the third year of the program was re-walked this summer by the undersigned and two graduate assistants. Fourteen native herbaceous species have now re-established along the eastern draws, including three that were absent from the original survey. Of particular note is the appearance, in modest but durable colonies, of a spring ephemeral we had not expected to see within the program's working horizon.

The return of the understory is, in a forest of this age and disturbance history, the most reliable single indicator we possess. The canopy is forgiving; the herbaceous layer is not. That it has begun to knit together, quietly and of its own initiative, in the formerly compacted slopes above the cataract pool, is the most substantive piece of news this office has had to offer in some years.

A clear morning, cool for the season. The pool at its customary summer level. Two native trout visible in the shallow margin at first light, taking something small from the surface. No sign of the heron that frequented the lower stones through June; the nest in the upper draw is presumed to have fledged. The access path above the falls has developed a minor washout at the second switchback; this will be noted for attention during the dry-season maintenance round.