NORTHEAST WASHINGTON, D.C.—On a foggy, finger-numbing Sunday morning in early December, chief “litter-gitter” Don Bates guides his jaunty crew of six to a sleek, low-slung motorboat camouflaged among the weeds along a raggedy shoreline near the 10th tee of Langston Golf Course.
“In a way, we are going to church,” he says, “right there in that ditch.”
The selected place of “worship” he is referencing is a stretch of Kingman Lake where the local Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS) has labored for decades to restore swaths of native wild rice. Over the years, hundreds of metal stakes and football-fields’ lengths of steel fencing were erected to stop non-migratory Canada geese from eating newly sprouted shoots have become eyesores.
“The stakes and fencing went from a conservation tool to pollution,” observed Chris Williams, AWS president and CEO since 2021. “We really wanted to get it out and this was a golden opportunity.”
Bates and his team—three women and three men—from Mobile, Ala.-based Osprey Initiative had been hired by a silent partner to muscle the sprawling mess out of the mud.
That Sunday morning, close to high tide, he ferried five hip-wader-clad seasoned veterans and one rookie through a waist-deep channel, then ever-so-carefully to a shallower, predetermined site to immerse them in the river-cleansing ritual.
Out came the wire cutters to tackle the embedded fencing and a giant wrench/chain combination tool specially designed as a giant lever to lift each sunken eight-foot, 10-pound stake from the depths of the linear lake’s clay and silt.
“We’ve modified that T-stake puller to make it work in the real world,” Bates said about affixing a two-foot length of a six-inch by six-inch piece of salvaged wood to the tool. “That required coming out here on Friday to test it.”
The key to liberating each stake is to plant one’s feet when tugging, but be nimble enough to pivot when suction breaks with the muck. Otherwise, you’re on your keister. Soaking wet. And cold—the water temperature lingered at 38 degrees.
“What we do is a combination of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” “Swamp People” and “Dirty Jobs,” ” Bates said about navigating the wet, cold and other extremes to benefit the environment. “My people don’t stop. Once they’re in a groove, they’re beasts.”
Think of them as applying first aid to waterways sickened by the seemingly endless streams of trash that have invaded, courtesy of humans, every nook and cranny of the planet.
That resuscitative skill set has punched Osprey’s ticket to destinations across the country—and even overseas—where doers of all stripes are eager to combine forces to restore wholeness to broken pieces of the natural world.
“Doing this unites communities and that’s what we like about it,” Bates says. “People realize they can have an impact.”
Osprey’s invitation to travel 965 miles north to D.C.’s Anacostia River came at the behest of the National Links Trust. Several years ago, the National Park Service (NPS) signed a 50-year lease with the then-newly created nonprofit to renovate and tend to the three neglected municipal public golf courses—Langston, Rock Creek and East Potomac—within the city’s boundaries.
A joint on-the-ground survey by the Trust and AWS, one of its conservation partners, three-plus years ago revealed that the No. 1 stewardship duty at Langston would be ridding the shoreline of Kingman Lake and the adjacent Anacostia River of trash.
Plastic bottles, cups, balls for every conceivable sport, baby dolls, Styrofoam coolers, milk crates, shoes, utensils and pretty much a sampling of every other human convenience had littered tidal inlets and become entangled in snarls of bush honeysuckle, English ivy, porcelain berry, Japanese knotweed and other invasive plants growing on the island and the water’s edge.
Andrew Szunyog, the Trust’s director of sustainability, spearheaded the Dec. 5-8 multi-pronged endeavor with Osprey, area volunteers and nonprofits.
De-junking pockets of the natural world is de rigueur for Bates. However, he notes that his teams achieve peak performance when they’re able to mesh with organizations who have imagined a doable future.
“What’s really cool for us is, instead of inventing the wheel, we go somewhere and find the wheel is already spinning,” he says, referencing groundwork laid by the Trust, AWS and the D.C. government. “Then, we’re part of something that has momentum.”
For Williams, the partnership assuages longtime lingering concerns about his nonprofit, formed in 1989, rationing the time, money and elbow grease to tackle the fencing headache.
“Fast forward to us finding out that Osprey would be here, and lo and behold they could help,” he said. They have such an elegant and simple solution.”
One Saturday + 40 volunteers = 4,092 pounds of trash
Bates and his team had arrived in D.C. on a brisk Thursday, Dec. 4, not long before a mesmerizing super moon rose over Langston. The next morning, as the first snow of the season powdered tree branches, golf course greens and eyelashes, they unloaded their two trailers of equipment, tested their tools and scouted out work stations sites near where crusty plastic bottles swirled together like so many small, filthy rafts, bobbing in unison around shallow coves.
By noon Saturday, they were a harmonious ensemble, prepared to welcome and lead area volunteers who had signed up to participate in a prequel to the Sunday-Monday fence removal main event. Forty bundled-up neighbors equipped with rubber boots, garbage bags, grabbers and protective gloves wended their way far beyond the Langston driving range to the four predesignated trash pickup sites at the edge of Kingman Lake.
Between slipping and sliding in the brown shoreline goo, the cheerful, dedicated array of volunteers scooped up an alarming 4,092 pounds—more than two tons—of detritus in roughly three hours.
Danielle Smith, a federal worker who lives in Chinatown, was among the willing on Saturday.
“The Anacostia is so beautiful,” said Smith, who often paddles the river. “But clearly it needs our attention. It’s heartbreaking to see all of this trash. By making our community better, we’re honoring the land and everything thing else that lives here–not just the humans.”
Smith volunteered as an extension of being enrolled in the master naturalist program at the University of the District of Columbia.
“The nice thing about events like this is that you never know who else is going to be here,” she added. “It’s a community of caring people in this city. And, well, it’s also fun to get dirty.”
Szunyog, of the Trust, was well aware that participants would be shocked by the volume of flotsam.
“I assured them I had the same reaction when I saw the amount of trash while helping to conduct vegetative surveys of North Kingman Island,” he said. “Since that day three-and-a-half years ago, it has been one of my missions to lead an effort similar to what Osprey did with the volunteers on Saturday.”
Debris cleanup is an integral component of a D.C. Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE)-led endeavor to restore 55 acres of wetlands in and around Kingman Lake. That’s just a small slice of the estimated 2,000 acres of marshlands that once sheltered and fed an abundance of wildlife along the 8.5-mile Anacostia River between what’s now Bladensburg in Maryland and Hains Point in the District.
No doubt the enhanced wetlands will be a haven for birdwatchers and kayakers. But equally crucial is how these “silent sponges” will capture runoff from rainstorms and provide a buffer as climate changes causes sea level rise and more intense downpours.
Multiple partners are pitching in on an overarching plan to heal a mistreated Anacostia River—oft-seen as a poor cousin to the more prominent Potomac—long plagued by raw sewage that overflowed from inadequate pipes, trash washing in from roadways and rain gutters, and other pollutants that have sunk into the sediments.
Briefly, the 138-acre artificial lake came into existence in 1920 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Kingman Island with enormous amounts of material dredged from the river, thus blocking much of the river’s flow.
Langston, the golf course that opened in1939 to serve the adjacent Black community, is on Kingman Island between the lake and the river, which both course under Benning Road NE. It was named for John Mercer Langston was the first dean of Howard University School of Law and the first Black man elected to serve Virginia in the U.S. Congress.
Don’t blame the Canada geese
It was roughly 2005 when AWS conservationists began experimenting with fencing off dozens of small patches in the Kingman Island wetlands, as a way to protect tiny rice shoots from the hordes of voracious geese.
Through trial and error, they settled on building an archipelago of “rice-refuge pens” roughly 30 feet in diameter. That size helped to discourage the geese, which need “runway space” for water landings, from gobbling the prized vegetation.
DOEE environment protection specialist Ariel Trahan, an AWS employee from 2009 to 2023, is intimately familiar with the geese-rice follies.
“The non-migratory geese were literally mowing down all of the rice seeds, plugs (small sprouts) and the seed bank,” said Trahan, a participant in Saturday’s trash roundup. “That was terribly disappointing for the kids in our Rice Ranger program.”
That preventive fencing measure, combined with a subsequent decision by NPS scientists to begin culling flocks of non-migratory Canada geese—via oiling eggs and also capturing, containing and depriving them of oxygen en masse—that eventually allowed the wild rice to thrive.
The conclusion to kill, and reverse a man-made muddle, might sound exceptionally harsh to untrained ears. But it wasn’t made at all lightly. What most area residents don’t know is that 90 or so years ago the federal government—in the form of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service—opted to import geese from the Midwest. Why? The idea was to release ready prey for human hunters in wetlands near the nation’s capital.
Native migratory geese don’t disturb emerging rice plants because they leave the region in spring for cooler environs far to the north. However, their ravenous “cousins” stuck around year-round. A population drop-off of the imports, verified via an annual June survey, has given the rice breathing room, Trahan said.
AWS and its partners have “big plans” for wild rice in the lake, declared Jorge Borgantes Montero, the organization’s natural resources program manager. “Historically, it’s dominant in these freshwater marshes. It’s a beautiful yellow and green when blooming in July and August.
He was encouraged this summer when AWS measured 26 acres of rice in the wetlands, mostly in areas with mid- to low-level water levels. That’s up from the 10 acres counted in 2022.
“We collect seeds every year because we don’t want to stop at 26 acres,” Borgantes Montero said, adding that wetlands in D.C.’s Watts Branch tributary, D.C.’s Riverside Terrace neighborhood and the town of Bladensburg in Maryland also offer rice success stories.
The species growing on the East Coast is one of just four types worldwide. The others prosper in the Upper Midwest, around Texas’s San Marcos River and in China.
Removing the fencing will alter the configuration of the sediment that has built up against it, Borgantes Montero pointed out. As the tides reshuffles it, new microhabitats will form, allowing varied native vegetation to flourish in different spots come spring.
DOEE, AWS and partners have nudged that transformation along by removing invasive plants to encourage the flourishing of species such as spatterdock, coontail, sedges, bulrushes, wild celery, pickerel weed and arrow arum. Those aquatic stalwarts rehabilitate habitat for beavers, ducks and, with luck, marsh birds such as the Sora. The brown and gray rail, once common along the Anacostia, disappeared due to over-hunting and vanishing vegetation.
“They’re very skittish and count on the wild rice for shelter,” Borgantes Montero said. “We’ll be watching for their return.”
Have hip waders, will travel
Bates spent his southern Louisiana childhood roaming the drainage ditches, creeks, bayous and rivers in a parish northwest of New Orleans where being outfitted with hip waders was a rite of passage. Thus, it seems natural that the waterproof gear is a signature piece of his professional “uniform.”
The anti-trash bug bit in Mobile eight years ago when he and his employer, the Alabama branch of Thompson Engineering, joined forces with nonprofits and volunteers to remove 200-plus bags of litter from a 400-yard stretch of a canal in one day.
Seeing that spacious stain prompted the college-trained geologist to invent a trash trap for waterways that he christened the “Litter Gitter” in fall of 2017. By the end of the year, he had launched the Osprey Initiative, which became his full-time gig in 2019, just before he turned 50.
“Who quits a job at 49 years old to start his own business?” the affable owner and president asked. “Well, I did because I wanted to know if I could take what I was doing on the side and do it every day and do it at scale.”
Since that start, his workforce has expanded to 25 full-timers and about 30 part-timers. As well, Osprey has rolled out gadgets such as heavy-duty booms and interceptors that can be strategically positioned at pinch points on waterways to capture wayward trash.
But Bates doesn’t peddle a one-size-fits-all solution to clients, which are mainly municipalities. He evaluates each community’s trash pollution struggles independently and draws on knowledge of locals so plans are tailored to their standards, not his.
“Whatever the situation with the trash is, one of our key questions is always, ‘What are you going to do about it?,” Bates says. “What we tell them is, ‘Let your actions mean something.’”
Once trash is collected, Osprey data collectors weigh and sort samples of it using an Environmental Protection Agency tool called the escaped trash assessment protocol. Simply put, it allows Osprey to assess an item’s age and level of degradation after sorting bag loads by materials and categories.
Very, very little of what was collected near Langston Golf Course was new. Instead, it’s defined as legacy litter, meaning it has been lingering for decades. For instance, one telltale sign from the 1980s was glass soda bottles partially encased in Styrofoam.
“Clearly, that’s a historical accumulation point for anything that floats,” Bates said. “And anything with a little air in it will float, including glass.”
By quitting time late Monday afternoon, Dec. 8, Osprey’s two-day haul of fence and stakes wrangled from the lake amounted to 3,900 pounds of potentially recyclable metal, all delivered to a local scrapyard.
Bates estimates that’s barely 5% of the fencing still out there. Never mind the trash the lake and the land will continue to “burp up.”
“This was a scouting trip that allowed us to define the enemy and build a concept for the bigger project,” he said. “It’s about respecting the water and learning how it moves.”
Now that Osprey is familiar with the territory, the crew is raring to return—with a slew of pre-retrofitted tools and a fleet of pirogues. The lightweight, canoe-like boats—common in the Southeast’s bayou country—would be ideal for hauling out fencing and other trash because of their maneuverability in tight quarters.
Bates is already scheming a plan to unearth grant money for the next cleanup round.
“We love it here because we can help with an existing vision and make it successful,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.”
PHOTO CREDITS: Elizabeth McGowan
TOP PHOTO CAPTION: Don Bates, founder of Mobile, Alabama-based Osprey Initiative and a fellow crew member load trashed goose fencing into a mudboat in waterways surrounding Langston Golf Course on the first weekend in December. It was part of a massive cleanup effort.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In late December, the Trump administration’s Interior Department followed through on its threat to terminate the 50-year lease lease that National Links Trust signed with the National Park Service in 2020. Read coverage in The Washington Post and this recent statement from the Trust.
It’s great to see such dedication to cleaning up this historic course, especially with a team as enthusiastic as Don Bates’ “litter-gitter” crew. I found some interesting related information about logistical challenges in tight spaces on https://tinyfun.io/game/bus-parking-out, which made me think about maneuvering the motorboat among the weeds.