Per K and my August Challenge we spent some time again this past Saturday enjoying the outdoors.  We were in Muskegon for the weekend so our outdoors time was a bit short to accommodate for time spent with family, but we did head down to the beach to inhabit a different ecosystem than the Chicago prairie.

I grew up on Lake Michigan, exploring the beach and water each summer with my sisters and friends.  Since I can rememer, though, our beach has changed many times with the significant rise and fall of the water-level.  The first beach I remember is one with “sea walls” that were installed by the previous property owners as an attempt to keep the water from pulling sand out into the lake to curb the erosion of the bluff.  These proved futile over the years as the water-level rose beyond them and at one point eroded the bluff to the extent that a new set of stairs had to be built because the old set had fallen into the lake during a storm.  The rise of the water and the constant erosion threatened to topple the house into the lake as well for a few years, until over the next summers the water-level rapidly fell.  Sand was re-deposited on the beach, first returning it to the state that I remembered as a child, then slowly rising even more to cover the sea walls that were once nearly impassable, and finally, for the first time since I have known the beach, creating a mini-dune with beach grass providing a steady anchor.  It was the beach with this maturing dune with which K and I spent time on Saturday.

I find it immensely interesting to examine the changes that can occur in an ecosystem over the course of a mere 20 years.  An area that was once unable to support plant-life is now thriving with a diverse array of grasses; that grass now provides food and shelter for insects and animals that would not have found any on our small stretch of beach before; and should the dune continue to grow, a completely different ecosystem will begin to form in the area between the dune and the bluff.