'Pothole' project finished by TILT

CLAYTON — Keep your eyes peeled for new wildlife in the fields of the Zenda Farm Preserve next year.

The Thousand Islands Land Trust has completed a two-year project to restore natural glacial "pothole" wetlands — an important habitat for wetland species and nesting area for waterfowl — that were drained and filled with soil by farmers.

Andrew T. Wood, the trust's executive director, said TILT partnered with Ducks Unlimited, a nonprofit wetland habitat rest-oration and preservation organization, to undo harm caused by humans and restore natural wetlands in the Zenda Preserve and on Grindstone Island.

The partners were awarded a $900,000 North American Wetlands Conservation Act grant administered by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for the project.

Mr. Wood said the last pothole on the Zenda property on Route 12E was restored in September.

"This is the last pothole we are doing," he said. "We've done all the restoration work that the grant called for."

Mr. Wood said TILT initially started discussing the project in 2005 and hired Waligory Excavating, Lowville, with the grant money to build the potholes.

Gerald A. Smith, an ornithologist and consultant with the Ontario Bays Initiative, Chaumont, who assisted the trust in the project's early stages, said the wetlands restored last year on Grindstone Island have improved the diversity of waterfowl on the island.

Once the potholes on Zenda are filled with water next spring, he said, it should attract a variety of wetland wildlife — such as turtles, frogs, birds and plants — back to the farm.