Walking the Berkshires

NN in the LJ

Last week's Lakeville Journal carried my Nature Notes column on our National Bird, readable here with free registration .  Fair use excerpt:

Bald eagles, wild turkeys, beaver, bear and moose, once driven from Connecticut,  have made promising and even dramatic returns.  Today we live alongside each other — not always easily — but whether encountered in midstream or in our very backyards, these species are evidence of extraordinary resilience and adaptation.  

Not every plant or animal is able to make such adjustments, and habitat destruction remains the single greatest cause of biodiversity loss worldwide. Still, the landscape of northwest Connecticut retains a wild and scenic character, where coyotes howl and eagles soar despite centuries of settlement.  

It is not difficult to imagine a time when even western mountain lions will venture a furtive paw in the Litchfield Hills as they gradually track eastward. Whether we would accommodate the presence of a top predator of their caliber in our neighborhood is an open question, but it is certainly something to ponder. And it certainly makes my heart glad to see eagles here.

Bog Turtle Disease Alert

The federally Threatened bog turtle faces a new threat in the northern portion of its contiguous range.  On August 5th, the USFWS issued an advisory bulletin that an unusually high number of dead and apparently diseased bog turtles have been reported from four states, including New York and Massachusetts.  I received the alert by email from a colleague and the full bulletin is reposted here. 

"...The number of bog turtles found dead in their wetland habitat (2 to 4 dead turtles in each of four wetlands in NY and MA) exceeds that which is typically reported.

In some cases, dead bog turtles have been found entirely intact, with no obvious cause of death.
On several live bog turtles, a grayish or whitish substance and/or discoloration has been
documented on the skin of the head, neck and limbs, as well as on the claws. In some cases,
these appear as skin lesions. Scute sloughing and loss of claws and toes has also been observed.
Based on data collected at a Massachusetts site, the symptoms appear to worsen over time.
At this time, the causative agent(s) of the observed symptoms has not been identified..."

This is extremely troubling news.  When I was with The Nature Conservancy, bog turtle conservation in Massachusetts, Connecticut and part of Eastern New York was a major focus of my work.  The bog turtle is at the extreme northern extrent of its contiguous range in Massachusett.  The USFWS Recovery Plan for the bog turtle's northern population identies just three bog turtle sites in the Commonwealth, but two of them are considered good sites and are under conservation management.  I am intimately familiar with both of these, and know that if one has lost 2-4 adults to a new threat the viability of what would otherwise be considered a strong and vital population is in grave peril.   Past research indicates that the loss of just one breeding adult a year at these sites would be enough to tip the balance toward extirpation.

The 2001 rare species recovery plan records what was known at that time about the threat posted to wild bog turtle populations by disease (my emphasis added):

    "...At present, there are no substantiated reports of disease affecting a wild population of bog turtles, although at one site in Columbia County, New York (J. L. Behler, pers. comm) the number of dead turtles is cause for concern; eight dead bog turtles were collected during three visits to the site in 1988 and 1989 ( A. breisch, in Mt. 2000).  A sick turtle removed from that population and held for several years in captivity tested positive for upper respiratory distress syndrome (URDS) upon necropy (J. L. Behler, pers. comm.).  Although this could indicate a health problem within that communication, it is also possible that the turtle contracted this disease while in captivity.  Disease issues have the potential to become a much larger threat to wild bog turtle populations as they are subjected to more handling by researchers or if manipulation of turtle populations is undertaken through the deliberate release into the wild of bog turtles from other areas, zoological collections, or those seized by law enforcement activities.  It should be noted that thorough health screening of wild-caught bog turtles has not been a standard practice of researchers, although it may be warranted (Smith in iitt. 2001)..."

I do not know for certain whether all four sites where increased mortality and apparent disease have been observed coincide with those where there has been more handling by researchers, but it is highly likely at least at the first site where such observations were made, because very few people besides researchers even know where the turtles are or would know to report what they had observed to the proper authorities.  In the Massachusetts case, only researchers have legal access to the sites.

There is additional publically available data concerning the possibly diseased bog turtle site in new York mentioned in 2001 rare species recovery plan.  Beacham's Guide to the Endangered Species of North America (2000) identifies the respiratory disease at that site as Mycoplasma:

"...Of additional concern is the recent (1997) discovery of Mycoplasma (the bacterium that adversely affects the desert tortoise) at a bog turtle site in New York. This disease has the potential to cause significant declines in bog turtle populations. The site where Mycoplasma has been discovered has been identified as one of the best remaining New York sites and lies in a valley with additional, extant sites leading to the possibility of spread of the disease through a significant portion of the remaining bog turtle range in New York State..."

The USFWS disease alert makes no mention of Mycoplasma and instead describes different symptoms.  That is what is most alarming about this new threat.  An unknown and highly lethal pathogen will take time to analyze, let alone isolate causes and develop a meaningful response. Bog turtles do not have any time.  their populations are too small.

Consider that in 2006, a new disease affecting little brown bats in New York was first described for science. Three years later,  white nose syndrome is causing up to 90-100% mortality in bat caves from the White Mountains of New Hampsive to sw Virginia.  It has affected between 500,000 and 1,000,000 bats of several different species.  There is still no absolute cause for this disease, nor a cure.  One theory is that human activity may have been an initial vector for the spread of the fungus.

I suspect that the reason this new turtle disease has not yet been reported in Connecticut is that no researcher has been to our few remaining (and much poorer quality) bog turtle sites to check. There has not been a live turtle reported from a couple of these places in years.  I am aware that several years ago, one Connecticut turtle was found by a passerby and taken to a public beach where it was spotted by a knowledgable person and ultimately returned to the site where it belonged.  My understanding is that this turtle was later found dead.

This leaves open a difficult question.  Should researchers visit other bog turtle sites to determine whether they, too, have evidence of increased mortality and apparant disease?  Or should they refrain from doing so, given the potential that their activity could be contaminating clean sites?   The felt soles of waders are known sources of introducing the microscopic alga  Didymosphenia geminata or "Rock Snot" to trout streams.  Unless soaked for at least 40 minutes in hot water at least 113° F (45° C) - or for 30 minutes with a 5% solution of dishwashing detergent - what keeps a researcher dry may be killing the very things they care for.

Today (and 2 weeks ago) in the LJ

Today's Lakeville Journal article, readable at the link with free registration, was all about bioluminescence.  Or faeries and witch lights, take your pick.  I managed to work a bit of Coleridge and Rachael Carson in there, too, and the inspiration, as it always is at this time of year, was the first night o fthe fireflies:

"...Last night at dusk, out where grasses sway in the meadow beyond the garden gate and a wild apple reaches its gnarled limbs to touch the western stars, they all took wing and began their meandering flight. From under leaf and blade, first one, then swarms of winking lights called and responded among the grasses:  “Here I am, come dance with me!” Enthralled, my children and I stood by the garden gate and watched the wisp lights in the vapors swirl and eddy from tassels to treetops..."

Two weeks ago, my piece in the journal was about those spring glories of the swamp: yellow ladyslippers and marsh marigolds.  The season for both has passed, now, but you can read about them here.

Terrapin Crossing

Snapping turtles smell like the swamp.  I stopped for one crossing the highway in the rain this morning on a fast stretch of road that slices through the largest inland wetland in Connecticut.  This is the season when gravid females haul out from the ooze and journey overland looking for suitable high ground to lay their eggs.  Often the gravel of a road embankment has the characteristics they seek, which exposes them to the twin perils of traffic on paved roads and graders on gravel ones. 

This is a vulnerable time for these otherwise fearsome turtles.  Their nests are prone to racoon raiders and hungry skunks, both of which have seen their populations spike thanks to the forgaging opportunities presented by human habitation and its associated garbage.  Road crossings can be perilous for snappers, though in this respect they fare better than smaller wetland creatures like migrating amphibeans that are flattened in their thousands on warm spring nights.  I found a shattered spotted turtle just a bit further along this stretch of roadway last week, and stopped to see whether it was indeed this declining species or the federally threatened bog turtle it resembles.

So I brake for turtles, even snappers.  This one did not appreciate my efforts when I hefted her by the tail and carried her across to the other side of the road.  She hissed from deep within the underbelly white of her formidable mouth, and right away I caught the thick, foetid odor that clings to these turtles as if they were part of the reeking mire itself.  This is nothing, however, compared to the stench of the common musk or "stinkpot" turtle", an unassuming little creature that seems to me to have been steeped in effluvia and then glazed with clotted slime.  Had she been one of these, I might have looked for something other than my bare hand to move her with.  As it was, the snapper was quickly on her way and I on mine, and neither of us the worse for wear.

The Drama of the Herring Run

I watched a herring gull live up to its name as Emily and I were leaving Windrock last weekend.  My annual pilgrimage to the Agawam River Herring Run is a favorite springtime ritual.  I start checking in late March, when the very first Osprey come winging northward, and the river herring out in the cold Atlantic sense something warmer in the meltwater that calls them home.  By late April the blueback herring and alewife should be in the river and making their way to the flume.  Here they collect beneath the plunging water and negotiate the fish ladder up and under the highway and into a chain of ponds by Myles Standish State forest where the lucky ones will spawn.

The herring fishery is closed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and several other states as far away as North Carolina because stocks are so depleted.  I can remember times when the Agawan was crammed with fish from bank to bank, and any Town resident could get a bucket for fish for fertilizer or lobster bait.  Even so, there is usually still at least one other car at the herring run when we arrive: another Pilgrim like me who is there just to check on the fish.  There are a number of herring gulls there, too, a species much maligned for its attraction to garbage.  On this ocassion, however, Emily and I saw one catch a herring.

The bird stood on a stone in the rushing water, poised above the dark river and the fish striving in the current.  Suddenly it struck and came up with a foot long fish.  It flew to the bank and choked down the herring in a few great gulps while other gulls closed in to try and snatch away the prize should the bird falter.  It was a great mouthful that stuck for a short time in its gorge as it worked to swallow its prize.  I have seen herring gulls with corncobs wedged in their gullets, but this bird managed to complete its task in short order and demonstrated that it still derserved the name.

Emily felt badly for the fish, yet here before us was the great cycle of life and death played out in one of the great migration dramas of this or any other place.  It is the same with salmon and grizz, lion and wildebeast.  We saw the power of the school to overwhelm the predators even as it loses individuals, and felt something of the compulsion of instinct that draws the fish to the river in our desire to be there to watch it happen.

Herring in the river is a reassuring sight.  It gives me faith that at least for another year, a part of the natural heritage of New England will still abide.  I never knew the East's great rivers with their full compliment of sturgeon and salmon, but herring face their greatest struggle in our time.  Long may they run.

Extra, Extra

My latest article in the Lakeville Journal appeared in the April 2nd edition; readable here with free on-line registration:

"...My friend Mark Brown, an avid angler, tells me that we really have no native brookies left in Connecticut, as the indigenous strain has been thoroughly diluted by stocked fish. Not only that, but the widespread clearing of the landscape in the 19th century, accompanied by heavy fishing and the introduction of non-native trout species, further impacted genetic diversity of brook trout thought most of its range.  On opening day in 1877, one fisherman in Salisbury reportedly caught 150 brook trout in Moore Brook: none of them larger than half a pound.

By the early 20th century, a conservation movement spearheaded by dedicated sportsmen was hard at work in an effort to restore some of America’s vanishing wildlife — including the now ubiquitous white tailed deer — and to introduce other game species that they hoped would naturalize. Theodore Roosevelt is the one who is best remembered, but another national conservation leader was Connecticut’s Sen. Frederick C. Walcott, who along with Starling W. Childs established the Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk and Falls Village.

Sen. Walcott was a close friend and ally of Herbert Hoover, who deserves to be remembered as one of our great fishing presidents as well as the fellow who saw the bottom drop out of the market on his watch. In May 1940, the two men went angling at George Quinion’s fishing camp on Schenob Brook, just across the state line in Massachusetts, where they released several trout to help establish the fishery.  Quinion noted approvingly that President Hoover was careful to handle the fish with wet hands to preserve their protective coating, and used a barbless hook for his flies... "

The paper also ran one of my salamander pictures, which doubles the exhorbitant rate my services now command from a Hamilton to a Jackson.  

 

 

Quickenings

"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said `Bother!' and `O blow!' and also `Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, `Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."

- Kenneth Grahame "Wind in the Willows"

There was a chorus of spring peepers singing praise songs in the twilight when I stepped outside last evening.  Nature's Great Revival is underway.  The maple sap run is over, the salamanders are on the march, and with the first ospreys back in Buzzards Bay, can the herring be far behind?  The finches at the feeder are shedding their olive drab for canary yellow, and redwings rasp in the marshlands.  Our human neighbors emerge from their dens on about the same schedule as the local black bears, shaking off their winter torpor and reclaiming their sometimes overlapping territories from long disuse. 

If the senses of my species were not dulled by progress and evolution, they would quicken with every fresh scent on the warm Spring wind.  They would pulse with the first impossible bloom of skunk cabbage, literary melting its way through the frozen earth through the heat of its cellular respiration.  They would feel the stirring of the aged and tattered mourning cloak, one of the longest lived butterflies, reemerging in senescence to mate with the impulse of youth.   They would thrill with the drone of insects drawn to sticky buds and rank wet earth.

This is the season of quickenings.  The word itself derives from the old English "cwic", meaning living or alive, but its modern usage is also appropriate for a season of accelerations.  The fetus is said to quicken when its movements can be felt in the womb.  The heart quickens with life and vitality.  The poetic language of the Nicene Creed proclaims the second coming "in glory to judge the quick and the dead."  It is no accident that the Christian celebration of Easter falls at this time, when new life is self-evident. 

My birthday is also an early Spring arrival.  In these parts, the daffodils will be in bloom a week afterward, and as a young boy I worked out for myself that the last patch of snow would be gone the week before.  The first of the spring ephemerals are working their way upward in the bare light below the leafless trees.  Dutchman's britches, wild leeks, trout lily and trillium will usher in April's wildflowers, along with the winking yellow eyes of blood root, and clusters of marsh marigolds adding their splash of color to shadowy wetlands. 

All these awakenings take place in a brave, bright time when frogs lay eggs in ice-rimmed pools and early birds battle for prime nesting sites.  Even as the season advances, a fickle rain can blight the apple's bloom just as surely as longer days call forth its flowers.  All around us, nature is striving, seeking, obeying urges as involuntary as breathing.  Spring is a serious business, yet still given over to the domain of the heart.   "Hang spring cleaning" says the industrious Mole, with a spirit that soars on diaphanous wings.  Even a raw wet day like today has a sweet expectancy, like a kite that strains on its tether, ready to take wing.

The Big Night Begins

Last night on the way home from a board meeting, I noted that the light rain and temperatures were just within the range required to kick off the first wave of migrating amphibians.  By the time I pulled into Canaan I started to see wood frogs by the roadway, so I rousted my children from bed, stuffed pajamas into boots and jackets and rounded up three functional flashlights.  We headed over to a bend in Rte 41 near Dutcher’s Bridge where judging by the carnage I have observed there in past years, there is a major migration corridor.  There were a few frogs there, nothing spectacular, but once over in Salisbury I saw numerous frogs and heard the first chorus of Spring Peepers coming from a nearby oxbow of the Housatonic.

I checked one of my favorite spots for salamanders on Taconic Rd but saw only a frog or two.  However, the big salamander crossings in Sheffield, MA  on Rte 41 showed evidence that the yellow spotted salamanders were beginning to move.  We escorted a handful across the highway between Sages Ravine and Berkshire School Road, but it was on this latter route, running East / West across Sheffield’s extensive seepage wetlands, that we observed them moving in significant numbers.  We found many more living than dead, perhaps 40 in all, which is not as many as we find in really big nights.  The temperature was 42 and perhaps more began to move later in the night for I found the thermometer was nearly 50 when I awoke this morning.

Today's Lakeville Journal Article

My biwekly article in the Lakville Journal concerns migrating salamanders and vernal pools, and can be read here with free registration:

...On warm rainy nights in early spring, there are certain roads in our area that are littered with hopping, skittering and — regrettably — squashed amphibians.  Volunteers sometimes monitor heavily traveled crossings during the migration and assist the frogs and salamanders on their journey to the opposite side of the road. My children and I look forward to being out one evening very soon when The Big Night arrives, “saving Spotty” and its many relations.

Dad and Lad and Daughter on the Ice

Last Sunday, Emily, Elias and I went over to our friend Tom's quarry for an afternoon of skating and wound up doing some ice fishing besides.  Emily caught two small bass right off the bat, but unfortunately there was no camera there at the time to record the moment.  Elias did not hook anything, but he and I did have some great time waiting by the hole, as this photo will attest.

Those marking the progression of our family through the years will regard these two pictures as having archival significance for 2 additional reasons.  Emily has glasses, received just before Christmas, and I have grizzle, clearly showing through at the jaw in my winter beard.  The skates, however, remain as always the hand-me-downs from my father, and unlike some years at least they have a fresh, keen edge.

And yes, that is a medieval cowl, Renaissance Faire vintage, and just the thing for warmth and unrestricted movement on the ice.  Or skulking in Sherwood.  I have a full hooded doublet as well, for more formal occasions.