Walking the Berkshires

Interview with a Blogger

I am flattered to be profiled with an interview today at a blog and environmental forum called My Greenpeace Buddies.  I was approached to share my thoughts as a blogger who writes about ecological matters, among other things, and was happy to oblige. 

Given my strong preference to focus on areas of common interest rather than positions - except in those cases where reason is clearly out of the question, such as where a certain southern African dictator is concerned - the interview goes strongly down the path of being "occasionally nettlesome" but "fairly non-partisan".  I talked about how individuals and institutions change their behavior and some of what is and is not helpful in that regard. 

I suspect this may be the only time that my right-of-center cousin Tigerhawk gets an acknowledgment in this or indeed any environmental forum.  Anything for bilateral relations, dear readers. And yes, I do know the difference between "affect" and "effect"...just not when I wrote out my responses.  Plus, I found an opportunity to quote from The Last of the Mohicans and it wasn't anything about noble savages.  Fellow English Majors can rest easy that my undergraduate degree is in no immediate danger of revocation.  Mugabe's, however, is another question.

Drop in if you like and check it out.

A Granddaughter Remembers Rubert Fothergill

Last year I wrote about Rupert Fothergill, the Rhodesian Game Ranger who spearheaded a 5 year rescue mission to safe thousands of wild animals from the rising waters of Lake Kariba.  Now his granddaughter Kirsten Drysdale has embarked on a labor of love with her new blog Operation Noah, sharing Fothergill's story and a trove of family memories and memorabilia.  Her most remarkable undertaking is to digitize the 16mm films he made of the rescue effort.  Her own effort is in its early days, but will clearly be one to watch.  In the meantime, Kirsten has also posted this, made by the Rhodesian government with Fothergill's footage:

Giving a Fig For Newts

This is the kind of news story that makes it hard to be a conservationist.

"I know it's the law, but it's very frustrating and bordering on the ridiculous that the fate of newts takes precedence over humans."

The British couple in this story from Dauntsey, Wiltshire  are understandably frustrated that they are unable to return to their flood-damaged home until the blocked drainage ditch on their property that handles run-off from a nearby motorway is surveyed for rare great crested newts this summer.  Rare species legislation generally focuses on species occurrences, regardless of how marginal or human altered the habitat.   If you've got newts, you've got issues.  This tends to set up an adversarial relationship between critters and people.  What incentive is there to provide a safe harbor for rare species on private property when there are no benefits for the landowner to doing so? 

This particular case looks like it will resolve itself in a few months, since relocation of any newts that are found is possible under applicable law and the landowners have another suitable site on their property where the newts occur.  But as I have said in this space on previous occasions, when human beings are given a choice between our health and well-being and that of other creatures, we generally side with our own species.  When we are given no choice, even in compliance we take our own side.  There are other options.  Community-based conservation is applicable in the developed world as well as the developing.

Saving Spotty

Last night, in the final hours of March, the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills experienced a mild, soaking rain.  The temperature reached in the mid-to-upper 40s and the prospect was excellent for the "big night" that kickes off the amphibian migration. This is one of the great movements of wildlife that few people recognize though it happens in our very backyards.  I jumped the gun a week or so, when we had rain enough but the weather was a few degrees too cold, but I was certain that this night was the one.  Once again bundled the children into their boots and pajamas and with flashlights in hand headed out for the back roads and byways of Sheffield Massachusetts and Salisbury Connecticut on the trail of the spotted salamander.

The grand movement of several species of mole salamander from their dusky upland hibernacula to the inky waters of downslope vernal pools is an annual New England event that for me heralds the real beginning of Spring. Their close companions on this journey are wood frogs, who like the rare Jefferson's and blue-spotted salamanders (which hybridize in this portion of their ranges) and the yellow spotted salamanders are obligate species for these ephemeral wetlands that hold water long enough for their eggs to hatch and (usually) for their larvae to mature without predation from fish and other denizens of permanent ponds.  On early spring nights, the salamanders and wood frogs may be serenaded by spring peepers or co-occur with gray tree frogs, but those little amphibians do not require vernal pools to reproduce.  By emerging this early they avoid some of their bigger, gluttonous competition, such as the green or bull frogs, but they still run a gauntlet wherever they must cross a road, as so often they must on their journey of up to 1/2 a mile from the high ground to the low.  This is a great drama of death and renewal, and the hardest part about sharing it with children is that there are many broken bodies in the places where we delight in finding living creatures.

Emily and Elias were prepared, though, and as I turned onto the first of many local roadways we stopped to roll down the windows and hear our first chorus of peepers.  We also found a wood frog, laden with eggs, hopping across the road, and more of them in a vernal pool I knew about, down along a dark field edge and under the silent trees.  There were no salamanders in the pool, yet, but I knew they were out there, and sure enough as we took a crossroad lined with seepage wetlands and deep forests I saw a familiar shape and pulled the car over.

It was a spotted salamander, cold and sluggish and just passed the center line.  We scooped it up and brought it over to the side of the road where the children observed it in the headlights.  It was fat and wet and much bigger than the red backed salamanders we often find under rotten logs in the summer.  The children named it Spotty and were thrilled to have saved it and helped it on its journey.  It was the first salamander of the night, though not the last. 

We found a Spring peeper and some wood frogs as well at this crossing, as well as a number of amphibian casualties.  On Undermountain Road, a state highway that runs beneath the Taconic Plateau and above the Schenob Brook wetlands, we came upon a scene of carnage where many frogs and salamanders had been struck. I hoped to spare the children this sight, but there were living amphibians, too, and we found half a dozen spotted salamanders and numerous frogs that we could move out of the way of the heedless cars.  It was growing late, and I took a back road home, when suddenly the road was carpeted in tiny gray tree frogs and numerous salamanders.  There had been very little traffic here and most of what we saw emerging from the woods and crawling or hopping across the road were safe and sound.

On the way hope, two hours past their bedtimes, Emily and Elias were full of plans for a salamander crossing guard club that they would organize among their friends to help Spotty, and all the other spotties and their frog companions, reach their destinations on the first warm spring night, next year, when it rains.  Maybe they will even get one of these towns to put in a tunnel at one of the heavy crossings.

Searching for Signs and Salamander Crossings

The temperature has been around 40 degrees all day with a soft and steady rain.  Tonight on the cusp of the Vernal Equinox, I thought conditions might just be right for the great mole salamander migration.  After dinner, we stuffed children's pajamas into boots, took down our flashlights and headed out for Salamander country.

These first spring amphibians precede the chorus of peepers that will be a feature of late April evenings in our swamps and woodlands.  In western New England we have three species of mole salamanders - yellow spotted, blue spotted and Jefferson's - that start to stir on nights like these and move from their winter slumber to the cold dark water of vernal pools to breed.  The blue spots hybridize with the Jefferson's in the southern Berkshires, so I'm never quite sure which one I have found when I come across one, though that itself is a rare enough event.  These two are also state listed rare species of special concern.

I drove all the muddy back roads in Sheffield where I knew there were salamander crossings.  It must have been just to cold, or too early, for we didn't see a one, but we did have the thrill of a rufus phase screech owl that flew across the road near Dry Brook and landed on a post just to the side of the road where we had a fine view of it in our headlights.

This year our backyard maple has experienced ideal conditions, and we've enjoyed a fine run of sap. I have already sugared off enough to make my 1/2 gallon of syrup and it looks like we'll have at least another week of the run before it slows.  I should end up with 3/4 gallon from my two buckets and spiles.  The sap did not run in January this year, which may have helped.  It seems that the emerging bulbs in our yard are less advanced at this stage than in the previous couple of years.  There is not a sign of daffodil tips at the base of the tree, even where the afternoon sunshine warms the mulch. 

We'll head out again the next night it rains, and one of these times we'll see them, crawling out from the dark woods and into the beams of our flashlights.  It is one of the season's great spectacles, but you have to put in some effort - and have a bit of luck on your side - to experience it.

Mapping The Woodlands: GIS Wonkery in the Litchfield Hills

The landscape of the Litchfield Hills is 75% trees.  Connecticut as a whole is about 60% forested, and actually loses more forest cover now than it replaces through natural succession.  We still have forested uplands in Northwest Connecticut that are of sufficient size to sustain a broad array of animals that depend on contiguous, intact forest habitats for their survival.

The Litchfield Hills Greenprint has developed a novel way of defining these areas and is using it to help its conservation partners set regional priorities for conserving large forest habitats.  We did so because we were not satisfied with existing data sources for this resource of regional significance.

Both The National Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy recognize exceptionally large blocks of relatively intact forest habitat in Northwest Connecticut.  In TNC's case, its Lower New England / Northern Piedmont Ecoregion Conservation Plan (2000) emphasized predominantly forested areas bounded by roads encompassing at least 15,000 acres, which TNC considered the minimum area needed to withstand the impacts of major natural disturbance events.  TNC believes conserving these forest blocks can serve as a "coarse filter" for most of the region's terrestrial biodiversity. 

It is a very coarse filter, however.  There are very few of these places and TNC had to ignore a number of smaller roads and fragmenting features to define the areas.  It is hard to explain why some roads were considered fragmenting while others are overlooked.  I remember one fragmentation metric that did not consider roads where two people could stand and toss a Frisbee for five minutes without having to step out of the way of an oncoming car.   I give them points for creativity, but it is still an imprecise means of determining traffic volume and more than a tad subjective. 

Merely buffering a digital road layer and selecting larger patches of interior forest as the Greenprint had initially done also proved inadequate, since Connecticut's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) road layer is a real mess and lumps together private driveways, trails, and roads digitized from old topo maps.  This makes it exceedingly difficult to select as "fragmenting" a set of roads of a specific width, surface, and traffic volume using digital data.

We needed to be able to account for the impacts of habitat fragmentation as we defined core forest habitat. We decided not to consider roads when defining boundaries, but instead to use the 2002 remote land cover data: the most current available for Connecticut.  These data layers recognize 12 land cover types, 11 of which occur across this landscape.  The results are shown on the map above in pale green. 

Here is how we did it:

• We selected altered land cover types - grass and turf, agricultural fields, barren land, utility lines, and developed areas (buildings and associated road infrastructure).
• We buffered them by 300 ft.  We chose this distance to account for some of the significant edge impacts on core forest habitat, which include the spread of invasive exotic plant species from disturbed areas and invasion by brood parasites that threaten interior forest nesting birds. 
• We then selected the remaining terrestrial land cover types (coniferous and deciduous forest, forested and non-forested wetlands) and made a single shape file. 
• We clipped the buffered areas from the habitat shape file, and eliminated patches of contiguous habitat that were <190 acres in size.   What remained represented our region's predominantly forested core habitat. 
• We added the lake cover layer , which we did not want to buffer or to count toward the computation of overall terrestrial habitat.  Nothing more resembles egg on one's face than standing up before a commission or land trust and pointing to a purposed forest habitat that is 90% below the surface of a lake.

This is what it looks like close up.  Permanently protected open space shows up in dark green, while the habitat is pale green.  You can see that small roads that had closed canopies were not detected by the satellite, but houses in clearings and large open fields were identified and buffered.  The remote data looks at 100' pixels and classifies them by their dominant land cover type. 

These forest habitats cross jurisdictional boundaries and occur across many ownerships.  The number of forest landowners in southern New England doubled in the last decade, but the overall area of forest declined.  The inescapable conclusion is that forest parcels have been divided and are managed - if managed at all - in lots of ever diminishing size and often without regard for the larger forest system in which they occur. 

This kind of resource mapping offers landowners, land managers, land trusts, municipalities and regional planners a new way of understanding the distribution and protected status of our larger forest habitats.  If you overlay these data with actual parcels of land, you start to see opportunities to locate development so that it creates less habitat fragmentation, or identify large forest parcels to try and conserve.  We believe that we in the Litchfield Hills need to conserve at least 20,000 additional acres of this forest habitat where it expands cores and connects corridors, and do so in the next dozen years. 

These maps do not tell us whether there is a willing landowner, or how the forest is managed.  That sort of data comes from those most closely connected to the resource and the communities in which it occurs.  The maps help focus attention on the resource and structure that discussion.

Warming Up To Spring

It's official.  I, as well as most everyone else in the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, am trying to get a bead on spring.  Pitchers and catchers have already flown to fields of green.  Maybe it's the bluebirds and robins outside, and warm foggy days like today when the river swells and the foundation wall seeps.  Or it could be that we have not been able to sustain enough clear cold days for pond skating that were not washed out soon after.  At least this year, for the first time in three, the maple tree has remained dormant through a January thaw.  I think of the sap buckets and the time, coming soon, when I will find another hand-span of trunk between the faded scars to place their spiles.  I wonder if the river herring will return in hopeful numbers to Buzzards Bay, where their season has been closed for three years running.  I think of spring peepers, and red wings, and the osprey following the fish up the coast. 

And it is still February, the traditional month of deep snows and deeper freezes here in the Litchfield Hills, the Berkshires and the high Taconics.  When I was a boy - and this April I will be 40 so I get to say that - the last of the snow melted the week before my birthday.  It is anyone's guess this year, or next, what the weather may bring.  That is part of the package for us New Englanders.  But if I am having difficulty attuning to the signs of the shifting season, what must it be like for those that truly depend on this ability?  What range of variation do they sustain?  For all its astonishing resilience, life on an ecotone is made of great swings and plunges.  The edge frays between transitional and central hardwoods.  The red-bellied woodpecker takes up permanent residence, and the cross bill retreats and is seldom seen.

Somewhere in the pine woods, great horned owls are calling their mates.  Soon, very soon now.

"Winter Grey And Falling Rain, We'll See Summer Come Again"

This was last Friday, with the Great Falls above flood stage and the spray freezing in a glaze of ice far downstream.  And these two guys thought it was a great time to run the rapids.  (Click to enlarge)

Consolation Prize: Our Own Mini-Niagara

Our winter has really been a washout for the last couple of weeks.  What snow we've had has been lousy for making snow-people and often with a crust of sleet mixed in.  We've had freezing rain and slush on our skating pond, and we haven't gone sledding all year.  But we do have one winter treat that has long been absent from these hills but is back with a vengeance. Since the hydro-plant at Falls Village, Connecticut went to "run of river" management from a "pond and release" regime, we have gained a rediscovered natural  wonder. 

After heavy winter rains, the Great Falls of the Housatonic are awake and roaring.

This morning I stopped by at the head of the Falls.  If this gage is any indication, it should be even more dramatic tomorrow after the snow and sleet we'll be getting tonight.

More (2/7/2008):  What a difference a day makes!

Marginalia

Connecticut Local Politics created this revealing map of the Nutmeg State that represents each of its 169 towns by its population size rather than geographic area.  Suddenly, it becomes crushingly clear why the 185,000 or so people in Litchfield county's 26 towns in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut are politically of little consequence in state politics. 

When 500,000 people in Greater Hartford and Waterbury get their clean drinking water from us, though, there are reasons to pay attention.