Walking the Berkshires

Adaptation

This is one of my favorite photographs from my years in Namibia.  I especially like the way the coppiced mopane tree in the foreground mirrors the braided track with its reflecting pools of water.  This is a picture taken in late afternoon during the rainy season in northern Namibia at a place called Iilyateko and a little Roman Catholic Mission station where I lived and taught during 1992.

You will note the heavy browse line in the foliage and the grass reduced to stubble by goats and herds of cattle.  Colophospermum mopane has the virtue of resprouting from stumps, and this tree with its twisting leaders has been harvested at least twice: the first it lost its main trunk, and then two of its four respouts were later hacked off.  Mopane trees can withstand this kind of use but the forest that remains is greatly altered from what it might have been had the trees been allowed to grow.  There are many people here, and mopane wood is in great demand for fencing and household construction.  Overuse leads to desertification, and if there is one thing Namibia has plenty of it is desert.  But the northern area where the seasonal rains fill the shallow pans called iishana even support fish during these times, and a major flood or efundja even brings down a few crocodiles from better watered Angola to the north.  Roads in oshana country customarily wend their way around wet areas, widening and braiding with use.  This track was too wet for passage a week or so before I took this picture. 

It was late afternoon when I walked outside the kraal, listening to the cattle and children singing and the sounds of the birds gathering before nightfall to dip and drink in the iishana. I was 24 years old and finding my way in a new nation that was finding its own.  I learned to travel that braided track, and those I have found myself upon in my life since then.  Sometimes you have to stay on the path and apply steady pressure rather than striking out on your own.  At others it is best to dodge the traps and avoid the pitfalls and keep moving forward.  There are costs to each approach, and knowing when to apply one or the other can make all the difference.

Wake of the Flood

The Great Falls of the Housatonic are not usually compared to their larger cousins at Niagara or Victoria Falls.  I've visited both of those massive waterfalls and have been awed by their majesty and power.  This week, after heavy rains drenched the Northeast, the Housatonic rose in flood and the Falls took on the aspect of a roaring torrent, our own little Niagara.

For many years before the hydro-electric plant upstream went to "run of river' instead of "pond and release", the Great Falls in Falls Village, Connecticut were hardly a trickle.   Only in flood were they restored to a semblance of their former glory.  The April nor'easter that dumped a month's worth of rain  on our region in the space of 36 hours swelled the Housatonic and its tributary steams above flood stage on Monday.  My drive to work through Robbin's swamp that day saw water lapping at the edge of Rte 7., so I chose - wisely, it turns out - to head home before noon lest I be cut off.  When I reached that low spot in the road not three hours after I first passed, the water was  axle deep and surging across the highway.  I was one of the last vehicles through before they closed the road.

The next day, the tributary streams had crested and begun to subside.  Roads in our area were again above water, but the main stem of the Housatonic was still in rising flood.  On my way home from work on Tuesday, regrettably without my camera, I took a detour and dropped down into Falls Village to see how the river was running at the falls.  Crossing the low, single-lane iron bridge around the bend from the falls, I felt uncomfortably close to the floodwater, which had swelled beyond its banks and across the parkland on the far shore.  Turning up the river once again, I saw mist from the falls rising above the trees, something I had never seen before.  The water was roiling, a foaming brown, and what had been islands in the stream were now battered beneath the waves, their trees like the masts of  submerged wrecks broken on a reef.  When I saw the Falls they were Niagara in miniature, the mist from their plunge swirling up the face of the plunging water.  There were the bright yellow dots of raincoats standing by the edge of the falls, like the first brave splash of crocus flowers against the barren earth. Cars had pulled aside by the pathways to the Falls as residents  made their pilgrimage to see this great wonder for themselves.

I stood on the rocks where the falls made their most dramatic leap down into the gorge, at the same spot where the photograph above was taken two years previously during another, less dramatic flood event.  I felt the bedrock tremble through my shoes.  The water coming over the spillway of the upstream dam was a solid sheet of floodwater, and the cataracts below were utterly swallowed by the churning water.  The river pushed up the sides of the gorge, spilling over stone and pouring through new cracks and crevasses to force its way downstream.  The hydrograph at right shows that the river reached 11 feet - 4 feet above flood stage - during my visit to the falls.

The waters are starting to subside now, though they are still in flood.  Communities downstream in Kent, and near the mouth of the river in Fairfield County, endured major flooding and damage to homes and property.  The Governor has requested that the entire state be declared a federal disaster area.  Up here in the Litchfield Hills, though, the Housatonic floodwater was an awesome display of nature's power, and a marvel to the eye.

"Instinct is no more Blind Than Wonder": The Herring Run

John Hay, a talented observer of the natural world and of Cape Cod most especially, had this to say about Springtime and herring in his classic book The Run:

"That original source of energy the sun, which men might still worship in good faith, was bringing out new facets to shine abroad.  The web of life was stretching to its light.  Birds, insects, plants, and fish were beginning to move to its changing measure; though if some days were warm with a budding, fringing, easing expectation, others were still raw, wet, and contracting, bringing winter back to flesh and fiber.  We kept looking for the alewives.  Cars would slow up at the Herring Run.  The drivers peered down to see the curving, dark forms of a few fish holding up against the current.  Then they drove on.  Or they got out, saw nothing, and went away in disappointment.  But suddenly one morning toward the middle of April the crowd of alewives had so increased as to cause an inescapable excitement in the vicinity.  The water was thick with fish, their fins showing on the surface.  It was almost as it had been a hundred years before when the whole population would cry out at their coming, 'The herring are running!'"

I can remember runs like that, when the narrow channel of the Agawam River in Wareham was a solid shoal of bluebacked fish, holding steady in the rush of water and taking the right fork toward the flume, and the fish ladder that would hoist them in brave and lightning leaps to their spawning ground upriver in Glen Charlie Pond.  Osprey move up the coast with the fish as each stream in turn, a degree or two warmer than the waters of their bays and inlets, beckons the herring in from the sea.  But while the osprey have made a dramatic return to the East Coast after the near collapse of this species due to DDT poisoning, the herring, alewife and shad are in sad and sharp decline.

I looked eagerly across the parking lot at the Elks Lodge in East Wareham today and saw there was no one at the herring run.  That was a bad sign, for at this time of year there should be a herring warden, at least, and locals pulling up with buckets for their allotment of fish dipped with nets from below the falls.  My Uncle Colin used to keep them salted to bait his lobster traps, and old Cape Codders used to fork reeking wagonloads of fish onto their fields each spring.  This year Massachusetts waters are closed for herring season.  There just aren't enough fish returning to the rivers for a sustainable catch.

Massachusetts enacted a three year moratorium on possession or harvest of river herring (alewife and blueback herring species) through 2008.  As I gazed at the base of the fish ladder below the flume, I could see the sleek gunmetal forms of herring beneath the water, piling up in the plunging current.  There were perhaps a a hundred fish, and one attempted the lower sections of the ladder as I watched with that same remembered thrill of my youth at this same spot.  In a heavy run there are tens of thousands of fish.  I wished these few well on their journey.

The Agawam River is not a long one, but it is crossed by several highways and suffers from excessive nitrogen runoff from septic systems and lawn fertilizer.  The river is less hospitable to alewife and herring, and so, too is the deeper water at sea where adults mature before making the spring migration back to the run to spawn.  It is these fish that are major sources of food for our toothed whales and countless other species in the marine food web.  Their loss is a loss of more than just a piece of our heritage and a much anticipated harbinger of Spring.

Again, John Hay:

"(W)hen I first saw these fish I was moved in spite of myself.  Instinct is no more blind than wonder.  To have the human attributes of mind and spirit and the race's ability to control its own environment does not give me the wit to beat the infinitely various will of life at its own game.  All I could wish for would be to join it."

The Eel Deal

Catadromous is a biological term most of us don't use everyday.   It applies to fish, like American eels, that spend most of their adult lives maturing in fresh/estuarine water and then head out to the open ocean to spawn.  Actually, the female American eels (Anguilla rostrata) are the ones that come far upriver, often spending decades well inland while their male counterparts lurk in brackish waters.  This life cycle is the reverse of anadromous species like herring, shad and salmon that breed in fresh water and mature in salt.   If this is getting too specific for some of you, you can lump both types of together under the term diadromous, which refers to fish species that spend some portion of their life cycle in fresh water and other portions in salt.

Regardless of which direction they swim, diadromous species face significant challenges in American Rivers as well as in deep water.  Pollution, predation, changing climate conditions and excessive harvesting have all taken their toll, but the physical impediments to fish migration in our rivers are perhaps the most dramatic reason for their steep decline.  New England in particular has a massive number of impounded rivers and streams, with nearly 1,200 dams in Massachusetts alone. The USFWS map at left is animated at this link to show the progression of dam building over time in a rather dramatic fashion.  While vital during some stages of this region's industrial past, and still used for electrical generation in places along many of our major rivers, many of these dams no longer serve these purposes and their removal to facilitate fish passage is a cornerstone of many freshwater conservation proposals in our region.  Species like Atlantic Salmon are virtually absent now and other once plentiful species like blueback herring my become non-viable here without better access to inland spawning areas currently denied to them by dams.

Dam removal is a very difficult and costly undertaking, which is why so many dams remain in place.  There are those who value the flatwater behind the impoundments for scenic and recreational purposes who oppose removal on those grounds.  There there is the question of permitting, and sediments behind the dams that may be contaminated with all manner of toxins and pollutants.  In the Housatonic River, the issue of PCBs is directly linked to the issue of dam removal, and so, too is hydropower, with five dams in Connecticut that generate electricity for the region.

Fish ladders and other forms of upstream assistance are sometimes viable alternatives to dam removal for certain species.  The American Eel may get an assist over one of the largest dams on the Housatonic via a temporary eel ladder as part of an effort to restore this species to sections of the river where it occurred historically but has long been absent.  The AP reports:

FirstLight Power Resources Company Inc. is working with state and federal agencies to build a temporary eel ladder on the Stevenson Dam on the Monroe/Oxford town line.

Plans call for the company to build similar structures on its other dams, allowing the American eel to make its way up river as far north as Massachusetts.

The plan is part of an effort on the East Coast to restore eel populations, which in recent years have declined so rapidly that the eel has been considered for inclusion on the nation's endangered species list.

'Historically, we know they used to be in the river,' Steven Gephard, supervising fisheries biologist with the state Department of Environmental Protection, said last week. 'They used to catch big ones, as far north as Lakeville. And we know there are none above the dams now.'

Alex Haro, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center in Turners Falls, Mass said bringing eels to the Housatonic is an environmental plus.

'Eels play a significant part in the environment,' Haro said. 'They're generalists, they feed on a great variety of invertebrates. And they're food for just about anything that can eat them — bass, trout pickerel. Herons love them. Cormorants love them. Let's say they go down easily.'

One of the reasons people have been hesitant about installing fish ladders is that they can assist more than just desireable species like eels upstream.  Sea Lamprey, which can become a real concern for anglers if they become landlocked, may also find passage via the ladders.  One assumes this first ladder is temporary so that its target and non-target impacts can be evaluated.  Eels are able to get over natural barriers that block many other species, though I'd imagine the Great Falls of the Housatonic at Falls Village, CT was a hard boundary for upstream movement for just about every fish species, be they anadromous or catadromous or merely instream migrants.  It would be great to see the river reconnected to the sea in this fashion, and I look forward to seeing the results of this first leap forward for eels in the Hous.

"First There is a Mountain, Then There is No Mountain..." And That's It. No Satori, No Enlightenment. It's Just Gone.

Guess what else that's man-made besides the Great Wall of China and is visible from space?  The missing mountains of Appalachia pockmark the Cumberland Plateau of eastern Kentucky in this satellite image.  Zoom in a bit.  This is a mountain top removal and valley fill coal mining operation north of Hazard, KY.  Have a closer look in West Virginia.  Fire up Google Earth and visit The National Memorial for the Mountains and view before and after images of gutted mountains and buried river valleys all across Appalachia.

This is how the EPA defines what you've just witnessed:

"Mountaintop removal/valley fill is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are removed, exposing the seams of coal. Mountaintop removal can involve removing 500 feet or more of the summit to get at buried seams of coal. The earth from the mountaintop is then dumped in the neighboring valleys."

Despite the provisions of the Clean Water Act, the devastating impact that these practices have on the environment and on the communities of the region, these are permitted activities.  Headwater streams are smothered, groundwater tainted, a landscape irrevocably blighted and Big Coal is allowed to continue to defile and degrade the region.

"For 25 years, the Clean Water Act (CWA) allowed for the granting of permits to place “fill material” into waters of the United States, provided that the primary purpose of the “filling” was not for waste disposal. As such, the CWA prohibited mountaintop removal operations from using the nation’s waterways as waste disposal sites. That changed in 2002, when the Army Corps of Engineers, under the direction of the Bush administration and without congressional approval, altered its longstanding definition of “fill material” to include mining waste. This change accelerated the devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining and the destruction of more than 1,000 miles of Appalachian streams."

The environmental impacts are horrendous.  The impacts on the people of the coalfields are callous and appalling.  The grassroots organization Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, for whom my sister has worked for many years, spells them out:

"The heavy use of explosives causes extensive damage to the homes and water wells of nearby residents...Blasting also sometimes sends 'flyrock' off the permitted mining area into residential areas and public roads, creating dangerous conditions...There are also personal and cultural impacts as communities are displaced, people are forces away from family homesteads, cemeteries are made inaccessible, health is adversely affected, feelings of powerlessness persist and living in fear becomes a way of life."

A lot of good people and organizations across the mountains of Appalachia are working to put an end to the practice of mountain-top removal and valley fill.  It is shameful and unjust that we permit such flagrant and callous abuse of those who live on the land and these natural resources to continue in our country.  It is time to put an end to it.

The Ninth Annual Housatonic Watershed Spring Peeper Stampede

Mists are rising from melting snow.  Skunk cabbage flowers emerge from icy swamps.  And up and down the Housatonic Valley in western Massachusetts, a long anticipated harbinger of Spring echos in our rugged hills.  Today I received this e-mail from conservation stalwart Shep Evans of Stockbridge, Massachusetts:

"Ladies and Gentlemen and Children of all ages, the
time has come –after a strange and cold winter - for
another fun filled cliffhanger of a competition that
will limber up your biological clock and test your
auditory acuity like none other.
It is, of course …

THE NINTH ANNUAL
HOUSATONIC WATERSHED
SPRING PEEPER STAMPEDE

Again, in this year of 2007, I will treat two
important people to luncheon at the famous
RED LION INN in Stockbridge:

A. The person who most accurately predicts the date
and exact time that spring peepers will first be heard
anywhere in the Housatonic watershed in Massachusetts
this spring, and.....
       
B. The first person to actually hear and report spring
peepers anywhere in the Housatonic watershed in
Massachusetts this spring...

HERE ARE THE RULES (Read carefully, please):

A. Predictors must e-mail their prediction of the DATE
and TIME of the first peeping together with their NAME
and MAILING ADDRESS to me, Shep Evans, at least 24
hours before the first peepers are heard peeping.
My e-mail address is shepevans AT yahoo DOT com.

B. Only one prediction entry per person, please,
consisting of the predicted DATE and TIME and your
NAME and ADDRESS.

C. Hearers must notify me, Shep Evans, by e-mail
within 24 hours of first hearing Spring Peepers with
the DATE, TIME, PLACE OF HEARING PEEPERS and
the NAME OF A WITNESS, plus the HEARER's NAME &
ADDRESS.
Again, my e-mail address is shepevans AT yahoo DOT com.

D. The hearer need not be a resident of our Housatonic
Watershed in Massachusetts, but the peepers heard must
be peeping here.

E. People reporting hearing peepers, must have an
identified witness of the hearing. No exceptions!

F. If the same person wins both the predicting and the
hearing (this actually happened once), that winner
gets to bring a friend to luncheon.

G. In case of a tie, the judges will invent a run-off
to determine the winner.

H. The results will be publicized to all participants,
and all entries will be available for inspection,
after our luncheon.

J.  Winners of any of the previous three years’ Spring
Peeper Stampedes, either predicting or hearing, are
not eligible for this years contest. Winners of three
prior Spring Peeper Stampedes (any year), either
predicting or hearing, are retired from competition.
All prior winners will be encouraged to join us for
lunch when the time comes.

Good luck, and pray for warm rainy nights!"

Those of you fortunate to be reading this within a 50 mile radius of Stockbridge should not pass up the opportunity to drive (with a friend) with your windows down the next night it rains and is above 40 degrees.  The rest of you, get your predictions in to Shep and welcome Spring!

Ice Watch

Folks in Kent Connecticut have a tradition at this time of year that climate change may well do in.  For the last couple of years, in fact, the Housatonic River has been largely ice free, which has made it touch to hold the volunteer fire department's annual Ice Watch contest.  A tradition in Kent since 1978, tickets are sold at $2 a piece starting on Valentine's Day for contestants who try to guess the day, hour and minute when the ice cover will melt and go out downstream.  A ticking clock on a tripod is planted on the ice and once it moves 100 ft. downstream the clock stops and the winner gets to take home the total amount in the pot.

According to the Kent Volunteer Fire Department:

"Even in a year when the ice doesn’t form or last until Feb. 14, the contest is transformed into a drawing and a winning guess is pulled out of the pile. In all the years since 1978, there’ve only been five such drawings. Past winners have split as much as $3,650 with the fire department. In 2003, the ice finally went out at 1:07 p.m. on March 18 and the total pot was $2,604."

I didn't lay my $2 down this year, but I'm betting the ice goes before March.

Update (4/9/2007)  And a good thing, too, as the tripod drifted downstream on March 16th this year.

Conservation Priorities in Connecticut's Highlands

The US Forest Service Highlands Regional Study has been released for Connecticut.  You can view pdfs of the resources it prioritizes for conservation here.  As the co-chair of the CT Highlands Coalition and a member of the Highlands executive, I have more than a passing acquaintance with this effort.  As the Director of the Litchfield Hills Greenprint, I have also been involved in a parallel assessment for the towns which form the core of the Highlands area in Connecticut. There have been good data sharing and information exchange between these two efforts but they were designed with different though complimentary objectives, and not surprisingly they come to somewhat different conclusions about what is most critical to conserve about this landscape.

The Connecticut Highlands study was done concurrently with one for Pennsylvania, with the goal to have a resource map that is compatible with those already completed under the Highlands Conservation Act for its New Jersey and New York sections.  The Forest Service Study looks at five broad categories of resources - Water, Biological, Recreational/Cultural, Agricultural and Forest - and also produces an overall Composite Resources Values Map.  These data will be used to help federal agencies set conservation priorities not only for Highlands Act funding but also as a primary filter for assessing land protection funds under the Forest Legacy Program. 

In contrast, the Litchfield Greenprint's assessment of conservation priorities has seven categories (splitting scenic and recreational values, expanding agriculture to include the entire working landscape, and an adaptive reuse category for brown fields and areas appropriate for urban infill).  These categories were locally driven priorities identified and ranked in importance by communities, municipalities and conservation interests across the Litchfield Hills.  They are not linked to any particular funding source but were instead intended to provide a regional understanding of where the unprotected resources of greatest value to the people who live here and to the ecological integrity of this landscape occur across our area.

One significant difference between the two studies is that the Forest Service included protected land in its conservation priorities and gives greater conservation weight to lands already conserved as a result.  The Greenprint assessed resources on both protected and unprotected lands but did not weigh them any differently and does not include those already conserved in its final map of conservation priorities.  There are clear differences in emphasis between the two studies based on this one variable.  Because the Greenprint was trying both to determine how much of the stuff we all care about has been protected and where the best opportunities for conservation lie outside of these protected areas, our study may be more relevant to conservation planners while the Highlands Study will be an important resource to site when applying for state or federal land protection grants and assuredly will be vital for projects up for Forest legacy or Highlands funding.

Another difference is that the Litchfield Greenprint is able to state for each of the model criteria we used in our assessment how much of each resource is protected on a town and regional basis.  We can now say that of the 85,549 acres that appear to be in agricultural cover across the Litchfield Hills, less than 12,000 are on protected land.  We can track changes in the conservation status of these resources over time, and together with our partners set measurable goals for the protection of specific resources.  This not only helps us choose where to invest our limited conservation resources, but also where to encourage thoughtful development so that what we all say we value remains viable here over time rather than opposing every development that comes down the pike regardless of its actual impacts on the resource base.

Both studies are valuable in their own ways to those who live on the land and make decisions about how to steward what we have been given here.  Turning good planning into timely action will be the challenge for us all.

Up a Lazy River

For all the insults it has endured - PCB's courtesy of GE at the head of the list - the Housatonic is still a beautiful, living river.  This section is a couple of miles upstream of Cornwall Bridge where I work. A few weeks ago I stopped to watch the sun sparkle on the water and the autumn leaves blazing along the sunlit western shore.  The eastern bank was dark in the early morning shadows. This is about where the two bears I saw a week afterwords were coming from when they crossed my path and headed into the tall timber. 

Now the leaves are down and the river is thick with floodwater after heavy rains.  Its many moods often mirror my own.

Riverside

I took a different route to work this morning, dropping down the eastern side of the Housatonic of River Road between Falls Village and West Cornwall.  The road turns to gravel at the Cornwall line, and follows the narrow ground alongside the Housatonic River and the freight line.  The trees are thick at the roadside and the high walls of the gorge rise up on either side of the river.  It was a cool morning, crisp and autumnal without the humidity of recent weeks.  I didn't wish to rush the journey.

There are several places along this section of river where cars can pull out and canoes can put in.  I parked at one of these, wide enough for two vehicles because it is perched on what was once a stone bridge abutment.  Its mate on the opposite bank is largely intact but shrouded in riverine vegetation - sycamore and elm and ash.  The riverside is tumbled stone, boulders scoured by glacier and flood and pocked by stone-fly larvae.  There are raccoon tracks in the silt at the river bend, and the carapaces of crayfish lie scattered on the rocks.

The sunlight played on the water in a wide sweep before me, the river bolting out of the shadows above and swirling around a bend not far downstream.  The air was thick with darting swallows. A great blue heron winged down the gorge as I stood on the shore, and a sandpiper with yellow legs hopped along the far bank. 

The Housatonic is shallow enough here during low water to wade the stream were one so inclined, and pours through riffles and emergent stones.  Mergansers cluster on sunny rocks.  Water trickles down the bank at intervals from clefts in the hillside.  There were freshwater mussel shells, large as surf clams, in the shallows. You cannot hear the traffic high up the western slope where my regular commute follows the twists and turns of Rte 7.  A single vehicle passed behind me during my stream side idyll. 

Finally, feeling the tug of my waiting office downstream, I reluctantly climbed up the bank and drove slowly down the road and over the covered bridge at West Cornwall to rejoin the mainstream of traffic and travelers once more.  I plan to take more of these diversions as the season turns toward Autumn and the golden light on the dark water is kissed by falling leaves instead of skimming swallows.