...For our family and more than 15,000 Connecticut Light & Power customers since 10:10 p.m. last night when the front came through. There was a tornado one town to our east as well. We are fine, but shifting our frozen food to a freezer in MA until we get the lights back. A lovely, less humid day today, at least.
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.
There are bluebirds in the backyard, darting down to scratch the damp earth where I have been raking. I pulled the spiles from the maple today and the afternoon sun made the dry holes weep anew. Last night, the first official Berkshire peepers of spring where heard and confirmed in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts and late this afternoon I grilled two pork tenderloins and watched my children run without coats through the ground is still frozen. The shoots of ramps and trillium push through the earth where last week there still was snow. Each day an old acquaintance renewed and new wonders turning toward the sun.
It has been an exceptional year for Abbott's Sapworks, the 2 spile operation we traditionally run in our little corner of the Litchfield Hills. Usually, I can count on a bit more than half a gallon of syrup, but this March we have had an almost unbroken month with ideal sap conditions, often producing a gallon per bucket each day. I have sugared off a gallon plus a pint of the amber nectar, enough to enjoy on aebleskiver, Belgian waffles, blueberry buttermilk pancakes, silver dollar flapjacks, indian pudding, oatmeal, and sour dough french toast for at least a month of Sundays.
I am grateful to our maple tree for its largess, and will give it an extra layer of mulch this summer. Next season I may decide to set just a single spile. I don't want to take advantage, and anyway there's a butternut back there I've been interested in tapping. Like the maple, it has sap that is 3% sugar but a distinctly different flavor. Variety is the spice of life.
Regular commenter David Corbett has asked so nicely to see more of my one guilty pleasure that I could hardly refuse. Here, then, are some of the toy American Civil War soldiers in my personal collection. I add to their ranks when I can and most recently acquired 9 figures from the "Brooklyn 14th" that have just been issued by The Collectors Showcase. Like the rest of my collection, these are matte finished metal figures in 1:32 scale (54mm), but I have just started collecting from this manufacturer. These particular pieces are extremely well done, historically accurate right down to the double row of brass buttons on their chasseur jackets.
I found a central location for them on a shelf with other figures compatible with a depiction of the Battle of 1st Manassas (or Bull Run, if you prefer). I've condensed the action considerably, but there are two Zouave units represented here: Company K of the 69th N.Y.S.M.by the discontinued Troiani Historical Miniatures company, and a recreation of a Don Troiani painting by Conte Collectibles depicting the 11th NY "Fire Zouaves" breaking under a charge by the 1st Virginia Cavalry, lead by a blue clad J.E.B. Stuart. The 2nd Rhode Island in their light blue blouses also makes an appearance in two sets by Forward March, while an ordinance wagon pulled by a mule team from the venerable William Britain company withdraws from the line. I understand that Zouaves don't sell particularly well in this hobby, which I cannot understand as I am always looking for some of these colorful units done well by one or another manufacturer. I had Abbott and Livingston ancestors in the 5th, 9th and 146th New York Zouaves, so it's personal.
In the late 1990s there was a renaissance in realistic, as opposed to "toy soldier" styles, which prior to then had been largely the domain of ultra expensive Russian manufacturers who did museum quality matte finished pieces and a few smaller operators. W. Britains and Conte developed extensive Civil War lines during this period and I collected them heavily. When lead sculptor Ken Osen left Britains for Conte, I followed, and when he moved on to Troiani and then helped launch Old Northwest Trading Company I collected those as well. Now back with Britains, the quality and detail continues to excel. You would think it might not be so difficult to get this historical period right, but many manufactures and sculptors fail to pull it off. Conte has gotten almost cartoonish and grotesque in recent years and had trouble getting the paint right or staying in scale. Britains went through a long dry spell before Richard Walker took over the reins and Ken Osen came back on board.
Collectors of high end Civil War toy soldiers tend to be found in US markets East of the
Mississippi. There are a disproportionate number of figures representing the armies of the Eastern Theater of the war than those who fought in the West. I am still hoping that Britians will issue a couple of Army of Tennessee flag bearers with the Hardee and Polk pattern flags. I pulled together the scene at right using Iron brigade figures by Britains, Conte and Troiani with some additions figures by these manufacturers to represent Grant with some of his westerners. I tried to hide them from view, but you can just make out the red circle badge of the 1st Division, 1st Corps of the Army of the Potomac on the kepi of one of the officers.
Some genres lend themselves to uniform ranks or duplicate poses. For the kind of money these cost, I have no desire to pay for the same figure twice. Conte ill-advisedly released a Union and Confederate marching set of 6 figures in three poses, and I 
bought a split confederate set on eBay and passed on the Yanks. Even if the same sculpts are used, a different paint job and a different head is all it would take to diversify the offerings, as some manufacturers have found. Recycled poses are fine except when union cap badges end up on confederate heads. I've got a lot of these now, feel entitled to be picky about what I add to the collection.
Of course, I have a wish list. Besides the Zouaves and flag bearers already mentioned, the cavalry units in my collection are quite thin. I'd like to see some of the Heavy Artillery regiments like the 1st ME or Litchfield's own 2nd CT that Grant converted to Infantry and fed into the furnace at Cold Harbor and Petersburg. It is probably too much to ask for any of Gracie's Alabama Brigade, which would cover the confederate side of the family tree rather nicely. There seem to be very few offerings of confederate NCOs who are doing something other than carrying flags. The Civil War doesn't offer collectors the range of vehicles of all that WWII armor, but I'd like a caisson to go with the six horse team and limber that Britains put out early this decade, and maybe a sanitary commission ambulance and sutler's wagon. Heck, I'd even go for a stampeding Congressman and his lady overtaken in their chaise after the rout at Bull Run. Just not all at once. I have to space out my purchases and stay on budget to keep my finances and my marriage afloat. Here are a few more shots of what is on my top shelves that you may click to enlarge.
More: (April 1, 2008): Welcome Artifacts Collectors.com readers!
When you "shuffle off this mortal coil, turn your body back to soil" as Loudin Wainwright III acidly puts it in the lyrics to "Suicide Song", will you still have a carbon footprint? How green is your cemetery? The Funeral Consumers Alliance of Eastern Massachusetts is a strong believer in going out the natural way and according to the March 12th Berkshire Environmental Action Team newsletter is seeking a partnership to establish a "green cemetery" in Massachusetts.
"A green cemetery is a natural burial ground that conserves land while providing an alternative to standard burial. It is a cemetery that encourages sustainable and ethical practices by banning the use of toxins and non-biodegradable materials. Green burial is interment without embalming, metal or hardwood caskets, casket vaults or cement liners, and often without permanent markers (although in some cemeteries, natural stone markers are permitted). An un-embalmed body may be wrapped in a shroud and placed in the ground or buried in a biodegradable casket. Typically, family and friends of the deceased have the opportunity to be more directly involved in the burial.
The FCAEM is looking for a conservation group to partner with on this effort. As a conservationist who spends a good deal of time thinking about land use and management questions, I confess I had not been paying close attention to the green cemetery movement. The Litchfield Hills Greenprint considers rural cemeteries to be permanently protected open space, since a change of use is highly unlikely and there are demonstrated habitat and recreational values provided by these spaces. I have written here about America's rural cemetery movement and the rare species and habitats that persist in old pioneer graveyards where the prairie has never been plowed, or where frequent mowing has mimicked the natural disturbance of suppressed fire regimes. The conservation benefits of these places has not been a question for me, but their management and the actual burial practices associated with them is a new angle.
There are protocols for green golf courses that I'd imagine would be applicable to rural cemeteries. My friends at the Ecological Landscaping Association could doubtless offer some pointers and best management practices for these spaces. I believe the main challenge besides changing consumer expectations and behaviors would be in local zoning and public health ordinances that might not be aligned with winding shrouds, and biodegradable caskets. Coincidentally, there was a piece on a UK manufacturer of Ecopod coffins on Marketplace this morning that raised this point, as well as questioned whether importing these things from Britain really resulted in a reduced carbon footprint when compared to wooden caskets made locally. As for how all this compares to cremation, there is certainly an immediate carbon release into the atmosphere but less land required for burial and decomposition.
If you have an opinion on which is the greener option, you can jump into this thread at Live Earth where they had a fine old time getting down and dirty on this topic. I would caution those who advocate a tilt over the side to Davey Jones, however, that burial at sea is not always forever.
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:
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.
Richard Thompson is kicking off his Spring solo tour. I'll be taking in the show in Great Barrington on April 19th at the Mahaiwe. Treat yourself to tickets at a town near you.
The 250th Anniversary of the Battle of Carillon features a Grand Encampment and battle reenactment June 27-29th at Fort Ticonderoga. They are putting the finishing touches on the French works and abatis. The Pipers' Refrain will echo over Lake Champlain and I will get a serious Jones for mid-18th century waistcoats and fusils.
The first chorus of spring peepers and the night of the salamanders.
The grand gathering of the Barker and Ogden clans over the 4th of July weekend at Windrock by the bay to honor my grandmother's life and celebrate all that connects us.
A few days on Monhegan immediately thereafter banging nails and hanging windows as part of an extended family work party on that enchanted isle. Will work for lobster!
Turning 40. Far better than the alternative!
Finishing the next chapter of my novel. Note I did not say first chapter. The book is well into its 1st trimester so it is safe to acknowledge it. I'm not ready to reveal much about the plot, except that its premise is an alternate history and those Revolutionary War posts of mine have had more than just genealogical interest behind them. Washington dies well.
Spring ephemerals in the woods and wetlands and the smell of newly turned earth in the garden.
Saving some really special places. Windrock is on the top of my personal list, but there are some truly extraordinary conservation opportunities in the Litchfield Hills, too.
River Herring rebounding. One can dream.
The upcoming Cabinet of Curiosities #5 blog carnival. It's shaping up to be a grand spectacle, but there is still time to get your submission in. Whacha got?
After last night's storm the mercury fell, and this morning I found our sap buckets far from the tree and icicles running from the spiles. That meant that today was a good one for sugaring off the 5 gallons of sap we have collected so far from our backyard maple tree. We are a two bucket operation, so against the better judgment of those home economics majors who know full well what a heady brew of maple steam can do to wallpaper, we set the kettle to boil on the stove and set about making pancakes. This particular breakfast would not benefit from the sap reducing in the pot - there were many hours to go before the syrup could be decanted - but our now customary aebleskiver tasted great with what we had on hand.
Breakfast done at the leisurely hour of brunch, we bundled into the car and headed off to inspect the Great Falls of the Housatonic, nearing moderate flood stage after the heaving rains this weekend. It was as high and riotous as we've seen it this winter, and dramatic enough to lure a steady stream of Sunday drivers to the best show in town for those in the know. The children were thrilled to be so close to such a wild and violent cataract, and the urge to toss stones into the chasm was a siren call for Elias. We lingered above and below the plunging Falls, then drove over the single lane bridge at Falls Village and turned north toward the final skating excursion of the season at Tom Zetterstrom's quarry.
The first time I took the children skating here in January, they barely could stay upright. This time, the half a dozen skating outings we have had since showed through. Emily took to the ice - soft and punky in the spring sunshine but hard and slick in the shade of the 
quarry walls - and Elias made his way steadily out with hardly a falter on his double runner skates. It has been such a pleasure to watch them find their way on their skates from wobbling helplessness to 
something approximating ease and comfort on the ice and, in Emily's case, the ability to go where she wishes in short order without faltering.
it was an afternoon of adieu to winter, for we do not expect to be able to skate on the quarry or the little pond near the elementary school again before winter comes again to these rugged hills. Today we felt the last frozen breathe of the season but also breathed in the sweet vapors of spring from the kettle on the stove and the amber reduction within. By 7:30 it was a roiling boil, and time to pour off and seal in a pint mason jar. Another week or two of sap collecting remains, and then the crocus and the snowdrop with compete for our attention. Today, at least, was rounded with the glories of water in all its forms - steam, liquid and solid - and memories far more fixed and immutable.
It is going to dive down toward negative territory tonight in the Litchfield Hills. I remember cold like that on a Christmas morning when it got so bad we seriously thought about bringing my sister's pony up from the empty barn and into the back wood room of our house. 32 degrees below zero is downright unfriendly weather and one tends to have uncharitable thoughts about the season.
Back in 1990 I spent New Years week on Monhegan Island out in the Gulf of Maine, and got to see that familiar island in winter. The little summer cottages on Dead Man's Cove were dark and empty, and the rising tide sucked the snow from the rocky shore. We stayed in a heated apartment and pitched in with the Islanders as they prepared for Trap Day, the traditional launch of Monhegan's lobster season, now established by law but then enforced by custom. I rode out that morning with Doug Boynton and my friend Chris Koerber who was Dougie's stern-man and the swells and the stench of the bait were beyond description and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.
Monhegan still had deer back then, before they got too numerous and were removed to protect the island ecology. The parasitic dwarf mistletoe infestation was starting to spread in the spruce forest but had not yet had the impact that it would in the coming decade. I skated with my Mom on the Ice Pond which I had never seen in its frozen form before. As always in winter, the human population shrinks to a few dozen year-rounders and a handful of others like ourselves with warm homes to return to elsewhere. 
When the sun came out, the low angle light on the long grass of the cemetery was breathtaking with the whitecaps and blue water beyond. I loved the days that were leached of color, all gray skies and steely water and white frosting on the dark shore. To endure a winter out here takes more than most would hazard, but to sojourn for a time was to see with fresh eyes. I will try to see with them again on this cold winter night in Connecticut when the marrow in my very bones wants to curse the cold and dark.
