Walking the Berkshires

Whether Invasive or Just In-Migrating; You Cannot Conserve the Status Quo.

There have been some concerns raised in the land trust community that one of the impacts of climate change will be the displacement of some native species by others that are expanding their ranges.  A recent article by Attorney James L Olmsted entitled: "The Butterfly Effect: Conservation Easement, Climate Change and Invasive Species"suggests a number of changes that land Trusts can make to their easement language to anticipate this problem, but the underlying premise that in-migrating North American species "will in many cases be invasive" is on questionable scientific ground.

 It is wrong to think of species and natural communities as static and restricted to where they are today, or were at the time of European contact. 

The term “Invasive” is both relative in space and time and too  broadly applied to North American species that are expanding their natural ranges in response to environmental factors and opportunities.  Birds have been doing this for a very long time.  The black vultures now present in large numbers in Connecticut were not found north of Maryland in the first part of the 19^th century (all those dead horses at Gettysburg gave them a beachhead).  Cardinals were not part of my mother’s Massachusetts girlhood.  Coyotes are filling an available large predator niche after the extirpation of wolf and cougar populations.

The term “Invasive” has more validity when it is restricted  to introduced species,  and then only to  those which  have such characteristics as spreading across spatial gaps, establishing virtual monocultures and multiple dispersal methods.  Having these attributes, species should be demonstrated  to displace and outcompete native species to be considered invasive.  Under this definition, House Sparrows are invasive, but Cattle Egrets which, bless their hearts, got here by crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean all on their own, are not.

When I was part of the Massachusetts Invasive Plant Advisory Group that developed criteria to determine which species should be considered invasive or potentially invasive in the Commonwealth, we had a very hard debate about Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), a central Appalachian species which can be problematic in pine barren systems in the Northeast.  Had the glaciers receded a few thousand years earlier, Robinia would likely have expanded its natural range a few hundred miles further north, resulting in a different kind of natural community where it overlapped with pitch pine and scrub oak.  Humans helped it make the jump, planting Black Locust for fence poles (which sometimes resprouted!). 

My advice for anyone drafting a conservation easement or management plan is to start by answering the question; “What are we trying to conserve and managing for?”  The question of invasiveness relates directly to whether a species impacts the viability of conservation targets.  The best example I can remember from my TNC days concerned a fen in NJ that was also a bog turtle site.  The fen had a large and expanding incursion of purple loosestrife (an exotic species non-native to North America).  There were two possible conservation targets to manage for at this site: the rare natural community represented by the fen, and the federally threatened bog turtle species.  The condition of the fen was severely degraded and attempting to eradicate the loosestrife threatened worse disturbance as well as the bog turtles that still were using it, so it was determined not to try to manage the fen as fen, but as bog turtle habitat.  The bog turtle basking areas  were being shaded out by the loosestrife, so the management prescription was to cut the loosestrife stalks by hand each year before they set seed.  This took several days of cutting by hand, but was the best response available to conserve the primary conservation target.

So, if we are managing for rare and restricted habitat types, some of which will not be viable in their current configuration, or indeed in any form with climate change, we are making a choice to prioritize them against the prevailing forces of change.  That may indeed be the right thing to do, but even then the calcareous fens of Connecticut will not have the same species composition and structure as those in Maryland even when our climate changes to that of Maryland today.  There are special gaps that are unlikely to be crossed by native fen species present today in Maryland but not in Connecticut.  That is the beauty of natural variation.  Diversity matters, but it plays out in many different ways from site to site.

Especially with large, “functional” landscapes, the idea is not to manage them to maintain exactly the species types and forest composition of today, but so that they are robust and resilient enough to maintain biodiversity, in whatever forms may be viable in the future.  Invasive plants may well be a factor that needs to be accounted for, but it does not begin or end with a list of species that are “meant to be here” and others that are not.

 

 

Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative Website Launched

It has been a year in the making, but today our brand new website for the Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative went live at www.litchfieldgreenprint.org.This will be the virtual home for the Collaborative and a major communications tool and resource for us and for those who care about conserving what makes our region so special.  There is an interractive map portal with lots of data specific to Northwest Connecticut and additional content that will be available to Greenprint members once I provide them with passwords.  We are having a soft launch during its shakedown cruise and will ramp up the publicity later next month.  Overall I am very pleased with this product.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

Connecticut Cougar came from the West

As predicted, the cougar killed on a parkway in SW Connecticut came East from a population in South Dakota.  From the Black Hills to the Gold Coast was a trek of 1,500 miles, and along the way this same individual was detected in Minnesota and Wisconscin. 

"Some experts suspect this could be the same animal filmed by a trail camera in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, leading wildlife experts to map its likely path from the U.S. into Ontario Canada, circling the Great Lakes and eventually crossing back into New York and Connecticut."

This is the same route taken by the western Coyote on its move into the east.  It is the first wild mountain lion confirmed by the authorities in CT in 100 years.  There will be more.

Last Week's Nature's Notebook Column in the LJ

I wrote here in the Lakeville Journal about the Mountain Lion that was struck and killed by a car in Milford, CT, among other incipient arrivals in western New England.  Fair use excerpt:

"The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection is working on the standard hypothesis that this was an illegally held captive animal that somehow got loose, perhaps wandering over from New York, as the eastern mountain lion is officially extinct outside of the Florida panther subspecies.

Preliminary investigation of the specimen, however, confirmed that it had not been neutered or declawed and was a lean animal, which does not strengthen that hypothesis, so they are waiting for DNA tests.

Moose have been known to wander to Long Island Sound, but it is hard to imagine a viable population of cougars becoming established on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. The western mountain lion, however, visits backyard swimming pools and overlaps with encroaching development in the wildland/urban interface. They are expanding their ranges east and, like the coyote before them, it is only a matter of time before a few of these big cats wander into our region (if, indeed, they have not already done so).

Wildlife officials often say that if we had mountain lions here, there would be physical evidence from collisions with cars. There is one such example of that now, and it will be very interesting to learn whether this was truly someone’s pet or a long-ranging pioneer from Illinois and points west."

Species of Special Concern

My children know that when you go looking for Box Turtles, you will not find them, but when you live where they live, it often happens serendipitously.  This old tortoise was walking across the cut in the bank that leads to the beach at Windrock.  The Massachusetts Heritage and Endangered Species Program lists  the eastern box turtles as a species of Special Concern in the Commonwealth.  I sent in a record from our property a number of years ago, making the surrounding area priority habitat and ultimately strengthening the environmental significance of the open space protection efforts that have saved so much of Great Neck from the heavy development pressure that has affected the remaining woodlands and shoreline of this coastal community.  Windrock itself qualified for Chapter 61B, a "current use" open space tax abatement program,, based on the environmental condition of our property and we cited the presence of this species to help make that case..When our neighbor cleared a part of the woodlands between us to build a stately home, the order of conditions for the construction work mandated a turtle barrier around the build site.

We are delighted to be sharing this land with these turtles.  I have the same thrill when I spot one of their long necks peering above a patterned shell that I felt as a child.

Saving Where the Wild Trout Are

There were wild fingerling brookies in this pool when I visited yesterday.  Further downstream is a pool with scores of fish, including native trout that are well over a foot in length. No one stocks this stream, and very few know the value of what it contains.

I am working with a landowner to save over 1,300 feet of frontage along this trout stream through the donation of a conservation easement to a local land trust.  It is a small strip of deciduous forest with a very special stream, as important in its own way as a large farm parcel or forest tract is for protecting those resources.

Eastern brook trout have completely vanished from nearly 40% of the subwatersheds where they histoically occur in the Highlands region that runs between south Central Pennsylvania and the MA/CT line.  We have some of the most intact and productive wild trout streams that remain in the region here in Northwest Connecticut.  This is one of them. 

Light in October

Buzzard's Bay is cold enough now for the smell of its salt to permeate the wind.   By November the oaks along the shore will have turned, but now the duff beneath the pines has a layer of fresh needles and the shrubs are the color of green amber.  The low angled light of late afternoon brings out all the highlights in the sand and beach grass.

This weekend was made for Fall sailing, but there were very few who took advantage of it on Buzzard's Bay.  It was warm enough, even at night, to be comfortable under blankets without needing to turn on the heat, which in the big red house by the sea is not a one step process.  Only part of the Windrock house is winterized, and the upstairs hall needs to be partitioned by a sheet of plywood - known to us as the Wall of Jericho - to isolate the warm part from the cold.  

We awoke in the last hours of darkness last weekend to see the winter constellations advancing from the East, and Jupiter with three of its moons shining in the cloudless night.  We headed down Cape to Eastham and Wellfleet, finding the tide so high at the latter place that cars parked too close to the shore were up to their wheel wells in salt water and the trail to Great Island submerged at its very beginning.  Nothing daunted, we hiked instead at the Fort Hilll and Red Maple Swamp trails in Eastham, and gazed out over Nauset Marsh.  Little wonder that Champlain found this vast salt water wetland ringed with native habitations as he explored the coast in 1605.  Little wonder, too, that he found it treacherous to navigate and named it Mallebar.

Cape Codders have the sea in their blood, and the old cemeteries record many among the lost and drowned.  This stone lies in Wellfleet's Duck Creek Cemetery, and records the deaths of two half brothers: one drowned in a harbor on the north shore of Prince Edward Island and the other lost from ther Schooner "Telegraph" in an arm of the St. Lawrence between the Gaspé Peninsula and New Brunswick.

I love this time of year at the shore, when the crowds have withdrawn and the sun is bright and the wind is not yet honed by winter ice.  There are crimson creepers in the trees, and asters among broom sedge tussocks attracting the late butterflies.  Apple mint is still green by the pump, and woodsmoke drifts from the first laid fires.  It has a beauty all its own, the brown beach glass and gray driftwood and the pink flecked granite that the glaciers left behind.  I love the great show of the sugar maple that shuns the shore, but I love as well these autumn days of blue water and low angled light when russet and straw are in their glory.

Old Miniatures at New Windsor

The New Windsor Cantonment, where Washington's Army spent the final year of the war, has a new visitors center that houses an old but extraordinary diorama of a long column of continentals on the march.  Created in the 1960s by Paul A Buckley of Lexington MA, in collaboration with Col. Frederick Todd of the West Point Museum with custom miniatures from the team of Imrie Risley in upstate New York, the diorama was completed in sections that when fully assembled is 24 feet long. It has more than 300 figures in what looked to be 54mm scale, and is remarkably accurate in its depictions of the late war period.

I spent a wonderful visit at the Cantonment yesterday, and could not take my eyes off the model.  Dioramas captivated my imagination as a small boy and have held my love and interest ever since.  This one has so many marvelous details to discover, including elements of whimsy like a soldier being prodded awake while shirking in the bushes, and a dog pulling at a piece of cloth held by one of the marchers.  The dog, the story goes, is a representation of the faithful hound of the artist, that sat on one of the completed sections of the diorama.  One of the sutler's wagons is emblazoned with Todd and Buckley, provisioners, as the signature of the collaborators whose vision it depicts.

The display case is well labelled and interpreted, explaining the function of each of the marching individuals and units. I particularly appreciated the inclusion of camp followers and civilian onlookers, as well as the yellow mud clinging to wagon wheels and the  regimental flags in their black casings.  The only thing the interpretation lacked was an explanation of the reversed colors on the coats of the musicians, which for a blue coated regiment with red facings meant that the fifers and drummers wore red faced with blue.  This allowed commanders to locate their main form of communication over the din of battle, but also makes those attired in red appear to be British.  The trumpeter for the 2nd Dragoons was in a buff or off white coat faced with blue.

The exhibit is housed downstairs in the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, whioch may explain why the facility at this State Historic site had the funds to create such a fine interpretive space.  I was there to meet with one of the researchers about 18th century artillery as part of the hunt for a surviving example of a Salisbury cannon, but ended up having a wide-ranging conversation and personal tour of the exhibits.  I mentioned that an ancestor through marriage to one of the Ogden siblings, Lt. Col. Francis Barber of 2nd NJ regiment (3rd establishment), had been killed at the very end of the war at this site by a falling tree, and he lead me to a display where the officer in question was featured, along with his sword, a present from La Fayette!  The New Windsor Cantonment houses a number of such relics from other area sites, inckluding Washington's Newburgh headquarters now under renovation. 

Sign of the Times

The Nature Conservancy and Sheffield Land Trust are selling Tatkon House in Sheffield MA.  This property  was gifted by Carol Tatkon on her death in 1997 to The Nature Conservancy, to be jointly shared with Sheffield Land Trust.  It also came with more than 40 acres and an operating endowment.  In 2003, the building was expanded to include a wing with numerous offices.  At that time, there were nine TNC staff working from Tatkon House.  There has been considerable downsizing since then.

The building is being sold with 20 acres (18 of which will have a conservation easement).  There is a yellow birch on the property that I planted over the ashes of our stillborn daughter.  There is a vernal pool that brims with wood frogs and yellow spotted salamanders in early Spring. 

I have no doubt that TNC and Sheffield Land Trust have minimized the environmental impact on the surrounding protected lands by limiting development to the area surrounding the existing structure, but it is a sad situation. 

Times change, and priorities shift.  TNC previously sold land it owned in Sheffield this past May to a neighbor, which is its right so long as the terms under which it was acquired do not preclude its sale without restriction to a non-conservation owner. It also sold the house that went with it for a 32% loss over its 1996 purchase price.  I trust that TNC kept a good account of these transaction details, and had the property appraised so that as a charitable non profit it would not make a sale to a private individual that was below current value.

I hope TNC and Sheffield Land Trust decide to honor the conservation intent of the donor of Tatkon House and use the proceeds of an eventual sale to protect other significant lands in Sheffield.

The Self Inflicted Wound

A dear friend wrote to me recently about the anguish she felt over the oil that continues to inundate the heart of the sea.  She is a brilliant poet, and one who looks squarely at the horrors of the body and soul, but she also is a person of action and feels helpless in the face of this heartsickness.  She is a writer, as am I, so this is what I wrote in reply.

"Sometimes it takes a self inflicted wound to halt the bleeding.  I think of those "relief wells" inching their way through the seabed, and it almost feels like using a lancet to release bad humors in those days when western medicine and modern science knew little of each other.  Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood.  The body out of balance. 

We are shockingly primitive in our modern response to what our greedy delving has released.  It is like Tolkein's Balrog of Moria that awoke when the dwarves went too deep after their mithril.  It took Gandalf's death and rebirth to quench its flame.  It will require something like that of us as well.

Tolkien the lover of Trees also understood the sadness of the elves who outlived all else that they loved, who knew the ancient oaks from acorns and saw whole forests heedlessly destroyed to satisfy the consumptive now.  The Scouring of the Shire is for me the most important part of the Lord of the Rings.

The more we look unflinchingly at the horror of this house of grimy cards, the more we insist never again, the better chance we have that some positive lessons can be learned.  As for the wounded sea, the irreplaceable losses and the long term scars, sometimes the best we can do is bear witness, to tell their stories, to feel and to weep and to give tongue to grief.  The real healing happens over spans of time beyond human years, although it is amazing what resilience is possible from decade to decade. 

Consider the dramatic change in status of so many birds, including Brown pelicans, threatened with extinction by DDT and now recovering in its absence.  The harp seals that now haul out on the beach at Windrock when before the Marine Mammal Protection Act they were heedlessly slaughtered.  The quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink which when you were growing up was fouled and disregarded. 

We cannot sit by and say in a thousand years the earth will cleanse itself of the outrages we inflict on it.  There is a small comfort in knowing that geologic time is measured in millions while we encompass decades, but we only learn through telling and bearing witness, and a poet with your heart and depth of love for the ocean is the right person at the right time to give expression and meaning to this self inflicted wound."