Walking The Berkshires

"You Have the Right to Remains": Connecticut's Roadkill Law

Connecticut, for all its sprawling growth, is still blessed with some extensive rural areas.  Although just 1 in 8 of us lives in a rural part of Connecticut, we have more rural residents than some western states.  The Connecticut State office of Rural Health recognizes 65 rural communities (out of 169 towns statewide), with fully 1/3 of these located within the area served by the Litchfield Hills Greenprint.

With all this rural land available, many wildlife species are finding suitable habitat where once they were excluded, expanding both their ranges and overall population numbers across the state.  Some of these species, like white-tailed deer, take full advantage of the edge habitat created at the interface between developed lands and open space, in numbers that are at or near their pre-European settlement levels and far in excess of thresholds where they negatively impact habitat.  Others, like black bear, just a few years ago were highly uncommon in the state but their numbers are dramatically increasing today.

Much to the amusement of some but with serious intent, this past legislative session included modifications to the state's so-called "roadkill law" to address the impacts of vehicle collisions with bears and moose as well as deer.   Simply put, in Connecticut if your vehicle strikes and fatally injures one of these animals, once the authorities have attended to the accident scene you are entitled to take the animal home and eat it.  If you do not choose to exercise this right, anyone else who wishes to take possession of the carcass has the right to take it home and eat it.

Vehicle collisions with large animals are no laughing matter.  I once - I kid you not - hit a 16-ft-long African Rock Python, full on, when travelling at high speed in a light pick up truck in Namibia and ended up in a ditch. A wild turkey took out my side view mirror when it decided to fly in front of my car a few years back, but you are approximately 30 times more likely to be injured after colliding with a moose than with a white-tailed deer.  There were over 3,300 deer/vehicle collisions reported in the Nutmeg State in 2000 - modest by Pennsylvania or Michigan standards but still representing a  significant amount of trauma and damage.  In contrast, the first moose collision on record in this state happened in 1995, and there have been fewer than 10 since then.  There have been several motor vehicle collisions with black bears in Connecticut every year since the first record in 1991, and these are probably on the increase today.

Nationwide, an estimated 135,000 deer are killed in collisions with vehicles, resulting in over 100 human fatalities and at least 7,000 injuries.  The economic costs, it should go without saying, are considerable. Nevertheless, it is still highly improbable that a Connecticut motorist will actually be involved in a bear or moose collision, and even less likely that he or she will have the necessary time and skills required to take advantage of the somewhat dubious compensation the law provides of stocking the larder with bear meat and moose jerky after totalling the family car.  These "road culls" are not preventing bear, moose and deer populations from expanding in Connecticut, but higher traffic and further road development in our rural areas will likely mean more collisions with wildlife.

Extinction by the Numbers

Scientists estimate that there are more than 30 million species of organisms - plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and protists- alive on planet Earth today.  About half of these are rain forest species, and most of them are found in the forest canopy.  These forests are disappearing at the astonishing rate of 100 acres each minute worldwide, or 52,560,000 acres every year.

E.O. Wilson in Biodiverisy (1988) and The Diversity of Life (1992) estimates that the background rate of extinction in all this diversity should be 1-3 species a year.  Scientists differ, but estimates say we are experiencing between 1,000 and 10,000 times greater rates of extinction today and that these rates are both unprecedented and increasing.  According to Wilson, in the 1970s, the extinction rate was about one species a day, or at least a hundred-fold increase above the base rate.  A decade later it was one species every hour, or 8,760 species gone extinct each year.  The current rate of extinction is far higher, with estimates that 100 species a day, or 365,000 each year, could go extinct in the first decades of the 21st  Century.

On the other hand, for long-lived organisms it requires tens of thousands of years for speciation to occur and new species to emerge.  The Asiatic brown bear and the American grizzly are subspecies of the same animal, separated since the end of the last glacial period but still capable of interbreeding.   There are some fertile hybrids out there, such as Ogden's Pondweed (Potomogeton ogdenii), which since it was first described by science a few decades ago is known from only a handful of freshwater systems in western New England and Eastern New York.  Conceivably, this globally rare organism could go extinct and then reappear if both its parent plants remained viable and promiscuous.  There are not many species with that luxury.  Richard Leakey offered the opinion at a lecture I attended several years ago that Homo sapiens sapiens has stopped evolving.

The argument that extinction and recovery are part of the earth's natural cycle disregards the pace and global nature of the current extinction event, our role in accelerating it, and the amount of recovery time the planet will need to diversify once again.  Even the great extinction event at the end of the Mesozoic Era that closed the age of the non-avian dinosaurs affected fewer species and some portions of the globe more heavily than others.

Humans are capable of responding to what we perceive and changing behaviors both as individuals and collectively.  How many of us can perceive the extinction of hundreds of thousands of species every year when we have direct experience with few, if any of them?  Drowning walruses and starving polar bears are charismatic fauna impacted by climate change in highly visible and dramatic ways.  Who sees the rainforest canopy, one of the last terrestrial frontiers and until recently virtually inaccessible to science?  How are we to turn these numbers into meaningful experience while there is still time to mitigate our role in this period of extinction?

Today is by Senate declaration Endangered Species Day.  Tip of the Hat to Lene at Whorled Leaves for the serendipitous posting.

Comes a Tide

By mid August, 1955, the rivers were running high in the Litchfield Hills.  Hurricane Connie had just pounded the eastern seaboard for 11 days, dumping torrential rains on southern New England before the storm passed inland.  After 6 inches of rain, the valley of the Naugatuck, once the region's industrial heart and still its population center, saw its streams and rivers rise to flood stage.  The saturated ground and steep sided hills were unable to absorb more precipitation, yet worse was to come.  Hurricane Diane struck coastal New England less than a week after Connie, bringing on the worst flooding in the Connecticut's history. 

Although it ravished communities from the Carolinas to New Hampshire, the communities of the Naugatuck Valley in the Litchfield Hills were among the hardest hit by The Great Flood of 1955.  14 inches of rain fell in the headwaters of the Naugatuck and Farmington Rivers in little more than a day.  The Mad River in Winchester and the Still River in Torrington, two tributaries of the Farmington, tore out the hearts of those municipalities on August 19th, leaving their downtown's devastated and killing scores of people.  The Hartford Courant did a 50th anniversary feature last year that includes extraordinary film footage of the catastrophe, including video of an apartment house carried away on the flood waters.  The Connecticut State Library archives include harrowing images of the storm damage that echo recent images of the destruction of Hurricane Katrina in urban New Orleans. 

Hurricane Diane was the sixth costliest tropical storm in the 20th century, with more than $852 million dollars in damages, or the equivalent of 7 billion in today's dollars.  The regional impacts of the floods have been long lasting.  Winsted and Torrington, already declining industrial towns when the storm hit, have never fully recovered from its destruction, and although Winsted has put considerable effort into revitalizing its downtown in recent years it is far different from the way the town looked prior to the flood.

The storm completely isolated large portions of the region, washing out roads and bridges as well as more substantial buildings and infrastructure. A massive investment in flood control by the Army Corps of Engineers in subsequent decades created a series of new impoundments in the Farmington and Naugatuck river basins that have arguably saved many lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in property, but also affected stream connectivity and created new barriers for fish passage in an already impaired watershed. 

Perhaps even more significant, the shattered transportation infrastructure of the Litchfield Hills kept the region remote and isolated while the new Interstate Highway system stayed coastal and followed the Connecticut River Valley.  The real estate development and sprawl of the 1960s and 1970s largely spared the Litchfield Hills, even as the local economy stagnated.  Large areas remained open and undeveloped here for decades longer than they might have otherwise as a result of the floods.

Today, the storms of 1955 are a distant memory.  Many residents today were just children when they witnessed the storm.  The real estate and housing market continues to expand in the Litchfield Hills. Torrington actually has the largest so-called ""micropolitan" area in the nation, with a city core of about 36,000 people but affecting a regional area with a population over 180,000.  Efforts are underway to restore fish passage at some of the dams on the Naugatuck, while flood control areas are viewed as potential greenways and recreational open space.  Far more people live in this area today who did not experience the floods than those who can still recall the day when the rivers came down in fury. 

Oh, My, No More Pie

The Connecticut state budget passed last weekend and yesterday was the end of the legislative session.  The environmental community hoped that money from a $100 million revenue surplus could be allocated for open space protection, and Senate Majority leader Don Williams supported allocating up $30 million for farmland protection.  At the end of the session, not one cent from the surplus was allocated to agricultural preservation, with major investment instead going toward Connecticut's transportation needs - both roads and mass transit.

There is previous legislative authority for farmland and open space protection, but it is extremely difficult to get money through the State bond commission and there is now a long list of unfunded projects that may be impossible to conserve without increased financial support from the State.  One farmland protection project that I have been associated with in the Litchfield Hills came to a screeching halt without $500,000 in state funding, and there are many more that now are more likely to be developed as a result.

If Connecticut is serious about open space preservation - and it is a very high priority for many of our rapidly developing communities - then it needs to make the investment in enabling non-profit conservation organizations and public entities to acquire fee interest in protected land and development rights.  If the goal is for 10% of the State's land area by 2023 to be protected through State ownership, and another 11% through non-profit, federal, and municipal conservation interests, then we can't keep removing slices from the conservation pie.  It will not matter if we develop new sources of private funding if the matching grants aren't available from the state to get the deal done.  Virtually no entity, however well financed, has the resources to conserve multi-million dollar properties on its own from a single source.  There should be $10 million -certainly not the less than $4 million- in the current open space grant round, and even that is inadequate.

The more I learn about the pace of conservation across the Litchfield Hills, the more convinced I am that state financing for conservation is absolutely critical to enable non-profit and municipal land protection projects to get done.  It is greatly in the public interest to conserve open space. After all, there needs to be homeland left to secure.

Open Space at a Snail's Pace

In 1998, Connecticut's Governor Rowland announced an ambitious goal to conserve 21% of the Nutmeg State by 2023.  The Rowland administration calculated that conserving 21% of the 3.5 million acres in Connecticut (wet or otherwise) would represent 673,210 acres (although 21% of 3,547,731 acres is 745,023 by my reckoning).  In any case, at that time and in aggregate, the 169 municipalities in Connecticut contained 14% permanently protected land, so using Rowland's figures in 1998 Connecticut had 25 years to protect 224,179.93 acres, or 8967.1572 acres each year for the next quarter century.

So how are we doing, Connecticut?  Governor Rowland resigned in a cloud of scandal to avoid impeachment and subsequently served some jail time after pleading guilty to one count of "conspiracy to deprive the state of his honest services."  The economic prospects of Connecticut in 1998 were quite different from the post 9/11 economy, and state investment in open space conservation has dropped at the same time that private philanthropy for land protection has sharply declined.   On the other hand, the pace of development across much of the state and soaring real estate values threaten the conservation gains made by local and regional land trusts and the state during the the last decade.

One measure of how much land is protected each year is the investment the State makes in open space acquisition.  Connecticut established an open space matching grant grant program in 1998 that expires when the state reaches its 21% open space goal.  In four grant rounds between 1998 and 2000, 7,084 acres were protected with the help of $20.5 million in state funding.  A grant round in 2001 protected 1,564 acres in 28 towns with $8.3 million.  Then in 2002, Governor Rowland allocated 80 million dollars from a state budget surplus to protect 15,300 acres of water company land in partnership with The Nature Conservancy which provided an additional 10 million.  In contrast, during the most recent legislative session, not one penny of the State's budget surplus when to open space preservation. 

In 2005 the state announced $6.8 million in grant assistance to help protect 2,000 acres in 24 towns and that after 10 grant rounds it was at 70% of its open space goal. 

Let's consider that statement for a moment.  That means all the land protection in the state in the seven years between 1998 and 2005 - 22,215.93 acres without considering the water company deal- pushed the aggregate amount of open space up from 14% to 14.7% of the total area of the state.  This number seems a bit low to me, since the 10 grant rounds by my calculations would have produced about this amount on their own.  The state DEP in the late 1990s was adding about as much open space through its direct acquisition as the matching grant program enabled.  In recent years its acquisitions have declined.  However, if we use the state's own figure of going from 66.667% of its open space goal to 70% in seven years, it will take  70 more years to reach the 2023 goal.  Even if we are charitable and throw in an extra 3% in 7 years to account for land protected by the state in fee, the 2023 goal will be reached in 35 years, or about twice as long as the target date.

It is difficult to get a handle on the actual pace of conservation in Connecticut.  Individual land trusts may be aware of what else has been conserved in the communities they serve, but the state's open space GIS data is error prone and local assessor's offices have an incomplete understanding of what is permanently protected in their localities.  Furthermore, the 21% goal is an executive benchmark.  The enabling legislation for Connecticut's open space aquisition specifies that the state would protect through direct aquisition 10% of the total land area and municipalities, non-profits and federal agencies would protect 11%.  It is not entirely clear from government press releases against which goal progress is being measured: the state's 10% or the total 21% protected open space.

In the Litchfield Hills, the Greenprint program that I direct is gathering data on the pace of land protection in each of the 25 towns in our area over the past decade, and comparing that with the rate of new housing construction in each of these communities.  Some preliminary data shows that communities with active land trusts, a deep local philanthropic base, current open space and development plans, and a strong sense that what they cherish is threatened are doing more land protection than those without these qualities.  A town like Roxbury in southern Litchfield County has a robust land trust that manages to conserve property at an astounding rate of 155 acres/year.  It sees about 18 new housing starts a year and has seen development sprawling in neighboring communities.  A land trust in a town like Watertown with about 69 housing starts a year is lucky to protect 5.5 acres in the same period.  Warren, CT sees about 10 new houses a year and its land trust conserves about 20 acres a year, which assuming an average lot size of 2 acres indicates that they are just keeping up with the current pace of development.  A 10 lot subdivision in Warren would be considerably out of character with the Town's development trend and the current rate of conservation would not be enough to compensate for its impacts. 

Whether any of these communities feels it has conserved what is most important to preserve its character or the ecological significance of its landscape is a different matter.  For some towns, the state's 21% goal is too little, while others do not have enough open space left to have a realistic chance of reaching it at all.  For Connecticut's overall open space preservation goal to be meaningful, the rate of land protection needs to increase dramatically and the only way for that to happen is for there to be larger and more reliable sources of conservation funding, especially from government sources.  Localities will also have to consider increasing their investment in preserving open space, including open space bond initiatives for land protection in their towns. 

One thing is certain.  We do not have 35 years left to conserve what we most value about this landscape and our communities.  All indications are that statewide and within the Litchfield Hills, development is far outpacing land protection.  To reach CT's open space goal, we need to protect nearly 9,000 acres a year, while every year we lose 16,500 acres to development.

"Hi Ho the Carrion Crow"

For reasons not entirely clear to me, our part of Canaan has an abundance of vultures.  Not a few, scattered buzzards soaring high and silently over the valley, but hundreds of birds.  On late afternoons they come winging up our street by dozens and by scores, roosting in the tall white pines and Norway spruce near the elementary school.   

Most are turkey vultures, whose familiar "V"shaped wings rarely flap as they ride the thermals.  But we also have black vultures, a southern species increasing its range spreading northward for reasons that may include global climate change.  Black vultures are smaller and more aggressive than the red headed turkey vulture and have white patches near their wing tips.  Their egg shells are weakened by DDT and the ban of that toxin has prop ably aided the recovery and expansion of this species. They frequent garbage dumps - we have a transfer station in Canaan - and can make use of large carcasses.  After the Battle of Gettysburg, when unburied horses made for a carrion bonanza, black vultures established a breeding population on Little Round Top at the extreme northern limit of the species range.  They are now breeding in Massachusetts and are sometimes seen as far north as Maine.

Vultures have one of the most keenly developed senses of smell of any creature.  Research has demonstrated that they can smell rotting flesh buried under leaves from thousands of feet above the ground.  Contrary to western mythology, an unhorsed cavalryman crawling across the desert would be unlikely to attract a vulture's attention unless he had a chunk of badly cured sow belly in his haversack.

This still does not explain why Canaan is the epicenter of vulturedom in our area.  We have a few farms out in East Canaan but no more open fields and tall trees than other towns in our area.  The Housatonic River does create local and variable wind patterns that move up the valley and may influence where and when updrafts develop.  Canaan Valley converges on the Housatonic Valley in our town, which may explain why raptors riding the currents would converge here, but I'm just speculating.

Spring is Sprung

Last night we had frost in the bottomlands of the Litchfield Hills.  Today the air is clean, the sky clear, and the nascent Spring is revealed in every flower and twig.  The rich, moist woodlands boast trillium and starflower, hepatica and bloodroot, while trout lily and ramps drift beneath the greening trees.  Marsh marigolds are a burst of yellow in dark woodland pools.  Ostrich ferns push their fiddleheads out of the ooze.

The invasives are emerging in force, too.  Barberry leafed out before all but the first Spring ephemerals, and Norway Maple blossoms fall in sickly green.  Garlic Mustard is in flower and the Japanese Knotweed is over a foot high, soon to surpass the height where it can be cut and served as ersatz rhubarb for those with a taste for it.  Coltsfoot blooms by the roadside and also deeper in the forest.  Bittersweet twines anew.  The early leaf gets the sun.

When I was in Virginia a week ago, the redbuds cast their ethereal sprays of color beneath the forest canopy.  In these latitudes, flowering shadblow hovers in the understory.  Named for the anadromous fish that often appear in our rivers when the tree is in flower, shad trees are among my favorite harbingers of Spring.  To walk in our forests in late April is a pure delight, with warm sunlight still reaching through the leafless trees and wildflowers unfurling at every step.  In a few short weeks, foliage closes in and vistas contract, but now the woodlands are airy and light. 

I have a wildflower garden at home with nursery grown spring ephemerals predominating.  Dutchman's britches and maidenhair fern sway beside many of the species previously mentioned.  There are even two clumps of large yellow ladylippers Cypripedium pubescens and another of little white ones Cypripedium x andrewsii, laboratory grown and divided by the New England Wildflower Society  without the need for the mycorrhizal associations that natural propagation requires.   Rare plant gardens are a bit like zoos - moving and satisfying at some levels but no substitute for the real thing in the wild.  Still, I spend hours in this garden as spring progressing, noting how the plants rearrange themselves over time and form their own associations.  The trout lilies and wild leeks are delightfully intermingled, now.

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
An eternity in an hour."

-  William Blake

"Chemicals, Chemicals, I Need Chemicals!"

The title for this post comes from George W. Hayduke, the paranoid, redneck eco-warrior character in Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang.  Hayduke measures highway miles in six-packs - "every freeway a free-for-all"- and the chemicals he craves (coffee, cigarettes and Schlitz) fuel his campaign of sabotage against the rampant development and destruction of the desert southwest.  For Hayduke and an intrepid band of proto-Earth Firsters, the ends justify the means, so turning the tools of modern society against itself while consuming some of its most addictive products is not a contradiction that troubles them terribly much.  The value of the wilderness they are fighting to save is much greater than the minor subsidizing of big tobacco and the like that comes from fueling Hayduke's addictions.

Environmentalists make compromises with modernity.  Even the most self sufficient "back to nature" adherent will favor modern matches over tinder and flint.  The Amish sometimes lease land for cell towers and farm in their shadow without telephones in their houses.  Our tools and taboos reflect our values, an ethical cost/benefit analysis we negotiate throughout our lives.  Sometimes we make different choices and modify our behaviors when presented with new information that casts our customary practices in a negative light.  Recycling is one such example.  The old practice of disposing recyclable waste in landfills has proved economically as well as ethically unsustainable and a combination of incentives and environmental education has modified how we treat our household trash and product packaging.

Even so, there are many environmental dilemmas with imperfect solutions, and whether or not these are adopted depends greatly on what we as individuals and society value.  I was recently asked by friends at Whorled Leaves about the costs and benefits of using herbicide to combat invasive plants, an ethical quandary of the first order.  They, along with many environmentalists and environmental organizations, recognize the significant threat to our landscapes and natural diversity posed by introduced, invasive plants and animals, but are also quite rightly cautious about the impacts of using of chemicals to combat them.  When a globally engaged conservation organization of the size and complexity of The Nature Conservancy tackles invasive species with the full range of tools at its disposal, including, where it deems appropriate, the use of herbicides, it makes these choices based on values that we need to understand in order to either increase our level of comfort with its practices or to better challenge the assumptions that underlie them.

I have considerable experience both with invasive plants and TNC, having been involved as an employee of one with combating the other for seven years.  I used to start my presentations on invasives with a discussion of values.  "Good and bad are not attributes of species", I'd say, "they are value statements we make about their behaviors."  The horticultural industry, which has come a significant way on the issue of invasives in the last decade, emphasizes "the right plant in the right place."  Those plants, animals, and pathogens that evolved elsewhere and can out-compete or even cause the extirpation of naturally occurring species when introduced to new regions can have far reaching impacts on things we value - biodiversity, historic landscapes, outdoor recreation, farms and forestry, to name but a few.  Invasive species are dramatically altering the ecology of habitats both common and rare, and are the second leading cause of biodiversity decline after habitat destruction worldwide.

With impacts like these, it is no wonder that The Nature Conservancy, a biodiversity-driven conservation organization, would prioritize reducing threats to native species posed by invasives.  The ethical as well as practical problem arises when it comes to invasive species prevention and control.  Invasive species are so successful because they have a host of attributes that make them very hard to eradicate once they become established.  There is an exponential and diminishing rate of return on investment in invasive plant control the larger the invaded area and the longer the invasives have been established.  Some invasive plants are so overwhelming that even  when they form a very small percentage of the overall plant diversity in an area, they are poised to dominate native habitats in a very short time.  Garlic Mustard in the Northeast reaches the threshold where it starts to out-compete native plants at less than 2% cover.  Old World climbing fern, spread by airborne spores, has smothered the Everglades and is advancing with astounding speed upstate through Florida's wetlands.

Invasions of these magnitudes can only be addressed at the scale of the threat through management that includes herbicides.  A minor percentage of invasive plants currently in this country has these system altering attributes and the capacity to expand explosively in a few short years.  A decision to manage these species will be based on the values of the individual or entity that contemplates the management.  For The Nature Conservancy, the native diversity it values is directly threatened by invasive species -admittedly some far more so than others- and it has made an accommodation with the selective use of herbicides to manage invasives. 

TNC's Global Invasive Species Initiative, formerly the Wildland Invasive Species Program, provides detailed Element Stewardship Abstracts for invasives and control methods on its website.  The abstract for Phragmities australis, or common reed, describes a host of management options, some more successful than others, including chemical control.  Aerial spraying with Glyphostate, the active ingredient in Roundup and its wetlands approved counterpart, Rodeo, is used on Phragmites where the non-target impacts on native diversity of using a broad spectrum herbicide are minimal.  In sensitive habitats or areas where aerial spraying is either impractical or politically and culturally unfeasible, TNC uses hand application with backpack sprayers, stem swipes or cut stem application directly into the plant using eyedroppers.

Glyphosate has been around for several decades and there has been a good deal of research on its behavior in natural systems and impacts on wildlife and human health.  It bonds with soil on contact, breaking down into naturally occurring compounds including nitrogen and phosphorus.  When applied correctly -targeted application without toxic surfactants in wetlands, on days with low wind, temperatures below 90 degrees and when rain is not expected within 8 hours of treatment, it has few non-target impacts on plants and animals and stays out of the water supply.  It works on some species better than others - you will need something stronger for bittersweet.  TNC has a high level of comfort with its management protocols and with the evidence supporting the use of this herbicide and its known, largely controllable non-target impacts.  That is not to say that people living in communities where TNC uses herbicide feel the same way.  There is far more in the prevailing electronic media stream about concerns with Glyphosate in general than countervailing data about its appropriate use for ecological objectives.

Part of the problem is also an organizational strength of The Nature Conservancy.  Folks who work for TNC really believe in its mission.  A poll taken in 2000 by incoming President Steve McCormick showed that 97% of us fully supported the mission "to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive."  With that kind of mission buy-in, decisions made by TNC favor doing what is consistent with its values.  It tries to be science-based, pragmatic, and non-confrontational in its approach, but the issue of herbicide use is controversial and it sometimes surprises TNC employees to find that others -even environmentalists- who do not have the same mission add up the ethical question differently.

Another problem is that once you accept that invasive species are a real threat to what you value, and especially if you have struggled with little to show for it using manual or mechanical control methods, you make accommodations with the tools that offer better hope of gaining ground.   You drop a blanket policy against biological introductions to control invasives and develop a protocol for assessing whether and how to use this strategy.  You evaluate the available data on chemical control techniques based on effectiveness and non-target impacts and try and use what will get the job done without unacceptable impacts.  In some communities where I have worked, there is such opposition to herbicide use that it defies logical argument and is driven by pure, values-based emotion.  I made the decision not to spray barberry in one community in the Berkshires, even though I had permits to control it over 2,000 acres of state land using a Congressional earmark, because it cost us too much in community goodwill and in my estimation compromised our ability to do further conservation work there.  It helped that as I weighed the costs and benefits of controlling barberry in that community, I believed that we could still meet our management goals by working in other communities that shared that large forest system and that barberry did not pose the same sort of threat this far into its invasion that other rapidly expanding plant invaders might have.

Whenever one is contemplating land management of any kind, the first and most important question to answer is what are you managing for.  Management that is just about killing weeds is unsound. The desired outcome should be a healthier natural system, an unobstructed waterbody, a healthy rare species population, a regenerating forest.  Invasives may impact all of these objectives, but rarely as the only causal factor and the solution is usually not eradication.  If loosestrife is shading out bog turtle basking habitat and that is what you are managing for, cutting the stems at less than 1' high is a more practical and ethically appropriate solution than using herbicide or pulling up the loosestrife.  The natural community may be degraded but can still be managed for its value as bog turtle habitat.  Some land managers, in their zeal to address a known threat, overlook this primary rule of land management and too readily assume that herbicide use is the most practical and appropriate solution to a problem they may not have fully analyzed.

Where do I fall out in this values based discussion?   I manage for clear outcomes.  I strongly advocate invasive species prevention before they become established.  Because I manage a very small piece of property where I live, I can accomplish most of the invasive control I require through mechanical means.  I use Roundup as a cut stem application on buckthorn and winged euonymus, both of which have extensive root systems that stay green and, in the case of buckthorn, resprout vigorously.  I hand pull garlic mustard and will be doing so for at least 5 years because its seed bank is prolific and remains viable for at least that long.  If I were managing a larger property, I'd consider spraying garlic mustard.  Now that I no longer work for TNC, I am even more convinced that while controlling some invasions at large scales with herbicide is possible, those places where we make that investment and accommodation with chemicals need to be broadly vetted and among the most significant and irreplaceable of our natural resources. 

Sometimes one lives with Loosestrife.

Fen Ways

Ask most folks in these parts what is special about this landscape and you'll get a rich discussion of scenic beauty, rugged mountains, quaint villages and dark forests.  You will hear discussion of working landscapes, family farms, cultural and recreational opportunities.  Not surprisingly, the lands we have set aside for protection have many of these attributes.  We have been particularly attentive to our highest elevations and lands we can see from our cars. 

What you will likely not hear, unless you are speaking with an ecologist, is any talk about our most ecologically rich and globally significant habitats: our fens and calcareous seepage wetlands.  Most people do not have direct experience of these extraordinary natural communities and the patterns and processes which sustain them.  Yet here in the northern Litchfield Hills, the broad river valleys of the Berkshires, and west of the Taconics in New York, are wetlands of remarkable rarity and importance for conserving regional biodiversity.

Fens, like bogs, are moist peat lands where anaerobic conditions prevent decay, sometimes creating a perched mat of vegetation that quakes underfoot.  Unlike bogs they tend toward pH readings in the alkaline spectrum and are dominated by sedges.  While bogs rely largely on surface water and precipitation, groundwater hydrology maintains a fen.  Seeps and springs providing nutrient poor, calcium rich groundwater create ideal conditions for many regionally restricted plants and animals which prefer these habitats.

Like virtually every natural community found on this landscape today, this area's calcareous fens and seepage swamps are products of climate, geology, and past land use patterns.  The marble valleys and limestone bedrock geology of our region is unique in the rest of New England.  Glacial scouring left kettle holes and lakebeds fed by springs and slowly filling with peat.  Lake basin fens may develop on the shore such as at Snyder Pond in Copake, NY, or far out on the water as happened at the misnamed Kampoosa Bog in Stockbridge, MA.  Calcareous Sloping Fens emerge where two layers of bedrock, one more porous than the other, allow groundwater to break surface, while upslope vast areas of gravel, the shorelines of glacial lakes, provide a steady supply of water to the springs even in times of drought.

Natural Communities are not static systems, and fens are no exception.  Without periodic disturbance - beaver ponding and abandonment, wind events, fire, herbivory by large (possibly including extinct) ungulates -  woody vegetation tends to increase over time in open fens, eventually creating shrub fens with alder, dogwood and willow species predominating, and finally red maple tamarack peat swamps and other calcareous seepage wetlands with closed canopies.  Historically, open fen habitat would have occurred where conditions were too harsh to support the growth of woody vegetation or where disturbance created openings in a mosaic of seepage wetlands in different successional stages.  Natural fire is rare in this part of the northeast, rarer still in wetlands, but a soil core taken in Sheffield MA by the Nature Conservancy shows regular charcoal layers in one seepage wetland on average every 75 years over a period of two millennia.  Native Americans managing wetlands for food and forage and rare lightning ignited wildfires could account for these episodes.

Since European settlement, the seepage wetlands of our region have been managed for wet pasture and woodlots.  With the extirpation of beaver and the widespread clearing of land for Agriculture in the early 1800s, there may well have been more open fen habitat in that period than exists today. The federally threatened bog turtle, the rarest of our pond turtles that likes to wade in rivulets but seldom cares to swim, would likely have found more available habitat in this period than before or since.  Since the return of the beaver and the abandonment of farmland, our seepage wetlands have relatively little early successional habitat and may require active management to maintain their open, sedge-dominated condition.

There are all sorts of fascinating plants and animals in our fens and calcareous seepage swamps.  Carnivorous pitcher plants and sundews may occur on open sedge mats, while bog ants make black mounds among the tussocks.  Calcareous Sloping Fens may host a wide range of species, including small yellow and showy lady slippers.  They are also good places to encounter poison sumac, which I can attest itches just as bad as poison ivy and seems to be the thing one grasps for a handhold when negotiating ones way across a sedge mat.  Rare Northern Spring Amphipods and a host of uncommon or threatened waterfowl may occur in these wetlands.  Many of the plants found in fens are rare and vulnerable to collection; hence an understandable reluctance of conservation entities to provide specific locations and public access to these places.

Because they are out of the public eye, however, fens are not always a community's first conservation priority in its open space and development plan.   Entities with biodiversity mandates such as state wildlife agencies or The Nature Conservancy may be able to conserve core fen habitat, but the wider basin of groundwater influence and adjacent human land use can have far-reaching impacts on these rare natural communities.  Invasive exotic plant species often thrive in calcium rich systems, and many fens and seepage swamps are under intense threat from giant reed, reed canary crass, purple loosestrife, buckthorn, and rosa multiflora, among others.  Prescribed fire may have a limited role to play in maintaining open fen habitat but it is very difficult - believe me, I know firsthand-  to achieve good burning conditions and apply with wetland and rare species regulations in these systems.

In the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills, our calcareous fens and seepage swamps are among our most significant natural resources, proving habitat for some of our rarest species and emblematic of our region's biodiversity.  Those making open space conservation and development decisions in our area need to consider how to ensure that these habitats remain viable parts of this landscape.  The first step is to recognize what we have.

Community Character

Connecticut Windows on the Natural World, Brendan Hanrahan's highly informative blog about Connecticut's natural history and its environmental resources, has been posting a series of conservation-focused articles entitled "The Search for the Magic Bullet."  The sixth in this series is  "Preserving the Spirit of Place" and well worth a read. 

Defining community character is one of the more difficult tasks facing those involved with open space and development planning.  Hanrahan observes this challenge when writing about one Connecticut town's inspiring effort to maintain what it most values;

Like many in Connecticut, Granby is a town where residents share a strong "spirit of place," one that has developed over the past two centuries, since colonial days. It isn't something that towns usually put into words or write into official documents, at least before people such as the residents of Granby saw it as essential in their effort to preserve what is special about their town well into the future.

...Last year, the Granby Planning and Zoning Commission appointed a subcommittee to draft a new Plan of Conservation and Development for the town. (The state requires towns update plans every ten years.) The subcommittee reviewed Granby's 1993 plan, held public workshops and facilitated an agreement about things that made Granby special and reasons residents chose to live there. The result was a statement of the Town's Fundamental Values, a new 10 Year Vision for conservation, preservation and development, and recommendations for implementation.

...The plan begins with a "Statement of Granby’s Fundamental Values" that is refreshingly easy to read and understand and highly evocative: "Agricultural: Our Town’s rural character has its roots in…the small farm...Viewing the livestock, smelling manure, experiencing the changing scenery of the fields…is a treasure that will be missed if it is allowed to disappear. Residents: The residents of Granby apply a broad definition to the term “neighbor.” They show concern and offer help to one another during times of sickness, grief, unemployment or other difficulty…Granby residents cherish the natural environment and are willing to work for its preservation. Wildlife: We look to the sky when we hear the chatter of the geese and we quickly spot the familiar V pattern of their flight. We stop and listen to the chant of the morning dove, the hoot of the owl and the melodies of the songbirds…We catch and release, turn rocks in search of salamanders and shriek at the sudden movement of a snake. We choose to make our home among the wildlife and we are the better for it."

Granby, Connecticut lies in an area of rapidly expanding growth pushing out from Hartford and nearby Bradley International Airport.  I drive through Granby along Rte 20 on my way to the airport, through farmland with centuries old stone houses as well as shopping centers.  There is extensive forest to the west of Granby where the Litchfield Hills rise beyond the open lands of the Connecticut Valley. A thumb of Massachusetts juts down from Southwick to the north.  Old New-gate Prison, a colonial mineshaft and hellhole for Tory sympathizers during the Revolution, lies in East Granby on the way to the airport.

There is no question that growth and change are coming to this area.  The difference may be that in Granby, a participatory process of community visioning has identified those key qualities that are essential to the character of this place and which residents and their municipal leaders have the opportunity to work to maintain over time.  If Granby uses the plan to guide development, incorporates its values in local zoning and municipal regulations, and makes a commitment to investing in land protection to preserve its "Spirit of Place", it will be well served by the efforts that it has already made to define its community character.