The Blister Rust Battle Resumes

Transcription

AUTUMN ’15
A N E W W AY O F L O O K I N G AT T H E F O R E S T
The Blister Rust
Battle Resumes
A Cornucopia of Cones
New Fiction by
Howard Frank Mosher
Vaccine Ravioli,
Ukrainian Forests,
Cashing in on Carbon,
and much more
$5.95
on the web
WWW.NORTHERNWOODLANDS.ORG
Cover Photo by Roger Irwin
Photographer Roger Irwin called this bull
moose down from a ridge of East Mountain,
near Line Brook in the town of East Haven,
Vermont. “I could hear him coming for 15 or
20 minutes before he came into sight,” says
Irwin. “It is always a thrill to call in a nice
bull; they will stop every so often to rake the
bushes with their antlers. I took this shot as
he was leaving….He had decided I really
didn’t look like a cow moose!”
THE OUTSIDE STORY
Each week we publish a new
nature story on topics ranging from
bee mimics to edible weeds.
EDITOR’S BLOG
“At the water there was a sky
like in a Hudson River School
painting. Seabirds – common
terns, I guess – were circling,
and feinting, and then plunging
through golden light into the
gunmetal sea.”
From: On The Coast
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VOLUME 23 I NUMBER 3
AUTUMN 2015
Elise Tillinghast
Executive Director/Publisher
Dave Mance III
Editor
Patrick White
Assistant Editor
Amy Peberdy
Operations Manager
Emily Rowe
Operations Coordinator/
Web Manager
Jim Schley
Poetry Editor
REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS
CENTER FOR NORTHERN WOODLANDS EDUCATION, INC.
Virginia Barlow
Jim Block
Marian Cawley
Tovar Cerulli
Steve Faccio
Giom
Bernd Heinrich
Mary Holland
Robert Kimber
Stephen Long
Benjamin Lord
Todd McLeish
Brett McLeod
Susan C. Morse
Bryan Pfeiffer
Joe Rankin
Michael Snyder
Adelaide Tyrol
Chuck Wooster
Copyright 2015
DESIGN
Liquid Studio / Lisa Cadieux
Northern Woodlands Magazine (ISSN 1525-7932) is published
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Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2015
1
C
Center for Northern
Woodlands Education
from the enter
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
President
Richard G. Carbonetti
LandVest, Inc.
Newport, VT
Vice President
Bob Saul
Wood Creek Capital Management
Amherst, MA
Treasurer/Secretary
Tom Ciardelli
Biochemist, Outdoorsman
Hanover, NH
Si Balch
Consulting Forester
Brooklin, ME
Sarah R. Bogdanovitch
Paul Smith’s College
Paul Smiths, NY
Starling Childs MFS
Ecological and Environmental
Consulting Services
Norfolk, CT
David J. Colligan
Colligan Law, LLP
Buffalo, NY
Esther Cowles
Fernwood Consulting, LLC
Hopkinton, NH
Dicken Crane
Holiday Brook Farm
Dalton, MA
Julia Emlen
Julia S. Emlen Associates
Seekonk, MA
Timothy Fritzinger
Alta Advisors
London, UK
Sydney Lea
Writer, Vermont Poet Laureate
Newbury, VT
Last autumn, at our first writers conference, we set up a table featuring 10
different brands of maple syrup from around New England, New York, and
Quebec and encouraged people to pick their favorites. Picture the scene: a
too-small table, teetering stacks of paper cups, spilled syrup, and a crowd of
happy, sugar-buzzed, smack-talking partisans from different states. In other
words, a mess – but a happy mess. We came to no conclusions about which
part of the Northeast makes the best syrup, but we did score a photo of the
Northern Woodland’s crew and staff alumnus Chuck Wooster, posed with a bottle of Log
Cabin™’s finest.
This year’s conference will take place over the weekend of October 16-18. The Trust for
Public Land is once again our sponsor, and the Aloha Foundation’s Hulbert Outdoor Center
is our co-organizer and host. We’ll have some great speakers, including plenary talks by Peter
Forbes, David Macaulay, and Bernd Heinrich. The schedule encompasses a range of interests:
there will be writing workshops and discussions, a bark identification walk, presentations on
black bears and cougars, an outdoor illustration class, a children’s book workshop, and an
educator’s panel discussion led by David Sobel. Also on the agenda are good meals, cozy cabins,
and s’mores by the fire. Teacher professional development certificates are available. Heck,
there’s even an open mic session.
All of this is a lot of fun, but there’s a serious purpose behind it – to encourage more people
to talk, write, create art, and otherwise share their interest in forests. I’m inspired by The Trust
for Public Land’s “Parks for People” vision, which imagines “a park or natural area within 10
minutes of every person in the country.” Riffing on that language, how great would it be if
every person in the Northeast was never more than a couple of hours or a turn of the page away
from some expression of why someone cares about forests, and maybe they should, too.
You can learn more about the conference by looking on the right column of our homepage,
www.northernwoodlands.org. And while you’re there, skim through the bears, hawks, and
bobcats in our readers’ photo gallery archive. This is a project that we started last December,
and it has been steadily growing. Again, the purpose is to connect with a broader audience
than we reach with the magazine.
Finally, speaking of galleries, I encourage you to check out the advertisement on page 51 of
this issue. Subscribers of this magazine know Adelaide Tyrol as our Outdoor Palette columnist
and the illustrator of Virginia Barlow’s articles. She has also, for the past 13 years, contributed
illustrations for our weekly Outside Story article series, supported by the Wellborn Ecology
Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. Her fall shows include some of that work,
as well as her fine art paintings.
Elise Tillinghast, Executive Director, Publisher
Peter S. Paine, Jr.
Champlain National Bank
Willsboro, NY
Kimberly Royar
Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department
Montpelier, VT
Peter Silberfarb
Dartmouth Medical School
Lebanon, NH
The Center for Northern Woodlands
Education, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) public
benefit educational organization.
Programs include Northern Woodlands
magazine, Northern Woodlands Goes
to School, The Outside Story, The
Place You Call Home series, and
www.northernwoodlands.org.
The mission of the Center for Northern
Woodlands Education is to advance
a culture of forest stewardship in the
Northeast and to increase understanding
of and appreciation for the natural
wonders, economic productivity, and
ecological integrity of the region’s forests.
in this ISSUE
54
features
28 Where is Don Quixote?
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER
36 High-Hanging Fruit: Conifer Cones
SUSAN C. MORSE
42 An Old Enemy: White Pine Blister Rust
JOE RANKIN
52 The Power of Microbursts
JOHN BURK
54 A Part of Nature
BARBARA MACKAY
60 The Diminishing Woodpile
JONATHAN STABLEFORD
departments
28
36
2
4
5
6
9
From the Center
Calendar
Editor’s Note
Letters to the Editors
Birds in Focus: Common Nighthawks
BRYAN PFEIFFER
11
Woods Whys: Can I Fertilize My Forest?
MICHAEL SNYDER
13
Tracking Tips: Beavers
SUSAN C. MORSE
14
27
62
Knots and Bolts
1,000 Words
Field Work: Forest Carbon Offsets
PATRICK WHITE
66
Discoveries
TODD MCLEISH
70
42
The Overstory: Mountain Ash
VIRGINIA BARLOW
73
Tricks of the Trade: Chainsaw Carving
BRETT R. MCLEOD
75
Upcountry
ROBERT KIMBER
76
79
WoodLit
Outdoor Palette
NONA ESTRIN
80
52
A Place in Mind
MIKE MINCHIN
3
C A L E N D A R
A Look at the Season’s Main Events
By Virginia Barlow
September
October
November
FIRST WEEK
North winds will increase the number of
migrating hawks. Look for them in the
middle of a sunny day / Woodchucks
are packing it in, especially at dawn and
dusk, to create a layer of fat that will last
all winter / Virginia creeper and poison
ivy leaves are red, attracting migrant
birds to their ripe berries / The plaintive,
three-note, whistling song of the eastern
wood peewee can still be heard, although
most of these flycatchers have headed
out by now
The beautifully colored leaves of white
ash, in all shades of purple, are among
the first to fall / White pines drop half their
needles every autumn. Don’t be alarmed /
Tiny spiders go ballooning on strands of
gossamer and may remain aloft for two
weeks. In the right light conditions you can
see their silken threads in the sky / Some
golden-crowned kinglets go south of our
region in winter but others stay. Somehow
these tiny birds survive bitterly cold nights
Watch for the last autumn meadowhawks
(Sympetrum vicinum) hunting from sunwarmed rock walls or gravel drives. This
small, red-bodied skimmer is still active in
November / Unseasonably warm weather
stimulates peepers to sing from woods
and fields, sometimes far from ponds,
before they go belowground for the
winter / Owl pellets consist of the
indigestible parts of recently eaten food,
usually the hair, teeth, skulls, and claws
of mice, shrews, and voles
SECOND WEEK
Bunchberries have turned red / Jack-inthe-pulpits may be changing gender.
The size of the corm determines whether
it will be a Jack or a Jill next spring /
Asters, in colors ranging from white, blue,
and pink to deep purple, are blooming
along roads and at the edges of fields /
White-tailed deer begin to shed their
summer coats and grow a new, thick
winter coat. The new outside hairs are
hollow and beneath is a dense undercoat /
Beech drops are flowering
Crush a few leaves of sweet fern, a shrub
of dry or sandy soils, to recapture the
fragrance of summer / It’s sparrow time.
Lots of sparrow species are still here, all
looking for seeds to fuel their migrations /
The bright yellow stringy flowers of witch
hazel are blooming. They’re pollinated by
moths / The eastern comma, like some
other anglewing butterflies, is flying now
and will overwinter as an adult. An obvious
white “comma” decorates its underwing
Snow buntings may be seen. They’re
almost always in flocks / Cold weather
will bring more and more birds to the
feeder: mourning doves, downy and hairy
woodpeckers, and chickadees, as well
as a few late migrants / When beechnuts
and acorns are scarce, bears will search
for food over a wide area / Bullfrogs
usually spend two winters as tadpoles /
Chipmunks will keep coming out if it is
warm / It’s a good time to find bird nests,
now that leaves are off the trees
THIRD WEEK
The trees are full of migrating warblers,
just as in May / Fluffy white stuff among
shrubs and low trees might be the plumed
fruits of virgin’s bower, a long, twisting vine
found in moist areas / The holes made by
maple leafcutter larvae sometimes make a
tattered mess of sugar maples at this time
of year / Muskrats may or may not store
food for the winter. Those that do are hard
at work packing their burrows and lodges
with arrowhead (duck potato) bulbs
October 21, 22: Orionids meteor shower,
caused by dust particles from Halley’s
Comet, peaks / A hard frost will send
thick showers of leaves to the ground. By
now, oak, poplar, apple, and lilac are the
only deciduous trees that still have green
leaves / It’s easier to see birds now that
the leaves are down, and sparrows are
actively looking for seeds. You might see
chipping, fox, song, white-crowned, or
white-throated sparrows / Milkweed seeds
are airborne
Nov. 17, 18: The Leonids meteor shower
is best seen after midnight, as by then the
moon will have set / As pond ice thickens,
beavers will be stuck in their lodges or
below the ice till spring / Now that leaves
have fallen, the bright red berries of
winterberry holly are much more visible /
Some northern saw whet owls migrate.
After the first snowfall, those that stay
shift from hunting red-backed voles in
the woods to hunting meadow voles in
open fields
FOURTH WEEK
Sept. 28: Total lunar eclipse as the moon
passes through the Earth’s shadow,
beginning in this region at about 8 p.m. The
moon will turn a deep, rusty red / Patches of
bracken are now one-third green, one-third
yellow, and one-third brown / Crows migrate
and ravens don’t, though ravens may wander
long distances, usually on a southerly
course / Chipping sparrows and whitethroated sparrows that nested farther north
are passing through on their way south
Oct. 28: Venus, Mars, and Jupiter will be
in a tight one-degree triangle, a rare event
called a conjunction. Look in the east just
before sunrise / Skunks sleep for weeks
at a time during the winter but their body
temperature drops by only a few degrees.
They may come out of their dens on warm
days / Empty bird nests might be taken
over by mice and used as storage bins for
their winter food supply / Chipmunk cheek
pouches are bulging with sugar maple seeds
Let’s have lots more gray jays: they’ve
been seen picking winter ticks from the
backs of moose / Also, they’re often quite
unafraid of people, perhaps because they
associate us with many choice foods, from
bread to animal carcasses / If pond ice is
clear, you may be able to see cold-hardy
backswimmers below as they chase their
tiny prey / Squirrels and bears love beechnuts. Grouse turkey, wood ducks, jays,
chickadees, and woodpeckers also eat them
These listings are from observations and reports in our home territory at about 1,000 feet in elevation in central Vermont and are approximate.
Events may occur earlier or later, depending on your latitude, elevation – and the weather.
4
EDITOR’S note
By Dave Mance III
We cut about 10,000 feet of white pine last winter off a little nob in
the south end of the sugarbush. This summer we’ve been turning the
logs into lumber for the home we’re building. By the time you read
this in September, it’s a safe bet that we’ll still be milling.
Part of the allure of building with your own wood is the pioneer
spirit of the whole endeavor. From a structural perspective, I’d be
much better off buying kiln-dried, dimensionally accurate lumber.
And while I’m quick to delude myself into thinking of all the money I’m saving, really,
this math only makes sense if I don’t put any dollar value on my time. Still, taking a
tree to a board to a building is soulful, a value not included in traditional economic
accounting.
The other thing that makes the whole endeavor satisfying is the idea that these trees
were growing on a family woodlot, meaning we’re building with “our trees,” the lumber
a by-product of managing “our woods.” And yet even as I put those grammatically
suspect quotation marks around the phrases, they seem silly. The trees are around 80
years old, which means I wasn’t alive for the first half of their lives. And it’s impossible
to miss the fingerprints of other people as you walk through the stand. We were
skidding the logs out through old stone walls constructed when Able Webb owned the
land in the 1870s; on farm roads probably constructed when Gertrude Bates owned
the land in the 1920s; through a sugarbush that reflects the management efforts of
Fairfax Ayers in the 1940s and 50s.
And these are just the landowners; the human fingerprints in these woods
begin to resemble a touch screen on an ATM when you consider the loggers, hired
hands, and work crews who played a part over the last three centuries creating
the forest we see today. While gathering art to illustrate Joe Rankin’s story on
white pine blister rust on page 42, I came across an old map showing blister rust
control efforts in the exact stand of timber where I cut the pine trees; a treatment
prior to 1933, one between 1933 and 1940, and then a spot treatment after that
– probably in the 1950s. If the trees were seedlings around 1935, they may have owed
their very existence – I may owe their very existence – to these skirmish lines of ropy,
Depression-era men, six yards apart. Bursting through the thick growth of a patchy,
starting-over forest, hand-pulling pasture gooseberries, calling out loudly with every
plant they pulled.
Whether you grow and harvest trees yourself, or simply work with wood, it’s
impossible to escape the history that’s tied up in every fiber. And as any social studies
teacher will tell you, what we really learn by studying history is how to move forward
into the future. Over the past century, humans in the Northeast have developed an
environmental ethic that celebrates biodiversity – the ethic serves as an angel on our
shoulder who reminds us, when we fire up our chainsaws, that we’re not the only
creature in the woods and we’d better make harvest decisions that reflect this. But
there’s another, more anthropomorphic, ethic that gets less press in environmental
media – call it the management ethic; it’s another little angel who reminds us that
we owe somebody for what we take. In the 1930s, there was a crew of guys who are
probably dead now who helped white pine flourish on a little cobble in Shaftsbury,
Vermont. And 80 years later I come along and cut some of these trees down and turn
them into a roof over my family’s head.
You better believe I’m thinking of ways I can pay this forward.
5
letters to the EDITORS
Department of Corrections
The photo of the prescribed fire on
page 33 of the Summer issue should
have been attributed to Joel Stocker.
Local Disputes Over
Working Lands
To the Editors:
I am chair of Putney’s Development
Review Board and Planning Commission and a
long-time subscriber to Northern Woodlands. I am
writing as an individual, and do not speak for the
Putney DRB or PC.
The spring editorial presented the Bowen case
in Putney as a simple case of traditional rural
values associated with a small-scale firewood
and farming operation bumping up against NIMBY
neighbors. But as someone intimately involved
with the case, I can tell you that the issue was
more nuanced than that.
Without going too deep into the regulatory
details, among the very limited things that the
DRB was to determine was if the firewood
operation would have an adverse affect on the
“character of the area affected.” To do so, the
DRB was mandated to “consider the objectives
of the zoning district in which the proposed use
is to be located and specifically stated policies
and standards of the Town Plan.” The lots in
question lie in what is an area designated “village
residential;” the Plan says this district’s purpose is
to “provide attractive neighborhoods of relatively
concentrated residential development.” There are
other zoning districts in Putney that are intended
to accommodate rural activities, including agriculture and forestry.
The DRB determined that the requested firewood
processing activity would have an adverse effect
on the character of the neighborhood. I see this
determination as support for the basic notion of
zoning districts and support of a village residential
area – maintaining its attractiveness for residential
and related uses, and providing an alternative to
scattered rural residential development.
The editorial ended by wondering if 10 acres is
enough to sustain a rural way of life. I think the
answer is a qualified yes. Vermont’s agricultural
zoning exemptions and right to farm laws support
many rural ways of life. But in this specific
instance, the “rural way of life” was proposed
for an existing residential neighborhood and
included what the town considers to be nonagricultural activities (processing logs trucked
6
onto the site) that were determined to have an adverse
impact on the character of
the neighborhood, a neighborhood developed before
the applicant’s activity.
The conflicts between rural
activities and residential uses
will always continue. Is it OK
to have your roosters crowing at four a.m. in a
village center; can you have a cow behind your
condo? And having attractive village residential
areas will not alone solve the rural sprawl problem. But the planning and zoning processes do
make a difference. The citizens involved in this
work care deeply about these issues. Regulatory
processes to achieve planning land-use goals
have problems, but I think they are essential. As
new techniques are developed, like the work of
Jens Hilke of Vermont Fish and Wildlife in developing overlay zoning districts to show areas of
critical wildlife habitat connectivity, development
review will improve. That is something to write an
editorial about.
Phil Bannister, Putney, Vermont
To the Editors:
When reading the Summer 2015 issue’s Editor’s
Note concerning residential growth conflicting
with traditional land-use based industries (wood
harvesting, agriculture), I couldn’t help but think
back to my tiny town of Edgecomb, Maine (population 1,249 and wedged between the two tidal
rivers of the Sheepscot and the Damariscotta)
and what our Planning Board instituted more than
a decade ago. We passed the Z-word, but it was
a different type of zoning. The Marine District, the
Rural District, and the Woodland District are based
on historic and traditional land-use patterns as
well as every type of map you can imagine
illustrating existing soils, lands, and waters. All
districts allow commercial and residential uses
because we want people to work where they live
and live where they work.
The zoning districts don’t restrict uses, but they
educate people that, for example, if you live or
want to build in the deep interior of our town, the
Woodland District, these are lands that are suitable for recreational uses such as hunting, fishing,
and hiking, as well as wood harvesting operations
that can be noisy and smelly. Surrounding the
Woodland District is the Rural District, where both
the infrastructure and the lands are suitable for
agriculturally based industries that can be not
only noisy but also smelly. The Marine District
includes the eastern and western perimeters that
border our saltwater rivers where the land is suitable for productive uses of maritime resources
– hence, noisy fishing boats early in the morning.
With differing minimum lot sizes, along with
the usual regulations, we recognized that our
roads might someday look different, but our lands
would keep working. It didn’t stop the growth
completely in those areas, but it pushed the residential growth into areas where people wanted
smaller yards to maintain (something we also
planned for with regulations) closer to the areas of
other nearby towns’ commercial areas. And when
people choose to build in these “working land”
districts, they know they’ll be hearing the sounds
of skidders and tractors and chainsaws and the
roar of boat engines. They know what is coming.
No one is surprised.
There are still some flaws to be ironed out,
even all these years later, but it was and remains
important that the people of Edgecomb voted and
passed a set of rules to preserve the traditional
land-use patterns that are at the core of why we
are the people we are.
Amanda Russell, Edgecomb, Maine
To the Editors:
I have just finished reading the summer issue, and
it is great, as usual. Dave Mance’s piece describing the conflict between the Bowens, who wish to
farm their 10 acres, and neighboring artist retreat
owners, who object, is a prime example of the
northern forest’s wildland-urban interface. In this
age of ever-increasing regulation, the group that
should engage in the deepest introspection are
land-use planners. In 1970, the architects of Act
250 and the Vermont Health Department subdivision regulations decreed that 10 acres was the
threshold for on-site septic systems and other
development regulation. Since then, many towns
have adopted 10 acres as the minimum lot size in
“rural” zoning districts. The problem is that rural
means too many different things.
Ten acres of lettuce, pole beans, and sweet
corn beside an old farmhouse heated with a
Defiant are a wonderful example of the working
landscape, but the same acreage containing beef
cattle and a firewood processor with attendant
manure pile, dirty tractor, and retired one-ton are
a blight on the neighborhood. The immigrants
who expect pastoral serenity on a 10-acre lot
are deluded, but they probably have enough
resources – accrued in an urban career – to hire a
lawyer to press their case. Similarly, anyone who
engages in a smelly or noisy working landscape
business on a 10-acre lot should not be surprised
at objections from neighbors.
All too often, land-use metrics of lot size, setbacks, soils, slope limits, and permitted uses are
intended to prevent egregious or incompatible
outcomes. These same metrics assure how the
area will be developed. Permitted uses should be
more comprehensively identified for rural areas.
If a prospective resident can’t abide the full list,
then go elsewhere. If a prospective farmer needs
to buy a bigger property further from markets, so
be it. If he must charge more for his produce, the
customers must pay it or buy a substitute from
California at the supermarket.
Mance’s article demands an update in the next
issue.
Russell S. Reay, Cuttingsville, Vermont
Postscript to Working Lands
On May 5, the Putney Development Review voted
to disallow Kate and Mark Bowen’s firewood
processing operation. It was a 3-2 decision.
According to a draft decision, the reason was “on
the grounds that the home industry, as presented,
would adversely affect the residential character of
the neighborhood in which it is located.” See the
letter by Phil Bannister, chair of the DRB and one
of the “no” votes, at the beginning of this section,
which explains his decision in more detail.
The Bowens were disappointed, to say the
least. And they pointed out that Putney’s zoning
regulations also state that their farm falls in a district where “agriculture and forestry are permitted
uses” and that “nothing in these regulations shall
restrict accepted agricultural or farming practices,
or accepted silviculture practices.”
The question at the heart of the matter here
is whether processing firewood is an agricultural
activity or a “home industry.” We asked Kate for
her follow-up thoughts, and here’s a portion of
what she wrote:
Yes, we were processing firewood, but we
weren’t dramatically changing the wood; we
weren’t taking logs and turning them into violins
or furniture. I compared it to the chickens that we
process on our property. We buy them as chicks,
raise them, humanely kill them, pluck them, and
finally bag them for sale. Now, if I were making
“Kate’s Frozen Individual Chicken Pot Pies,” I could
see where that would be a home industry that
would require a whole host of permits and legal
fees. I just don’t see where taking wood – a plant –
from its raw state and simply changing its size and
shape isn’t part of an agricultural process; I don’t
see how it’s any less agricultural than processing
chickens. Just as we provide meat for your table,
we also want to provide heat for your hearth.
We decided not to reapply or appeal the board
decision. We were urged by a board member not to
reapply because they didn’t believe any accommodations made would change the Board’s mind. We
can’t afford to appeal it in Vermont Environmental
Court. We spoke to some other firewood producers
around the state who had lost similar hearings.
Already the time and energy this fight has taken,
compounded by the loss of income, has us on
the brink of total collapse. We are responsible for
trucking 100 cords of logs, once destined for our
neighbor’s wood stoves, off our property. Not only
does this hit us financially, but ethically the fuel we
are using to truck this wood back to the landing
where it was cut seems ridiculous. Talk about a
way to “ungreen” firewood: truck it twice!
We want to raise awareness of these issues,
and gain some momentum to get legislation
changed. In our view, processing firewood should
be considered an agricultural endeavor and should
be protected under right-to-farm laws. Another
thing we learned in this process is that Vermont’s
right-to-farm laws do not protect new farms like
ours. Your farm has to have been there before
any neighbors who complain, and it can’t have
changed how it’s used. My fear is that they could
smack us with a lawsuit citing the flies, manure,
and tractor noise. If the whole goal in Vermont is
to encourage working lands and young farmers,
they’re going to have to build more flexibility into
this protection.
Our small family farm mirrors those that you
would have found throughout Vermont pre-World
War II. We’re a family that works together with
the seasons to produce and raise a variety of
livestock, crops, sap, and forest products. Since
1999, we’ve made up for a lack of vast farmland
by diversifying what we produce to increase the
return per acre. The solution we were given by
opponents was to move somewhere else and buy
more land. For young farmers like us, the financial
reality is that purchasing 200 acres of Vermont
farmland is impossible.
On the Road Again (with Turtles)
To the Editors:
Following up on “Confession of a Turtle Killer” [A
Place in Mind, Summer 2015], I have to relate
one episode of a snapping turtle: I had gone to my
mailbox on the highway and saw a car stop some
couple of hundred feet down the road. A man got
out and picked up something from the road and
put it on the mown shoulder of my neighbor’s
yard. The man then drove off. Curious, I peddled
down there and saw it was a roughly 14-inch
snapping turtle. The neighbor was in his back
yard so I went and told him of this event. With a
little grunt he went into his house and pretty soon
came out with a shotgun with which he removed
the snapper’s head. In fairness, he nurtures a
number of ducks and geese in a pond on his
property and is aware of the threat snappers are
to the young of his water fowl. But what a stark
contrast in values and ethics.
Russ Seaman, Rougemont, North Carolina
An Interruption
A boy had stopped his car
To save a turtle in the road;
I was not far
Behind, and slowed,
And stopped to watch as he began
To shoo it off into the undergrowth–
This wild reminder of an ancient past,
Lumbering to some Late Triassic bog,
Till it was just a rustle in the grass,
Till it was gone.
I hope I told him with a look
As I passed by,
How I was glad he’d stopped me there,
And what I felt for both
Of them, something I took
To be a kind of love,
And of a troubled thought
I had, for man,
Of how we ought
To let life go on where
And when it can.
Robert S. Foote, Hartland, Vermont
More on Taxes and Easements
To the Editors:
If one donates, sells, or otherwise transfers a
conservation restriction on their land that results in
a reduction of the value, then they are eligible for
a federal tax deduction [Letters, Summer 2015].
7
It is straightforward: the reduction in value is
considered a charitable contribution. In most cases
this reduction in value must be documented by an
appraisal (and be sure to use an appraiser who is
acceptable to the IRS). When filing your taxes, IRS
Form 8283 is used; you may deduct in each year
up to 50 percent of adjusted gross income, and
this may be carried forward for a longer period
than other types of donations. It is best to check
with a local land trust as most are familiar with
the process.
there. Unfortunately, these rules don’t address the
noise pollution and destruction to the terrain that
the less responsible individuals cause.
It is going to be very interesting to see how the
residents of Coos County address these issues. I
sincerely hope that they have considered how to
handle those less responsible individuals and their
destructive acts. I also hope that another article
will be forthcoming on just how successful their
endeavor has been (or not). I wish them well.
Philipp Schuessler, Preston Hollow, New York
Ted Cady, Warwick, Massachusetts
Worries Over ATVs
To the Editors:
I read the article “Conservation and Recreation”
[Summer 2015] about the new ATV trail in northern New Hampshire and finished it with mixed
emotions. Although I totally identify with the people in the rural areas needing a source of income
in this changing world, I also have experienced
the results of the non-responsible motorized trail
users in our woods and on our back roads.
One of our rules up here in the woods of upstate
New York is that one takes out more than what he
takes into the woods. In other words, clean up the
litter that others leave, should you come across it.
Another is that one leaves no sign of having been
8
Heavy Lifting
To the Editors:
Northern Woodlands is both interesting and informative. The first thing I check is the balance: we
were promised at the outset of your magazine a
publication on forests that is educational, informative, recreational, and economically related
to logging, maple syrup, firewood, timberland
improvement, etc. So far you’ve done a pretty
good job.
On another note, I recently found myself in
a hardware store marveling at a “battle axe” of
an eight-pound splitting maul! With a yard-long
handle! Have you ever tried picking one of these
up? When are manufacturers going to produce
a maul comfortable to use? Few things will
discourage us average-size Americans from wood
burning more than those eight-pound monsters.
We need four- or five-pound, short-handle mauls
and sharp wedges; then wood splitting would be
a pleasure.
Timber Brooks, New Ipswich, New Hampshire
Immature Eagles Acting Immaturely
To the Editors:
In reference to Awkward Adolescent Eagles
[Summer 2015], I observed three immature (adolescent) bald eagles collectively harass a loon by
swooping down on him, forcing him to dive but
not before giving repeated alarm calls. Upon the
loon’s resurfacing, the three mischievous troublemakers continued to force the loon to dive again.
This happened repeatedly, until the loon was able
to distance himself from the eagles’ play area. All
the while, an adult bald eagle watched from high
in a pine tree several hundred yards off. All of this
played out on the Androscoggin River (north of
Errol, New Hampshire).
Paul Fillion, Colebrook, New Hampshire
We love to hear from our readers. Letters intended for
publication in the Winter 2015 issue should be sent in
by October 1. Please limit letters to 400 words. Letters
may be edited for length and clarity.
BIRDS in focus
Story by Bryan Pfeiffer
Common Nighthawks: Two Strikes and a Temporal Mismatch
BRYAN PFEIFFER
On a warm August evening at Boston’s Fenway
Park, everything had fallen into place by the
fifth inning: The Red Sox were beating the
Angels 6-0. My pals and I in right field were
enjoying two of baseball’s four food groups
– beer and peanuts. And a half-dozen common
nighthawks were feeding on big white moths
high above the outfield grass.
It was a fitting display for an odd bird with
a dubious relationship to people.
But first, a dubious name: the common
nighthawk – hardly common anymore – is
not purely a nighttime hunter and is not at
all a hawk; rather, it’s a member of the family
Caprimulgidae, which translates from the Latin
to mean goat-milker. Nighthawks and their
relatives (including the whip-poor-will) yawn
wide-open mouths to inhale insects on the
wing or, as the legend goes, to suck milk from
the udders of goats.
Nighthawks nest in prairies and grasslands, coastal sand
dunes, forest clearings (including burns and clearcuts in mixed
or coniferous woods), rocky outcrops, and even on flat rooftops.
In quieter cities and towns across the county, our summertime
dawn and dusk choruses once featured the buzzy peent calls of
nighthawks foraging for insects attracted to street (or stadium)
lights.
But no more. During the past 30 years or so, nighthawks have
vanished from most northeastern communities. The cause is not
clear. It may be due in part to the use of new rubberized roofing
materials which lack the gravel that once served as nighthawk
camouflage and probably kept eggs from rolling around.
Or perhaps the decline of nighthawks signals something
more troubling in our skies. Biologists and birdwatchers are
now documenting population declines among a number of
other North American birds that hunt insects on the wing,
including whip-poor-wills, swifts, swallows, and flycatchers – a
suite we call aerial insectivores.
In the search for a cause, it’s reasonable to investigate the
common denominator: airborne insects, which we humans
have been attacking with pesticides for more than half a century. Even so, not all aerial insectivores are declining; some are
doing fine. The other complication is that we know relatively
little about the status of insect populations. We’ve been counting
birds for more than a century, but are only now beginning to
understand insect abundance and population trends.
Another theory involves what conservationists call temporal
mismatch. Migratory birds generally synchronize their breeding
with peak food abundance or availability, but as the planet
warms, some insect species now reach peak abundance earlier
in the season. So it’s possible that nighthawks, wintering in
South America, don’t get the memo and are failing to adapt to
global warming at the same rate that their prey are responding.
A lot of this remains speculative, and our search for a
cause of aerial insectivore decline is complicated by the usual
threats: habitat loss (here and in the tropics), pollution, industrial agriculture, housing development, and invasive species.
It does appear that the aerial insectivores that migrate farthest
– particularly common nighthawks, which make one of the
longest migrations of our land birds – fare worse than those
that migrate shorter distances. It could be that the demands of
a big migration compound the other threats. It’s difficult to say,
though, because we know so little about what happens to these
birds once they leave us in the fall.
But we can still watch common nighthawks on their journey
south. From mid-August through mid-September here in the
Northeast, nighthawks migrate in plain view, sometimes in
big numbers. Look for them moving in the late afternoon or
evening along river valleys or lake shores. Decades ago, particularly in the Midwest, birders could sometimes see nighthawks
in migration by the thousands, but here in the Northeast, we’re
more likely to count dozens or, on a good evening, a hundred or
so. It’s not a bad way to pass the time during the waning days of
summer – especially if your favorite baseball team is no longer
in the pennant race.
Bryan Pfeiffer is an author, wildlife photographer, guide, and consulting naturalist who
specializes in birds and insects. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont.
9
10
woods WHYS
By Michael Snyder
Can I Fertilize a Forest
Like I Fertilize a Garden?
DAVID DICKENS / FORESTRY IMAGES
Forest soils certainly benefit from the addition
of plant nutrients. Elements like nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and magnesium
are the building blocks of leaves, twigs, trunks,
and roots, and they regulate or activate countless
physiological processes in the microscopic life of
plants – functions like water movement, enzyme
activation, and stress signaling and response.
No mineral nutrients in the soil below, no living
plants above.
Some forest stands are naturally flush with
nutrients. Plant-available minerals in the soil
come from the weathering of rocks, deposition of
airborne particles relocated from somewhere else,
and from the recycling of decomposed organic matter from dead
plants and animals on the site. Their continual cycling between
soils and trees is vital to the maintenance of soil minerals.
But not all soils contain sufficient nutrients for healthy tree
growth. Some soils are just naturally depauperate, some have
been exhausted by erosion or poor management practices, and
some have been depleted by repeated harvesting and removal
in the form of grass, wool, milk, or logs over many decades.
Minerals can also be leached from soil in drainage water.
Recently, we’ve learned that some minerals, like calcium, can
be leached at accelerated rates by inputs of acid precipitation.
Such losses of essential nutrients lead to deficiencies that reduce
growth and jeopardize forest health.
So can you fertilize a forest? Yes. Fertilization of forest trees
– particularly with nitrogen – has been a common practice in
intensive plantation silviculture in the Southeast and Northwest
since the 1960s. Most is applied by aircraft, unless there is
adequate spacing between rows of trees where it can be done by
tractor or skidder-mounted equipment. The vast majority of such
applications use dry, pelletized forms of synthetic fertilizers.
There have been experimental applications of fertilizer to
northeastern forests. For example, in 1999, a 30-acre hardwood stand at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New
Hampshire was amended with over 50 tons of calcium dropped
from a helicopter in an attempt to restore that which had been
leached away by acid precipitation. By following the forest
ecosystem’s response over the past 16 years, researchers documented that increases of calcium in such conditions stimulated
a significant increase in growth of forest vegetation.
While these findings are significant, they do not necessarily
indicate that amending forest soil with a helicopter is the best
solution to a forest health problem. For starters, it is highly
Foul-looking forest fertilization using fowl feces.
impractical and, unless you’ve got your own aircraft, prohibitively expensive. Moreover, there are many possible reasons
beyond fertility why a forest stand might exhibit slow growth,
discolored or misshapen foliage, or dieback.
Fertilization simply will not fix the limitations of a site that
is too wet or too dry, and it cannot overcome destructive logging practices that erode soils or damage tree stems and roots.
Similarly, fertilization cannot prevent defoliation by insects (in
fact, it might just nourish them). And an overcrowded stand
where trees have no room for expansion will likely benefit far
more from a good thinning.
Fertilization won’t improve the growth of trees already
growing on a nutrient-rich site, and if overdone, it can actually
have a deleterious effects on trees and the greater environment.
Indeed, high soil concentrations of even the most essential
nutrients can be toxic to plants and excessive nutrients can run
off and pollute nearby waters. Effects on wildlife have not been
adequately studied and remain largely unknown.
Fertilization may be a workable idea if your forest is a young
plantation of southern pines and your sole objective is growing
timber as fast as possible, or if your forest is an abandoned
surface mine and you are heaven-bent on restoring its vegetation.
Otherwise, it’s probably not worth the associated expense,
practical difficulties, or environmental risks. If you really want
to enhance your forest soil’s productivity, advocate for clean air,
retain leaves, twigs, and branches from harvested trees, practice
good silviculture and careful logging, and return your raked
yard leaves to the woods from whence they came.
Michael Snyder, a forester, is commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests,
Parks, and Recreation.
11
12
TRACKING tips
Story and photos by Susan C. Morse
Beavers at Home for the Winter
Most folks know that stream-flow ponds impounded by
dams built of sticks, stones, and mud are created by beavers.
Conical or dome-shaped lodges surrounded by water are also
recognizable signs of Castor canadensis. As summer slips into
autumn, reminding us that winter is not that far away, how do
we know that beavers are actually in residence within a given
pond complex? Here are four signs of active beaver occupancy
that one can easily find:
Look for an abundance of freshly cut trees, saplings, and
woody shrub stems in the vicinity of the pond. During
autumn, beavers shift into overtime for food gathering.
A colony may need to store hundreds of woody stems
to have enough food for the winter. Fresh-looking sap
and wood chips will be obvious evidence on and around
recently cut stems.
Freshly peeled sticks and mud will have been added to the
dam. It is critical that the dam is strong enough to hold.
The pond and its associated canals allow these semi-aquatic
rodents an effective means of minimizing their exposure
to predators while collecting food. In addition, the pond’s
watery environment makes it easier for beavers to access
and transport their foods. A pond is perfect for the creation
of a safe, weatherproof lodge in which beavers can escape
from enemies, rest, keep warm, mate, raise families, and eat
during winter.
Look for fresh mud plastered on the lodge. In all but the
most gravel-bottomed habitats, beavers will gather and
apply a seal of mud to the surface of the lodge, covering
all but the air vent. This serves both as weather shield and,
when frozen, a cement-hard fortification against predators.
In our region, coyotes, bobcats, occasionally bears, and
historically wolves and cougars all prey(ed) on beavers.
Seek to find evidence of food caches. In preparation for
winter, beavers collect branches and construct a raft of less
desirable species whose collective water-logged weight will
push down and hold the food branches they like, including
poplars, willows, maples, red osier dogwood, and yellow
birch stems. When the pond is frozen, the beavers benefit by
having underwater access to their preferred foods. The raft’s
branch tips can be seen protruding from the water or even
the frozen pond’s icy surface. Species that are not generally
eaten, such as eastern hemlock, red spruce, white pine, and
alder will be visible poking above the surface of the raft.
Susan C. Morse is founder and program director of Keeping Track in Huntington,
Vermont.
Above: Beaver; Orange
County, Vermont,
forester David Paganelli
admires a recently
mudded lodge.
Left: Forester Gaetan
Champagne inspects
a beaver dam in the
Sutton Mountains of
Quebec. Note that sticks
have been arranged
parallel to the direction
of the water flow, lending
strength to the dam.
13
K N O T S & B O LT S
[ FORAGING ]
Cattail Rhizome:
Flour from the Marsh
It is not an exaggeration to call the cattail (Typha
spp.) the supermarket of the marsh. Food can be
procured from cattails during any season – even
the dead of winter – and nearly every part of the
plant is edible.
Perhaps the most distinctive food that comes
from the cattail is its rhizome, a root-like, underground stem that is one of the richest wild
sources of edible carbohydrates in the Northeast.
Cattail rhizomes can be harvested at any time of
year, but the best time is after the plants have
died-back in late autumn, when the cattails have
stored starch for the next growing season. It
takes a large number of rhizomes to produce a
sufficient quantity of food, so it is best to gather
from a sizable population. Since cattails readily
accumulate metals and other pollutants, choose
your location carefully.
Rhizomes can be gathered from anywhere
within the patch, but digging them out of the thick
tangle at the center requires a lot more work. The
best way to gather them is to wade out to where
the cattails give way to open water and follow a
stem several inches down into the mud with your
hand, until you feel a finger-thick, spongy, ropelike stem leading horizontally away from the plant.
Give it a little tug. If it is connected to another cattail nearby, you can often see that plant wiggle as
you pull. Cut both ends with a knife and pull the
rhizome out of the mud.
PHOTOS BY BENJAMIN LORD
14
The cattail rhizome looks like a strange, reddishbrown, alien tentacle with rings of threadlike roots
every few inches along its length. The outer layer
is spongy and inedible. Remove this outer layer
with your thumbnails, pushing off the spongy rind
without pulling up any of the core’s fibers. It takes
a bit of practice to get this right. The inner core
should be firm, fibrous, and white. Any cores that
aren’t should be thrown out.
From here, you could simply chew the starch
from between the long fibers. This is convenient
but messy. Some people roast the unpeeled
rhizomes and flake off the charred rinds before
chewing. This does improve the flavor, but is even
messier.
Another possibility is to slice the peeled cores
into coins, leave them to dry, and grind them in a
food processor or grain mill. This yields a starch
and fiber mixture that can be sifted with a jelly
bag suspended in a sealed jar. The powdery
starch keeps fairly well and can be used as a
gluten-free flour replacement.
My favorite method is to vigorously work the
peeled cores in a basin of water. The starch
settles to the bottom and most of the water can
be decanted, leaving a batter-like mixture. This
can be used as the basis of a latke-like pancake,
added to breads or baked goods, or used as a
thickener in stews and casseroles. This method
takes practice; additional information can be
found in Samuel Thayer’s excellent book, The
Forager’s Harvest.
Regardless of how you process them, there’s
no way to avoid the fact that harvesting cattails
is messy work. Still, there are few wild foods as
hearty as the cattail rhizome. You will be wellrewarded for getting a little messy.
Benjamin Lord
[ N A T U R A L LY C U R I O U S ]
Eye Protection
NATURALLYCURIOUSWITHMARYHOLLAND.WORDPRESS.COM
You and I have two opaque eyelids, one
above the eye and one beneath. When we
blink, they meet in the middle. Some birds,
amphibians, reptiles, fish, and mammals have
three eyelids – two similar to ours, and a third
translucent or transparent eyelid, called a
nictitating membrane. This membrane moves
horizontally from the inside corner to the
outer edge of the eye, much like a windshield
wiper, when needed for protection, to clear
debris, or to moisten the eye. Although this
juvenile bald eagle’s nictitating membrane
makes it look blind, it isn’t. Because the
membrane is translucent, the bird can still
see.—Mary Holland
15
[ STEWARDSHIP STORY
]
Managing Ecological Change in a
Nonprofit Working Woodland
Great Mountain Forest (GMF) occupies slightly
more than 6,000 acres at the southern end of the
Berkshires, in northwest Connecticut. The forest
was under private conservation and management for nearly a century, but a decade ago it
became a nonprofit and operates under a Forest
Legacy easement. I’m the director, and my job is
to engage the public with both the work and the
forest’s story. Forestry decisions are the purview
of our forest manager of 38 years, Jody Bronson.
Our roles increasingly overlap, as we must not
only make the best management choices for
the forest, but also educate the public about the
actions we are taking.
Perhaps the best example of this centers
around GMF’s hemlocks. Hemlock makes up
about 40 percent of Great Mountain Forest (mixed
with oak in some stands and with other hardwoods elsewhere), including a handful of very old
hemlocks in the forest, and there are a few more
on Nature Conservancy land adjoining. There is
a coolness and quietness to all hemlock groves,
but these old trees have a palpable gravitas.
Researchers in the 1950s dated many of these
Forest stewards and scientists with a downed old-growth hemlock. From left to right, Jody Bronson, Hans Carlson,
Carole Cheah, Russell Russ, forest technician Wesley Gomez, and John Winiarski.
16
hemlocks to the 1600s, and a few proved to
have been saplings when the Pilgrims landed at
Plymouth in 1620.
Nothing about them leaps out at you as being
ancient – nearby there are much younger trees of
other species that are as tall and broad – yet you
don’t need an increment borer to know that they
were well established before the first European
reached these woods in the mid-1700s. Their
heavy, plated bark is the giveaway. So is the
sense of grandeur that settles on you if you spend
a little time beneath them.
It’s something of a mystery that these stands
survived as long as they have. Northern Litchfield
County was at the heart of nineteenth-century
iron production, and most of the forests in Norfolk
and Canaan were cut several times to produce
charcoal for local blast furnaces. There are old
colliers’ hearths and roads within a quarter-mile
[ ECOLOGICAL ETYMOLOGIST ]
of the old-growth stands, and there were tanneries in this area, too. They razed whole forests to
procure the hemlock bark used to tan leather.
We will likely never know what circumstances
saved these trees from the nineteenth-century
onslaught – maybe it was as simple as disputed
ownership – but today, the rather sad fact is that
these stands appear to be falling apart. Many are
still outwardly healthy, but in the last few years
some of the oldest trees have been wind-thrown
or their tops have been snapped off. At nearly 400
years old, they have not yet reached their natural
age limit, but new stresses are affecting all the
hemlock in the forest.
Last fall, we spent a day monitoring hemlocks
across the forest with Carole Cheah from the
Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, trying to judge the encroachment of hemlock wooly
adelgid and hemlock scale. Because we are home
to some of the highest elevations in the state,
we have many places that look a great deal like
northern New England. Norfolk is well-known as
the “icebox of Connecticut,” and our cold climate
may have helped hold off these pathogens for a
time, but their arrival was inevitable.
We covered only part of the forest that day, but
we found no areas free of both scale and adelgid,
even in the coldest hollows. This was disheartening, but a second examination by Cheah found
that last winter’s deep freeze killed upwards of 99
percent of the adelgid at her monitoring stations.
Still, cold winters are an increasingly random
event here, and the adelgid is a prolific breeder, so
we are likely to eventually see significant mortality. The loss of the hemlocks will change everything in this forest, ecologically and aesthetically.
If we look at the big picture, losing these trees
will restart the process of growth that began more
than a century ago with the end of charcoaling.
We’ve spent decades cutting trees in an attempt
to break up the even-aged character of the forest
that was left by the nineteenth-century industrial
clearcuts; it seems our successors will be doing
similar work.
We’ll do some salvage cutting when the hemlocks succumb, but there’s not much of a market
for hemlock even in the best of times. When red
pine scale hit the forest in the 1990s, there was
extensive salvage cutting and a ready market, but
this will not be the case now. A lot of our hemlock
grows in places where we couldn’t cut without
doing damage to soils and watersheds, so we will
leave a lot of trees to die, too. We have a mill, so
Dear E.E.: The boys at our camp
out on Whiskey Brook want
to know where the word deer
comes from. Our best guess is
that it’s Abenaki. Thanks for all
your interesting information –
we keep a collection of
Northern Woodlands at camp.
at the very least we will have a good supply of
construction timber for our own use.
Large sections will have to regrow and some
parts may need replanting. Nursery work and
planting stopped here in the 1990s, but we once
produced our own Norway, white, blue, and meyeri
spruce, as well as red pine. These non-native
trees are strung out along the road that makes
up our western entrance, forming curious ethnic
neighborhoods in the Yankee forest. The real
exotics are remnants of a different era of forest
management, and we will certainly not replant
with tiger-tail spruce or King Boris fir, but some
of the spruce and pine offer valuable information
in our current situation. Some have adapted well,
and others are struggling or near-dead. All this
offers clues regarding which trees we should
focus on in our plans to start a new nursery.
Whether we cut hemlocks or leave them standing, it will all be messy for a while and people will
not like it. For the last century, GMF was funded
by family money, but now that we are a nonprofit,
public perception and support are paramount
concerns. Public input will shape the forest now,
as much as hemlock pathogens.
Smart foresters at least consider public perception when planning their work, but managing
a working forest as a nonprofit is something new
in forestry. In order to continue stewardship of
Great Mountain Forest, we will have to educate
people so they see the community value in local
forestry as they now understand the value of local
agriculture. It is here where forest management
and outreach will intersect.
Hans M. Carlson
It’s not a bad guess. Moose is Abenaki (or
maybe Narragansett), but deer is English,
through and through. The very sound of the
word makes me think of an English grandmother, sipping tea with her husband,
waiting for their sons to return from the
hunt. I hope they get a deer, dear.
When I first looked into deer I wasn’t
sure what I’d find, but it turns out to be
a pretty interesting story. It starts five to
ten thousand years ago with dheu, a word
that meant, simply, breath. Over time, this
evolved into dheusom, or an animal that
breathes. Imagine you’re a hunter on the
moors of ancient England, out looking for
a breathing animal to sustain you.
Deer (or dear, as it was spelled) showed
up in writing for the first time in the
Lindesfarne Gospels. This was an elaborate
illuminated text, created between 600 and
800 a.d. Picture monks on a tiny island off
the coast of Northumbria, England, faithfully
copying the gospel in Latin – and then taking
the radical step of adding a tiny English
translation between the lines. In the Gospel
of Luke, the monks used the word dear
to mean wild animals, and so the word’s
meaning became narrower still.
No one knows how it came to mean
cervids, specifically. Maybe it was because
deer were a favorite game animal. Maybe
because the Normans invaded, bringing
a whole new vocabulary with them. In
any case, it’s something to
think about in the woods
this fall, when you’re out
hunting for dheu, for breath
and life itself.
This series is sponsored by the Stifler Family
Foundation, in support of forestry practices that
promote healthy and sustainable forests and
wildlife habitat.
17
IHOR SOLOVIY
[ M A N Y M I L E S A W AY ]
Ukrainian Forests
Ukraine’s 26.7 million acres of forestland covers about 15 percent of the
country – a sizable holding by Eastern European standards. The Carpathian
Mountains and Polissya (a region of swamped woodlands) in the west and
north of the country have the most forest, including stands of beautiful pine
and larch, but there are pockets of oak- and beech-dominated deciduous
forest throughout the central and southern steppes.
Intensive forest exploitation in Eastern Europe began in the eighteenth century, when forests were cleared for timber, as well as for potash and charcoal
production. Wood was exported to Germany, France, England, and Poland. The
need for new agricultural land, much of it cleared for the sugar beet industry,
caused a disastrous reduction of forest area in the nineteenth century.
Today, the prevailing tree species are Scot’s pine (Pinus silvestris), European
oak (Quercus robur), European beech (Fagus silvatica), Norway spruce (Picea
abies), European white birch (Betula pendula), black alder (Alnus glutinosa),
European ash (Fraxinus excelsior), European hornbeam (Carpinus betulus),
and silver fir (Abies alba). There is a nearly even split between coniferous and
hardwood forests in Ukraine, with pine the most common species (making up
33 percent of the total forested area), and oak and beech together representing
roughly another third. As is typical in Europe, a large share (more than 45
percent) of forests are planted, but Ukraine’s Carpathian region also boasts the
largest surviving reserves of old-growth forests on the continent.
The Carpathians are home to more than half of Europe’s population of
18
bears, wolves, and lynx. The primeval beech
forests of the Carpathians are particularly special,
and have been inscribed on the World Heritage List.
These forests are unique for the research of biological
processes in non-disturbed ecosystems and are continuously studied by
both Ukrainian and American researchers (including those from the Carbon
Dynamics Lab and the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural
Resources, both at the University of Vermont).
Ukraine has a long tradition of forest management, though as one might
expect from a country that was under communist rule for much of the
twentieth century, most involves the management of state-owned forests.
While today the law allows for municipal and private forest ownership, in
practice, state ownership predominates. State-owned forests total 9.66
million hectares, while municipal forests represent just 40,000 hectares.
The major public owners include the Agency for Forest Resources and the
Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food.
Property restitution was not practiced in Ukraine following the breakup of
the U.S.S.R.; this was due to various historical circumstances in the different
regions of Ukraine and the public’s fear that sustainable forest management
would not be practiced on private forests. Even today, there’s a five-hectare
(a bit over 12-acre) limit on the forestland that an individual can own. This,
combined with a lack of forestry skills in the private sector, has limited private forest ownership and management. Individuals can lease forest plots for
up to 49 years for recreational, educational, and other non-industrial uses.
In its role managing the majority of the forests in Ukraine, the State Forest
Resource Agency (logo above) is charged with developing and implementing
national policies regarding forest management, including the protection,
TOP: WWW.LIS.CK.UABOTTOM: LLOYD IRLAND
Left to right: Life in rural communities is tied to the forest
environment and forest resources; an old-growth beech forest in
the Carpathian Biosphere Reserve; forest restoration work in the
Cherkassy Region; a harvesting operation in the Lviv region.
conservation, and regeneration of forest resources. The state is also charged
with managing game animals.
In contrast, most of the wood processing facilities are privately owned.
About 7.2 billion board feet gets harvested in the Ukraine each year, but much
of this wood is exported and processed in European Union countries, Turkey,
and China before a considerable amount of that wood is shipped back to
manufacturers in the Ukraine. This is not so different than in the northeastern
U.S., where pine logs are shipped to Canada only to return as 2x4s. To try to
promote domestic wood processing, a law was recently enacted to prevent
raw, unprocessed timber from leaving the country. There are still concerns
that not all wood will be sold on the domestic market and worries that highquality wood will end up being used for bio-energy or the production of pallets, because these uses are more profitable. If the export ban fails to achieve
the intended result, it’s likely some other solution will be tried.
Beyond commercial uses, Ukrainian forests are relied upon to play an
important environmental role, particularly in terms of protecting soils and
water. They also are used to create more favorable microclimate conditions
for agriculture (especially in the southern region), as well as for recreation
and for cultural heritage conservation.
Non-timber forest products, such as mushrooms and berries, are of
great importance to local communities and can be collected free of charge.
However, recent surveys conducted as part of the international FLEG (Forest
Law Enforcement and Governance) program cited problems with harvests
involving both timber and non-timber crops in Ukraine. They noted reduced
forest cover from both legal and illegal logging, overharvesting (especially
by outsiders coming to the forest to cash-in on lucrative berries and mushrooms), and destructive harvesting techniques that increase short-term
harvests but hinder regrowth. They also blamed climate change for reducing
forest cover, drying marshes, increasing disease, and changing the distribution of forest products like mushrooms and cranberries.
The war with Russian-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country is leading to the loss of life and property and posing serious threats to the
environment. At least 33 protected natural areas in the Donetsk and Lugansk
regions have been damaged by the fighting; one fire caused by the conflict
damaged nearly 100,000 acres of forest. Despite the massive pressures on
the economy and the fragile situation in the eastern part of the country, the
conditions for building a successful economy in Ukraine have never been
as favorable as they are today. Political and economic reforms designed to
eliminate corruption and increase transparency, as well as the association
with the European Union, are creating a more favorable climate for investment, including in the forestry sector.
Ihor Soloviy
Dr. Ihor Soloviy is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the Gund Institute for
Ecological Economics, University of Vermont, and also associate professor at
the Ukrainian National Forestry University.
19
[ RACCOON RABIES ]
How to Kill a Zombie
We’re in the midst of a disease outbreak that is
turning some of our four-legged neighbors into
slavering zombies intent on biting everything
around them. The disease is raccoon rabies, and
it’s been present in the Northeast since the early
1990s.
Rabies comes in different variations, and each
variety has a preferred host. There are nine
common terrestrial variants of rabies, among
them fox rabies (a problem in Texas, Arizona, and
Alaska) and two kinds of skunk rabies (making
headlines in the plains states).
Raccoon rabies has been the big concern in
the Northeast. First noted in Florida in the 1950s,
it moved up the coast, spreading slowly through
raccoon populations. By 1990, the virus had
reached New York, and three years later that
state had set the record for greatest number
of lab-confirmed animal rabies cases in the
history of the U.S. at 2,747. It moved into Vermont,
New Hampshire, and Maine in the early 1990s,
with annual rates in Vermont and New Hampshire
jumping from the single digits in the late 1980s to
more than 150 by 1995. The raccoon rabies virus is
now firmly ensconced across the entire Northeast
and has even made forays into Quebec.
Living in a country that has reduced human
rabies cases to a handful a year, largely through
PHOTOS BY USDA, APHIS
successful pet vaccination campaigns, it’s easy
to forget just how devastating the disease can be.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), rabies kills more than 55,000
people around the world each year, which works
out to about one person every 10 minutes. The
majority of these victims are from developing
countries in Africa and southeast Asia and most
are under the age of 15.
Rabies has the highest fatality rate of any
known disease. Once symptoms start, a patient
is almost certain to die, which is why it’s so
important to get vaccinated after a bite from
an animal suspected of being rabid. Those who
do receive post-exposure vaccines have a very
good chance of recovery, but a course of rabies
Ravioli bait
20
Occupational hazard – that’s not a raccoon!
vaccines costs about $1,000 per person. The
New York State Department of Health estimates
that the increase of rabies exposures due to the
raccoon rabies outbreak is costing New Yorkers
$2 million per year – that price tag includes
the costs of post-exposure treatment, laboratory
testing for rabies, and programs to control rabid
animals. The CDC puts the costs of rabies for the
whole country at $300 million.
To help control the spread of rabies, and to
reduce the need for these expensive vaccinations,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal
and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has
created a National Rabies Management Program
An unwilling patient.
that has been working to vaccinate raccoons
against rabies. The idea behind vaccinating
animals is that the vaccinated, and therefore
immune, animals can act as a buffer between
diseased animals and potential new hosts.
Raccoons are not going to book themselves
a vet appointment, so how can APHIS vaccinate
enough wild animals to make a difference? While
humans typically receive vaccines through a
shot, some vaccines can work if taken orally. In
fact, rabies may have the longest history of oral
vaccination of any disease: there are reports of
Bedouins roasting the livers of rabid dogs and
feeding them to dog bite victims 900 years ago.
Thankfully, APHIS does not need to use the
roasted livers of rabid raccoons for their vaccine
program; they use vaccine baits. The first was a
sachet coated in fishmeal – basically a ketchup
packet full of liquid vaccine with a fish-flavored
shell. In 2011, APHIS began field-testing a second
bait vaccine that Fred Pogmore, district supervisor
and wildlife biologist with APHIS, describes as
looking like a square ravioli. It’s a blister pack of
vaccine coated in fat, vanilla, sugar, and dye, like
a frosted cookie with a gooey vaccine center.
The ravioli baits cost $1.65 each and the
ketchup packets are $1.23, and APHIS aims to
distribute up to 150 baits per square kilometer in
areas with high raccoon numbers. Last year, they
placed baits in 15 states, with 8,198,991 baits
distributed over 162,902 square kilometers. The
goal is to treat about half of the raccoon population
in the coverage area. APHIS estimates that each
year the bait-dropping program costs $58-148
million nationally, as opposed to the $48-496
million that unchecked rabies would cost.
So how do these oral vaccines actually work?
Raccoons don’t have to eat the vaccine baits, they
just have to bite into them. The liquid vaccine gets
into their mouths and down their throats, where
it triggers an immune response. Neither vaccine
contains actual rabies virus; both use a standard
virus vector that has been modified to have an
antigen known to trigger an immune response
to rabies. In other words, the bait vaccines can’t
cause rabies, so there’s no concerns about family
pets inadvertently eating the bait.
In the Northeast, bait drops typically take place
from mid-August to mid-September, mostly in
the northern counties of Vermont and New York,
to prevent raccoon rabies from circumventing
the Great Lakes and then moving west through
Canada. New Hampshire and Maine use a lesser
amount of bait dropping on their northern borders,
but currently are focused on enhanced surveillance of the disease. In Massachusetts, Cape Cod
is the only area that has vaccine baiting, with
some enhanced surveillance.
In remote areas, vaccine baits are dropped
from small planes operated out of Plattsburgh,
New York. Unfortunately, raccoons love urban
and suburban places with their concentrations
of scavengeable trashcans and APHIS prefers
not to rain baits from the sky onto unsuspecting
homeowners. As a result, APHIS hand-places
baits in cities like Burlington, Vermont. There,
Fred Pogmore describes tossing handfuls of baits
beyond the fences of the waterfront bike path
where raccoons can get to them but dogs can’t.
Such efforts have already shown that it is
possible to halt the spread of rabies: raccoon
rabies did make it across the border into Québec
in 2006, but was declared eliminated in 2009
after a bait-dropping program using the raviolitype bait vaccine.
Rich Chipman, coordinator of APHIS’ National
Rabies Management Program, says the goal is
now to move beyond containing raccoon rabies
in the Northeast, and instead to “push it into
the sea,” that is, using the bait dropping to
narrow the area affected by raccoon rabies until
it disappears.
That’s what has happened with the grey fox
rabies variant in Texas, which has been nearly
eradicated after APHIS efforts that are part of the
same program being employed in the Northeast.
Eradicating rabies, any rabies, is an ambitious
goal, especially considering that the disease has
been with us at least as long as we’ve been
writing history. APHIS is only just beginning the
elimination phase for raccoon rabies and it will no
doubt be a tough fight. Yet, if successful, it will be
a huge win in a long struggle for both animal and
human health.
Rachel Sargent
21
[ ECONOMICS ]
The Ripple Effect: Timber is a Big Part
of the Granite State Economy
Timber harvesting is one of those economic
activities that flies under the radar. It happens
most often in rural parts of the state on Class V
or Class VI roads, and only once or twice in an
average landowner’s tenure on the land.
So how can we gauge the effect that timber
harvesting has on the economy of an entire state?
In 2013 and 2014, the New Hampshire
Timberland Owners Association received generous
grants from the Plum Creek Foundation, the
French Foundation, and the Neil and Louise
Tillotson Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable
Foundation for a research project that quantified
the direct and indirect economic impact of New
Hampshire’s timber harvesting industry. Partnering
with Plymouth State University’s Center for Rural
Partnerships, the association designed a survey
to capture economic data from New Hampshire
timber harvesting companies. These figures were
then entered into an IMPLAN economic impact
model.
The survey results suggest that more than
1,100 people in the state work in jobs directly
related to the commercial harvesting of timber
– from the one-man cable skidder set-up on up
to a fully mechanized cut-to-length operation.
These jobs generated an estimated $69.7 million
in wages and over $20 million in local, state, and
federal tax revenue. An additional 309 people
have jobs that are indirectly related – foresters,
equipment manufacturers, mechanics, and bookkeepers. The wages in these supporting industries are estimated at $13 million.
But the ripples continue. The IMPLAN model
extrapolates additional value by looking at where
these wages are spent. The model predicts that
timber harvesting supports an additional 488 jobs
(waitstaff, gas stations, health care, and the like)
that generate an additional $22 million in local
wages. The model indicates that these wages
create about $89 million in non-wage economic
activity in the state. Totaling these figures suggests
that New Hampshire’s timber harvesting operations contribute $168.7 million annually to New
Hampshire’s economy.
As the New Hampshire Timberland Owners
Association program director, I travel throughout
the state. While on the road, I often count the
number of log trucks and chip vans I pass, noting
TONY FISCHER/CREATIVE COMMONS. SIGN: MBC DESIGN
22
what species and product they are carrying. The
exercise serves as an informal barometer for
how much work is taking place in the woods. But
thanks to this study, we’re now able to assign a
dollar value to this wood as it relates to wages. If
we assume that there are about 3.28 million tons
of wood harvested each year in New Hampshire
(that number is from timber tax data collected in
2012), we can calculate that every ton of wood
generates $32 in wages. To put this into perspective, if you pass an 18-wheeler on the highway,
the wood it’s carrying has created around $1,000
in local wages.
Of course, timber harvesting is just the tip of
the iceberg in New Hampshire’s wood economy.
Sawmills, biomass and firewood producers, wood
pellet manufacturers, and pulp and paper producers
all make huge contributions, too. We’ll tackle the
economics involving these businesses in future
economic models.
Eric Johnson
Eric Johnson is the program director emeritus for the
New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association. He is
a former professional logger and maple syrup producer
from Andover, New Hampshire.
[ THE OUTSIDE STORY ]
Woolly Bears: Forecast Flops?
Autumn is coming to a close. The brilliant fall foliage is
past peak, if not already layered in the compost bin.
The last geese are honking their way toward winter
homes. Predictions are proffered (sometimes cheerfully,
mostly not) for how cold and snowy this year’s winter will be.
Sources for seasonal predictions vary. The Farmers’
Almanac and traditional old wives’ tales are often cited. How
soon those geese head south, for example, is supposed to indicate how
difficult winter will be. We trust these bits of folklore because they seem to
work. (Research is advised, however; never assume that country wisdom is
reliable enough to calculate, say, your oil pre-buy needs.)
Sometimes the cuteness factor plays a role in our willingness to believe.
Take the woolly bear caterpillar, whose fuzziness often tempts people to pick
it up and, coincidentally, to discover that the bristles, called setae, are actually stiff and hard, not soft and cuddly. It is on the prowl in late fall, crossing
lawns, logs, and roads. According to tradition, the wider the rusty-orange
band around its middle, the milder the coming winter. The relative size of its
two black sections is also supposed to have meteorological significance. If
the front one is larger than the back, the beginning of winter will supposedly
have colder temperatures than the end of winter, and vice versa.
In fact, woolly bears are better predictors of the past spring and summer
than the coming winter. Like all caterpillars, the woolly bear goes through
several stages of development, called instars. Each instar is a period of
steady eating and growth, culminating in the shedding of now too-tight skin.
During each molt, some of the black-bristled segments are replaced with
orange ones. Fall is well under way by the fifth or sixth instar, just when we
begin comparing the forecast and the caterpillar.
What this means is that the ratio of black to orange actually depends on the
caterpillar’s age and developmental stage. Very young woolly bears are almost
entirely dark. If spring came early, the woolly bear will have had additional
time for growth, resulting in a wide orange band by fall. On the other hand,
lack of rain in the spring and summer may limit its food supply (dandelions,
grass, clover, nettles, and birches are preferred) and delay growth. Looking at
a stressed, spring-size caterpillar in November may tell you something about
the previous months’ weather conditions, but it won’t be much help with the
question of whether your wood pile needs supplementing.
As autumn edges closer to winter, these caterpillars seek out a place to
hibernate. They may wander surprisingly far in their quest. Choice spots are
under leaf litter, in a wood pile, even behind loose bark. Here they are out of
the elements, but by no means protected from freezing. In fact, they must
freeze in order to survive the winter.
Like frogs, woolly bears make a substance that acts like antifreeze. As the
late autumn temperature drops, the caterpillar gradually fills with glycerol.
This viscous substance basically prevents organs and sensitive tissues from
getting freezer burn. The setae also contribute to the winterizing process
by drawing water out of the caterpillar’s body. Deadly ice crystals form
harmlessly on the bristles instead of inside the body, where cells critical to
life reside. Eventually, only the interior of each cell remains unfrozen, safely
surrounded by cold-tolerant glycerol.
With ice on the outside and glycerol on the inside, the caterpillar is ready to
endure a long period of cold weather. This period of arctic diapause is so critical
that a mild winter can spell doom for woolly bears. (So, too, can soft-hearted
but misinformed “protectors” who relocate one to the garage, “so the poor
caterpillar won’t freeze to death.”) Protected from snow and wind by its leaf or
log shelter, the frozen caterpillar can withstand temperatures well below zero.
Looking like a crispy tortellini, it lies as though lifeless until spring temperatures warm it up. Once it thaws, it resumes ravenous eating as though never
interrupted. After a few days of gorging on tender greens, the banded larva
finds a site to spin a cocoon. Woodpiles are again favorite spots, but any secure
surface will do. Every year I find four or five inside an empty wren house.
A miraculous transformation takes place over the next one to two weeks.
Then one day a delicate yellow-orange Isabella tiger moth (Pyrrharctia
isabella) emerges without warning. You’re not likely to see it unless you have
a porch light, however, as it is both nocturnal and short lived. It will mate, lay
eggs, and die in a matter of weeks, leaving its offspring to carry on the role
of pretend prognosticators.
Barbara Mackay
The Outside Story is sponsored by the Wellborn Ecology Fund of New Hampshire Charitable Foundation: wellborn@nhcf.org.
23
24
25
A Consulting Forester can help you
Make decisions about
managing your forestland
Design a network of trails
Improve the wildlife
habitat on your property
Negotiate a contract
with a logger and
supervise the job
Improve the quality of
your timber
Markus Bradley, Courtney Haynes, Ben Machin
Redstart Forestry
Juniper Chase, Corinth, VT 05039
(802) 439-5252
www.redstartconsulting.com
Steve Handfield
Consulting Forester
178 Ruby Road, Poultney VT 05764
(802) 342-6751
stevehandfield@yahoo.com
Anita Nikles Blakeman
Woodland Care Forest Management
P.O. Box 4, N. Sutton, NH 03260
(603) 927-4163
woodlandcare@tds.net
Ben Hudson
Hudson Forestry
P.O. Box 83, Lyme, NH 03768
(603) 795-4535
ben@hudsonforestry.com
Herbert Boyce, ACF, CF
Deborah Boyce, CF
Northwoods Forest Consultants, LLC
13080 NYS Route 9N, Jay, NY 12941
(518) 946-7040
nfc@frontiernet.net
Grahm Leitner, CF
Greenwood – Mad River Forestry, LLC
1212 Camels Hump Road
Waterbury, VT 05676
(802)793-7224
trees@madriverforestry.com
Gary Burch
Burch Hill Forestry
1678 Burch Road, Granville, NY 12832
(518) 632-5436
garyeburch@gmail.com
M.D. Forestland Consulting, LLC
(802) 472-6060
David McMath
Cell: (802) 793-1602
dmcmath@kingcon.com
Beth Daut, NH #388
Cell: (802) 272-5547
bethdaut@gmail.com
Alan Calfee, Michael White
Calfee Woodland Management, LLC
P.O. Box 86, Dorset, VT 05251
(802) 231-2555
info@calfeewoodland.com
www.calfeewoodland.com
Fountain Forestry
7 Green Mountain Drive, Suite 3
Montpelier, VT 05602-2708
(802) 223-8644 ext 26
Andrew.carlo@fountainsamerica.com
LandVest Timberland
Management and Marketing
ME, NH, NY, VT
5086 US Route 5, Suite 2, Newport, VT 05855
(802) 334-8402
www.landvest.com
Meadowsend Timberlands Ltd
Serving NH & VT
P.O. Box 966, New London, NH 03257
(603) 526-8686
www.mtlforests.com
Jeremy G. Turner, NHLPF #318
(603) 481-1091
jgturner@mtlforests.com
Ryan Kilborn, NHLPF #442
(802) 323-3593
rkilborn@mtlforests.com
Richard Cipperly, CF
North Country Forestry
8 Stonehurst DrIve, Queensbury, NY 12804
(518) 793-3545
Cell: (518) 222-0421
rjcipperly@roadrunner.com
Calhoun and Corwin Forestry, LLC
41 Pine Street, Peterborough, NH 03458
(603) 562-5620
swiftcorwin@gmail.com
www.swiftcorwin.com
R. Kirby Ellis
Ellis’ Professional Forester Services
P.O. Box 71, Hudson, ME 04630
(207) 327-4674
ellisforestry.com
Glen Gifford, ACF
VP – FORECON, Inc.
1890 East Main Street
Falconer, NY 14733
(716) 664-5602 ext. 301
foreconinc.com
Charlie Hancock
North Woods Forestry
P.O. Box 405, Montgomery Center, VT 05471
(802) 326-2093
northwoodsforestry@gmail.com
New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts require foresters to be licensed, and Connecticut requires they be certified. Note
that not all consulting foresters are licensed in each state. If you have a question about a forester’s licensure or certification
status, contact your state’s Board of Licensure.
26
Scott Moreau
Greenleaf Forestry
P.O. Box 39, Westford, VT 05494
(802) 343-1566 cell
(802) 849-6629
glforestry@aol.com
Haven Neal
Haven Neal Forestry Services
137 Cates Hill Road, Berlin, NH 03570
(603) 752-7107
132cateshill@twc.com
Michael Powers
Bay State Forestry
469 Tanglewood Drive
Henniker, NH 03242
(603) 325-5430
mpowers32@comcast.net
David Senio
P.O. Box 87, Passumpsic, VT 05861
(802) 748-5241
dsenio@charter.net
Jeffrey Smith
Butternut Hollow Forestry
1153 Tucker Hill Road
Thetford Center, Vermont 05075
(802) 785-2615
bhollowforestry@gmail.com
Jack Wadsworth, LPF, ME & NH
Brian Reader, LPF, ME & NH
Jesse Duplin, LPF, ME & NH
Wadsworth Woodlands, Inc.
35 Rock Crop Way, Hiram, ME 04041
(207) 625-2468
jwadsworth@wadsworthwoodlands.com
www.wadsworthwoodlands.com
1,000 words
Photo by Frank Kaczmarek
Photographer Frank Kaczmarek took this
shot in early October along the banks of
the Connecticut River. “The sun was just
breaking out of a morning fog when I first
heard, then saw, the approaching geese,”
he explains. The image was captured on
Fuji Velvia film using a 400mm telephoto
lens. “The moment inspired me to write the
following Haiku poem,” says Kaczmarek:
hunting season
geese pierce
the light
27
28
WHERE IS
DON QUIXOTE?
Story by Howard Frank Mosher. Art by Matthew Gauvin.
Elizabeth would have known what to do about the wind towers. Unfortunately,
Kinneson’s wife had passed a year ago. Passed where? Kinneson had no idea.
From time to time he still heard her voice in his head, calm and practical, but
thus far she had said nothing to him about the towers.
29
Elizabeth had been the one person whose opinion, other than
Patchett’s own, Patchett had the slightest regard for. On those
occasions when Kinneson needed to get his hired man into gear,
he’d say, “Liz told me we should cut the north hayfield today.” Or,
“Liz said this forenoon would be a good time to start tapping up
back.” Up back was the maple orchard on the ridge above the
barn. So far as Kinneson knew, Patchett himself had never been
married. Forty years ago he’d appeared at Kinneson’s door out of
a blizzard, sudden as a revenant, a young man with an old man’s
face. Elizabeth had fed him supper and he’d stayed on. In time
he’d bought a third-hand Airstream and set up housekeeping
in it between the farmhouse and the hardtop road at the foot of
the lane. A month after Patchett had quartered himself on them,
Kinneson asked him a question. Was Patchett his first or last
name? Patchett had given him a long, slow, wondering look, and
neither of them had broached the topic again.
Patchett might have known what to do about the wind towers
himself. Now an old man with a young man’s face, Patchett knew
how to fix things. Given time enough, and someone to hand him
tools and listen to him complain, Patchett could fix anything,
from a broken flywheel on Kinneson’s ancient Oliver tractor to
the hard drive of the desktop computer Elizabeth kept the farm
accounts on. Quite possibly, Patchett could have fixed the wind
towers. Fixed them, in some subtle and untraceable way, so that
they’d never generate a single kilowatt of green power again. But
a few weeks after Liz passed, Patchett had hooked his Airstream
behind his pickup and lit out for Big Sky Country.
What had caused Patchett to jump ship? Montpelier’d made
him take down his sign beside the hardtop road, claiming that
it violated Vermont’s anti-billboard legislation. Patchett had
written to Montpelier asking how a square of cardboard from a
Mason shoebox with “Fish Worms for Sale” and a hand-drawn
arrow pointing up at his Airstream could qualify as a billboard.
Montpelier did not reply so Patchett, seeing the handwriting on
the wall, hit the high dusty, leaving the offending cardboard sign
duct-taped to Kinneson’s door with the message “Gone Fishing”
printed just below the arrow. Patchett being Patchett, he had not
troubled himself to say where he had gone fishing. Ten days later,
Kinneson received a postcard from Gulch, Montana, depicting a
range of snowcapped mountains that dwarfed Vermont’s tallest
peaks. It read, “I’m here. Patchett.”
Kinneson had a grown son in Boston and a grown daughter
in New York. After Elizabeth passed and Patchett pulled up
stakes and went west, they urged him to unload the farm and
move closer to them. Kinneson abided his adult children, as
they did him, and enjoyed his grandkids, but if there was one
place he detested more than Boston, it was New York, and
vice versa. His was the last working farm in the township of
30
Kingdom Common, and at eighty he couldn’t keep up with the
twice-a-day regimen of milking one hundred and fifty cows
alone. Therefore, he hired two hardworking Mexican brothers
to help run his outfit. Mexicans were already running most
of the remaining farms in Kingdom County and, as nearly as
Kinneson could tell, running them more efficiently than they
had ever been run before. In Kinneson’s estimation, the recent
influx of Mexican workers was the best thing to happen to the
Kingdom since his great, great grandfather, James Kinneson I,
and a like-minded handful of James’s neighbors, had declared
its independence from Vermont and the United States and
governed it as a free-standing republic for thirty years.
A few weeks after Kinneson hired on the Sanchez brothers,
the leach field below his farmhouse failed. Juan and Luis could
have put in a perfectly serviceable new one for the cost of several
truckloads of sand and gravel, a few hundred feet of PVC piping,
and the rental of a backhoe for half a day. Before they could get
started someone, Kinneson suspected it was old man Potts from
over behind, reported the failure of his septic system to the state
authorities. In waltzed Montpelier again, this time in the person
of a spindling little know-all scarcely out of his teens, who called
himself a sanitation hydrologist. Empowered by an abrupt letter
from some official or other, the hydrologist made Kinneson
install, to the tune of $18,500, a new, state-of-the art septic system
thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and ten feet high, which in
Kinneson’s estimation could have accommodated half of the
waste of the village of Kingdom Common. To pay for it, he’d
been constrained to cash in a whole-life insurance policy whose
proceeds, now that Elizabeth was gone, he’d intended to leave in
trust with his son and daughter for his grandchildren.
E
arly one evening that summer Kinneson looked out his kitchen
window over the top of the Indian burial mound, as he’d come
to think of the new septic system, and saw four coyotes chasing
a deer across the water meadow along the river. Before he could
load his rifle, they ran her down and tore her to pieces. The next
morning a this-year’s fawn, still in its spots, tottered into his
barnyard. Kinneson put the orphaned animal into an empty stall,
where the coyotes couldn’t get at it, and drove into the Common
and bought a baby bottle. He coaxed the fawn into lapping a little
warm milk off his fingers, then drinking from the bottle.
“My name is Ezekiel Kinneson. I own the last working farm in this town.
I milk one hundred and fifty cows, tap a thousand maple trees, fish the brooks that
run off that ridge and hunt along the Post Road. I am a seventh-generation Commoner
who does not care to be told what to do, or bribed into doing anything, by anyone.
For all these reasons, I’m opposed to the towers.”
Against the advice of the Sanchez brothers, who had recently
moved themselves and their families into two brand-new doublewides near the former site of Patchett’s Airstream, Kinneson
called the local game warden to report the killing of the doe
and his discovery of the fawn. Over the phone line he heard a
sound like a person sucking in air between his teeth. “I wish you
hadn’t told me that, Zeke,” the warden said. The warden called
his supervisor in St. Johnsbury, who called the head warden in
Montpelier, who showed up at Kinneson’s place the next morning
with his two subordinates and ordered Kinneson to release
the fawn back into the wild and let nature run its course. This
Kinneson refused to do. The coyotes, who lived on the ridge up
back, were nearly as large as the timber wolves their ancestors
had interbred with, and fully as ferocious, and would snap up an
unattended fawn within hours. The head warden shrugged and
told his employees to get the deer out of the barn and let it go in
the alders beside the river where, the following day, Kinneson
came across its bloody hide and partially eaten hooves. Nature
had run its course.
Above Kinneson’s maple sugar orchard, along the ridge-line
marking the west boundary of his property, a faint, north-andsouth-running trace cut through the woods, now mostly overgrown with hobblebush, grey birch, and striped maple. Nearby,
at the top of the maple orchard, Kinneson and Elizabeth had
placed a granite marker inscribed with their names and birth
dates. Here their ashes would be buried in a single urn now
containing Elizabeth’s, which Kinneson kept in the pie safe in
her former pantry. The trace, which was known as the Canada
Post Road, and was owned by the township of Kingdom
Common, had been built in 1812 by Kinneson’s great, great,
great grandfather, Charles Kinneson I, whose aim it was to
attack Canada and annex it to Kingdom County. In the event,
Charles and his militia of would-be invaders were driven back
across the border by a dozen angry Quebecois habitants armed
with pitchforks and squirrel guns.
One afternoon Kinneson walked up through his maple trees
to check on the grave marker. The stone stood where he’d left
it, facing out over a prospect of most of the Kingdom. It was a
beautiful place, but from just down the Post Road, Kinneson
heard voices. Through the underbrush, he made out two men in
white hardhats, coming his way with surveying instruments.
“Hello, old-timer,” one of the surveyors called out. “What
brings you up here?”
“My grandfather’s great grandfather built this road,” Kinneson
said. “What brings you up here?”
The surveyor handed Kinneson a business card with the
words “Northern New England Green Power” printed on it.
He told Kinneson that his company planned to buy the Post
Road from the township and erect twenty-one wind towers on
it. There would be an information meeting at the town hall in
Kingdom Common the following Thursday evening.
When Kinneson did not favor him with a reply, the surveyor
said, “Well, no rest for the wicked,” and made a small, dismissive
gesture with the back of his hand, as if to shoo Kinneson off
his own property. Kinneson’s grandfather would have wrested
the surveyor’s transit out of his hands and given him a severe
drubbing with it. His father, who made it a practice never to
leave his house unarmed, would have run off the interlopers at
gunpoint. This was a different era. As a rule, Kinneson did not
believe in taking the law into his own hands.
“Yes, sir, gentlemen,” he said, and started back down the
slope toward the farmhouse.
I
n general, Ezekiel Kinneson regarded meetings, including
Vermont’s fabled, grass-roots town meetings, as a waste of time.
In his view, the sole purpose of meetings was to find reasons
not to get things done. Patchett had disapproved of meetings,
too. It was one of the few things they’d agreed on. Therefore,
Kinneson’s neighbors were surprised to see him at Thursday’s
information meeting. “When did you make bail, Z?” old man
Potts brayed out at him as he entered the hall.
Green Power had hired a Burlington law firm specializing
in litigating environmental issues. The firm’s senior partner, a
meticulous man in his sixties, offered the township of Kingdom
31
Common $750,000 for a two-mile stretch of the Canada Post
Road running along the ridge top above Kinneson’s farm.
Kinneson, for his part, paid little attention to the attorney as he
nattered on, and less attention yet to the speeches that followed,
pro and con, from his fellow townspersons. When it was his
turn to speak, Kinneson rose and looked around the crowded
hall and frowned. “See here,” he said. “My name is Ezekiel
Kinneson. I own the last working farm in this town. I milk one
hundred and fifty cows, tap a thousand maple trees, fish the
brooks that run off that ridge and hunt along the Post Road. I
am a seventh-generation Commoner who does not care to be
told what to do, or bribed into doing anything, by anyone. For
all these reasons, I’m opposed to the towers.”
Less than ten minutes later, the town voted 245-181 in favor of
selling the Post Road to the power company. Kinneson went home
and wrote a two-page, outraged letter relaying the news to Patchett.
Two weeks later he received a reply on one of Patchett’s Big Sky
postcards. The message read, “Blow them up, come West.”
Overnight, word spread throughout the Kingdom, emanating
from the post office like circles on a trout pond, that Kinneson
had thrown in with a cadre of eco-terrorists. Report had it that
he had driven to New Hampshire, where you could buy, with
no questions asked, anything in the way of ordnance necessary
to “live free or die,” and purchased fifty-three cases of dynamite.
Patchett himself was said to be posting east, with a posse of
mountain men and survivalists, to deal with the as yet nonexistent wind towers. The county prosecutor caught wind of the
rumors and wangled an order from the district-court judge to
send out the sheriff with Dr. Frannie Lafleur Kinneson, the local
GP and three-afternoons-a-week consulting psychiatrist at the
county hospital, to examine Kinneson and determine whether
he had gone around the bend and become dangerous to himself
or others.
Dr. Frannie, as she was universally referred to in the
Kingdom, was Kinneson’s great niece by marriage. She had
two grown sons herself but was still, in Kinneson’s estimation,
as cute as a button. She asked him the day of the week and
his date of birth. Then she wanted to know the name of the
president. Kinneson winked at her and said Abraham Lincoln.
Dr. Frannie gave out a raucous belly laugh and snapped
off her recording machine and said she only hoped
that she’d be as sharp as Kinneson when she
was eighty. The sheriff, John “Uncle Johnny”
Kinneson, who detested the projected
wind towers because they would destroy
his secret deerstand on the Post Road,
smiled and drove Dr. Frannie back to
the village.
32
Schildren
everal months passed. Everyone from Kinneson’s grown
to the local postmistress who’d read Patchett’s postcard
and ignited the dynamite rumor had advised Ezekiel not to make
any life-altering changes during his first year as a widower. Other
than hiring on the Sanchez brothers, which Kinneson regarded
as the smartest thing he’d done since marrying Elizabeth, he’d
made no changes at all. Juan and Luis subscribed to several
dairy-farming periodicals. They brought in agricultural consultants from the state university, and began looking into local
vore projects such as beekeeping, cheesemaking, and raising
organically fed beef cattle. Their wives enrolled in community
college courses, the children were well-mannered and studious.
Kinneson enjoyed taking them fishing and playing catch with
them. He liked thinking that they were the future face of the
Kingdom, and wished he could see the expression on old man
Potts’s face when they grew up to be selectpersons and road
commissioners, schoolboard members, deputy sheriffs, state
legislators, members of Congress and, yes, presidents. One of
the boys was a gifted ballplayer. Kinneson envisioned him in
pinstripes and a New York Yankees cap, pitching a no-hitter in
Fenway Park.
In the late afternoons he sat out on the wraparound porch
of the farmhouse, where he’d sat evenings helping Elizabeth
shell peas and cut up apples, and watched the towers rising ever
higher on the ridge top.
“What do you look at, grandfather?” the Sanchez children
inquired.
“Those windmills up on the hill,” Kinneson said.
“Why do you look at them?”
“Because they bear watching,” Kinneson said. “Like you
young scamps.”
By August all twenty-one of the towers were in operation.
They stood four hundred and sixty feet high. At night their red
warning lights blinked on and off. More than half of the time
their vast blades were motionless since the higher mountains
immediately to the west blocked the prevailing wind. Nor,
Kinneson had recently learned, could the antiquated electrical
lines leading to and from the Kingdom accommodate more
than half of what meager power they generated. Kinneson
watched the wind blades not turning. He had never for one minute doubted what the scientists said about climate change, but
the stationary blades would do little to combat it.
Throughout his life Kinneson had been an
avid reader. After Liz passed, he’d had trouble
following anything longer than the court news
or obituaries in the Kingdom County Monitor.
He’d look out the window to check on the wind
towers, then return to his book only to realize
that he was rereading the page he’d just finished. One afternoon
he found himself in the village library again. Ruth Kinneson, the
librarian and Kinneson’s second cousin by marriage, was boxing
up some outdated westerns for an upcoming book sale.
“Welcome, stranger,” Ruth said. “What do you hear from Mr.
Patchett?”
For the briefest moment, Kinneson wasn’t sure who she
meant. Ruth was the only person who ever referred to his former
hired hand as Mr. Patchett.
“Not much,” Kinneson said. “Since that penny postcard got
all over town.”
Ruth smiled. “Mr. Patchett is Mr. Patchett,” she said. “I think
he always felt the draw of the West.”
She removed a book from the box: Zane Grey’s Riders of the
Purple Sage. There was Patchett’s name on the check-out card,
printed neatly a dozen or so times.
“Mr. Patchett read and reread every one of these books,” Ruth
said. “I’m sure you knew that.”
Kinneson had known no such thing. He wondered what else
there might be about Patchett that he didn’t know. After that day,
many years ago, when he had inquired about Patchett’s name,
he had never asked him a personal question. Now, looking at
Patchett’s block printing on the library card, he realized that
his friend had not been fleeing anything, including Montpelier
and its thousand-and-one regulations, when he’d struck out for
Montana. Rather, Patchett had been realizing a life-long dream.
At that moment, Kinneson knew exactly what he must do.
That evening, he summoned the Sanchez brothers to the
farmhouse kitchen. Without preamble, he said that he was
prepared to sell them his seven hundred and sixty acres, the barn
and livestock, and the machinery at assessed or book value. He
would hold the mortgage himself, zero percent interest and no
down payment. After his death, the monthly payments would
go to his son and daughter. He would retain the farmhouse and
two acres for his children and grandchildren to use as a getaway.
Juan and Luis thanked him and said they would keep up the
place, of which Kinneson had no doubt. He enjoyed thinking
of old man Potts’ consternation when he learned that the last
working farm in the township was now owned by Mexicans.
The brothers returned to their trailers to share the news
with their wives. Immediately, before he had second thoughts,
Kinneson began packing. He wouldn’t need much. His fly rod,
deer rifle, winter clothing, and boots. He could bunk in with
Patchett, he figured, until he found a place of his own. Late
that afternoon he’d brought the grave marker from the maple
orchard down off the ridge, on a stoneboat behind his Oliver,
and gee-hawed it up into the bed of his pickup. He didn’t sleep
much that night. Except for a year in Korea when he was in the
service, he’d spent only a few nights away from his own bed. Now
he was leaving the Kingdom forever. He imagined that he could
hear the low, throbbing hum of the windmills. Once he heard
Elizabeth say, very distinctly, “A red-and-yellow grasshopper
fly, fished wet, is a good bet out there this time of year.”
He was up at first light. He limited himself to one cup of
coffee so he wouldn’t have to stop five times before he was out
of Vermont. He removed the urn containing Liz’s ashes from the
pie safe and wrapped it in his hunting jacket and stashed it in the
bottom of the toolbox behind the pickup cab. The rig coughed,
ground out, coughed again, and started. He’d have Patchett
throw in a rebuilt starter when he arrived.
The river was invisible in the September mist. Higher on the
ridge, the clouds had dispersed. In the rising sun, the twentyone wind towers lit up as red as Armageddon and the fiery
blades began to turn like the big and little wheels of Ezekiel’s
biblical namesake. Well before he reached the hardtop road
where Patchett had started all this with his fish worms sign,
Kinneson knew that, for him, Big Sky Country was no solution.
“How was Montana?” Juan called to him a minute later as he
pulled back into his dooryard.
“Montana’s all right if you like it,” Kinneson said. “It isn’t the
Kingdom.”
Still, Kinneson realized, as he returned Elizabeth’s ashes to
the pantry, that it was not his beloved green fields or hundredyear-old sugar bush or six generations of forebears that had
changed his mind about leaving the Kingdom. What brought
him back was the wind towers. Looking up at their blades,
looming high above the county in the mild fall sunlight like
so many winged, alabaster idols, Kinneson pursed his lips. As
he’d told the Sanchez children, the towers bore watching. It had
fallen to him to watch them. That might not be much, but it was
the one thing left in his world that he was certain of.
Howard Frank Mosher’s new novel, God’s Kingdom, will be published this October by
St. Martin’s Press.
Matthew Gauvin is a book illustrator living and working in Lyndonville, Vermont.
33
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34
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35
High-Hanging Fruit
Boom and Bust Seed Crops of Conifers
36
Story and Photos By Susan C. Morse
or portions of two days, I watched a red squirrel clipping and caching cones
from the crown of a towering white spruce. It was a bumper crop that season,
and thousands of cones hung in bunches throughout the tree. The squirrel
seemed intent on visiting every bunch in the upper branches as it feverishly
clipped and cast cones down to the forest floor. I was curious and counted
all the cones I could find lying beneath the tree. I came up with 235 before I
quit, and there were hundreds more that landed on the branches above me.
Researchers have found that a hard-working squirrel can clip and store upwards of
12,000 ripe, unopened cones before seedfall.
Conifers produce cone crops erratically; there will be years of complete cone
failure, years of poor to moderate cone production, and, periodically, years in which
a staggering number of cones burden the trees. In such a year, our squirrel’s single
white spruce may produce 10,000 or more. Bumper mast years produce such an
excess of cones that predators can’t possibly consume them all – guaranteeing the
tree opportunities for successful seed dispersal, germination, and recruitment. The
relationship between mast crops and the animals that feed upon their seeds is a
remarkable, though not fully understood, phenomenon. For example, ecologists have
noticed that prior to a bumper cone crop, squirrels may produce an additional litter of
young, presumably to benefit from the surfeit of food later on. What tips the squirrels
off? One theory suggests that the over-abundance of male pollen cones in the spring
cues the squirrels, causing them to increase their reproductive output and hence
benefit from the bonanza of cones that will follow by summer’s end.
Vertebrate cone seed predators in our region include red squirrels, red-backed
voles, cedar waxwings, black-capped and boreal chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches,
common redpolls, white-throated sparrows, pine grosbeaks, and pine siskins. Of
course, others occasionally take part, too. During a period of severe food shortage
on Baccalieu Island in Newfoundland, red foxes were seen climbing balsam fir trees
and eating the cones. In the West, scrub, stellar, and pinyon jays, along with Clark’s
nutcrackers and pine squirrels, collect and cache millions of pine seeds, and grizzly
and black bears dig up and consume many of these nutritious, oil-rich food stores.
Native peoples throughout North America have used conifer cones in many ways.
Seeds were ground up and made into a powder that served as a delicacy when mixed
with deer fat. Dried juniper berries were mixed with fish oil or animal fat, as well as
with other fruits, such as mountain cranberries, and made into the original PowerBar.
Juniper berries were also brewed as a hot beverage. When all else failed, green twigs
and cones of spruce were boiled in maple syrup to produce a potent beer. Medicinally,
spruce cones were relied upon to cure toothaches, indigestion, diabetes, hyperactivity,
fever, pneumonia, arthritis, colds, snake bites, tapeworms, and urinary problems. An
all-purpose apothecary for breeding was helpful for contraception, inducing labor,
assisting women after childbirth, and curing venereal diseases.
Cones come in a variety of shapes, from globose to ovoid to cylindrical; they may
have blunt or pointed ends, and they may point up, like the firs, or down, like the
spruces, hemlocks, and white pine.
Not all cones are seed cones. Seed cones are the female fruits of conifer species, and
a typical seed cone’s woody scales cover and protect the ripened ovules underneath
them. Seeds are impressed against the inner wall of each scale. In the case of our
squirrel’s white spruce, there are two seeds per scale for a total of approximately 130
seeds per cone. Though they don’t look the same, the male reproductive organs that
provide pollen are also considered to be cones. They are found on the lower branches of
most conifers or on the tips of juniper branches. (Most species of juniper are dioecious,
meaning that a particular plant has male or female cone flowers on it, but not both).
Male flowers are exquisitely intricate and colorful.
What follows is a look at some of our region’s cones.
37
Creeping Juniper
Juniperus horizontalis
Draped over rocky outcrops on coastal headlands and cliffs
in Maine and southeastern Canada, creeping juniper is a low
prostrate shrub that instantly impresses upon us that life is
indeed tenacious and heroic at times. The same species
bravely occupies exposed serpentine slopes and ridgelines
in both eastern and western mountains. The powdery blueto-blackish berries are the pollinated female cone fruits
whose fleshy scales have fused together and are covered
with a resinous coating. The slight ridges and bumps that
we see on a berry’s otherwise smooth surface are all that
can be seen of the woody scales that enclose seeds.
Juniper berries are relished by red squirrels, chipmunks,
coyotes, foxes, ruffed grouse, willow ptarmigan, downy
woodpeckers, black-capped chickadees, and yellowrumped warblers and are a preferred food for robins,
cedar waxwings, and evening and pine grosbeaks. I have
seen creeping juniper seeds in the scat of black bears in
Canada’s Northwest Territories. Notice the lovely orange
male pollen cones on the foliage tips of the creeping juniper
photograph that accompanies this description. 1
Tamarack
Larix laricina
Eastern tamarack is technically a conifer or evergreen,
though it completely loses all of its needles in the fall. Among
dark, black spruces the luminous yellow autumn foliage of
tamaracks lights up the boreal north woods, as well as New
England and New York’s sub-boreal and northern mixed hardwood habitats, where poorly drained wetland soils support
their growth. Tamarack and others of the Larix genus boast the
most northerly distribution of any conifer on earth. Tamaracks
thrive at the tree line in Quebec and in Labrador’s subarctic
barrens, where they stand smallish, but as trees, in contrast
to the black spruces, willows, and birches, which appear
dwarfed and shrub-like, if not flat-out prostrate, in such environments. Erect, immature seed cones are the color of a red
Bordeaux wine, and they mature to be pale tan. They are ovoid
to globose in shape, more egg-shaped when immature, more
round when mature and fully opened. Willow ptarmigan and
spruce and ruffed grouse eat tamarack buds and new needle
shoots, while red squirrels, robins, purple finches, pine siskins,
and crossbills eat the seeds. 2
38
1
2
White Cedar
Thuja occidentalis
White cedars clinging to limestone cliffs are picturesque with their
upsweeping branches and fan-like sprays of foliage. White cedars
are among the Northeast’s longest-lived trees; some specimens
range from 500 to 1,000 years old, and deceased trees have
been calculated to be nearly 1,900 years old. Also known as
arbor vitae, the white cedar has small, attractive oblong cones,
especially appealing when they are yellow and immature (as seen
in this photo). Tiny seeds inside are dispersed by wind and carried
away from the opening cone on two long, lateral wings. Robins,
pine siskins, house finches, and common redpolls are known to
eat the seeds. Dozens of species of birds and mammals benefit
from the protective cover of white cedars. 3
White Spruce
Picea glauca
White spruce can be found in an extraordinary diversity of
northern habitats, from Maine to Labrador’s coastline, across the
continent to the Northwest Territories and interior Alaska, north
to the tree line. Disjunct populations of unique white spruce
“varieties occupy habitats as diverse as South Dakota’s Black
Hills, western Wyoming, and scattered locations in Alaska.
The following species of mammals and birds feed on the seeds
of the cylindrical, rusty-brown seed cones: squirrels, chipmunks,
voles, mice, red crossbills, white-winged crossbills, pine siskins,
red-breasted nuthatches, boreal and black-capped chickadees,
cedar waxwings, wood and Swainson’s thrushes, pileated, hairy,
and downy woodpeckers, evening and pine grosbeaks, purple
finches, white-throated sparrows, and mourning doves. Even
mallard ducks are known to feed on white spruce seeds. 4
3
4
5
Balsam Fir
Abies balsamea
Henry David Thoreau described the dark pyramidal silhouettes
of balsam fir as “plumes plucked from the raven’s wing.” Dark
and shadowy against the glow of neighboring hardwoods, they
are enchanting embodiments of the north woods. Everything
is special about this tree: its soft, lustrous aromatic foliage, its
striking shape and symmetrical form, the way it punctuates the
view at the bend of a wild river.
Balsam fir grows best in cooler, moist organic soils, around wetlands, and climbing to the higher terrain of most northeastern
mountains. Erect seed cones are two to four inches long,
cylindrical in shape, and purple or dark purplish-green when
immature. They are rarely seen unless you look down upon fir
crowns from above. Weather, birds, and squirrels pick at the
cones and contribute to their natural habit of disintegrating,
scale by scale, leaving only the central axis shaft of the cone
to be seen after the scales and their seeds have been scattered
to the forest floor. 5
39
Jack Pine
Pinus banksiana
Serotinous species, like jack pine and black spruce, have
persistent cones that remain on the tree for years. Such
cones are sealed shut with a thin film of resin until a forest
fire in the understory melts the seal and releases the seeds
to repopulate the burned forest. These fire cones open only
when the temperature climbs to 122 degrees. Ripe seeds
may wait and remain viable within their cones for decades
before fire frees them to fall to the earth. Other cones on
the same tree may open and shed seeds during hot, dry
weather, with the result that both persistent and open cones
may be seen on any jack pine or black spruce.
Short, twisted needles, contorted trunks, gnarly branches, and
the presence of messy-looking, persistent cones throughout
the crown detract from the aesthetic qualities of this species. One of my botanist heroes, Russell Peterson, described
the jack pine as “scrubby, scruffy, and terrier-like.” Still, the
accompanying photo of jack pine’s lovely male pollen cone
flowers (on the left, accompanied by a female seed cone on
the right) shows there is beauty, too. The magnificence of this
species is the role it plays in its environment. It is the most
northerly pine in North America – growing up to the boreal
forest and arctic barrens, where it provides extensive vital
cover and lichen food habitat for thousands upon thousands
of wintering caribou. 6
Black Spruce
Picea mariana
6
7
40
The sharply columnar spires of black spruce make this my
favorite tree. Though I had never met them as a very young
child, I nonetheless identified with their boreal muskeg and
subarctic habitats, and yearned to be there – sled dogs,
caribou, wolves, and all. Black spruce’s ovoid-shaped
cones are unusual, not only for their habit of persisting in
patient preparation for fire, but also for the stout, curved
stems (see photo) that attach the cones to the branches.
No doubt these rugged stems help prevent wind, snow,
and ice from prematurely detaching the cones. A number
of small mammals and birds eat the seeds, pollen cones,
new needles, and buds of black spruce, including red
squirrels, voles, chipmunks, spruce and ruffed grouse,
willow ptarmigan, hairy and downy woodpeckers, blackcapped and boreal chickadees, American robins, cedar
waxwings, wood thrush, evening grosbeaks, white-throated
sparrows, purple finches, pine grosbeaks, pine siskins, and
red- and white-winged crossbills. 7
41
An Old Enemy
White pine blister rust, once largely defeated,
may be mounting a comeback.
By Joe Rankin
Hollis Prior knew he was in trouble when the bull got between him and the fence. He
hadn’t paid much attention to the herd lying in the shade chewing their cud and shaking
off flies as he led his crew into the pasture. That is, until one of the men yelled, “Bull!”
The others hot-footed it for the fence. Prior climbed a tree, then yelled for one of the
crew to go fetch the farmer. For the next four hours he directed his Ribes eradication
crew from his perch as the three-year-old Holstein snorted and circled the trunk. “He
wouldn’t go away. He just kept bellering and pawing the ground. He wanted to get me,”
Prior, now 76, remembers. Livestock was just one of the hazards for the crews fighting
one of America’s largely unheralded wars: the War on White Pine Blister Rust, a major
disease of five-needle pines.
From the 1930s to the 1970s, Ribes eradication
crews scoured several New England states, pulling
and spraying the plants in an effort to prevent the
spread of white pine blister rust.
VT FORESTS, PARKS & RECREATION ARCHIVES
42
43
That war lasted for seven decades, cost tens of millions of tion from pines to Ribes plants can travel hundreds of miles
dollars, and was fought by thousands of foot soldiers like Prior, on the wind, the basidiospores that carry the infection from
who were charged with taking out one of the pathogen’s hosts Ribes to pines can only travel a couple of miles. Plus, the spores
– plants in the genus Ribes, which includes gooseberries and that infect pines are somewhat fragile and require cool, wet
currants. Like many wars against undesirable plants, it didn’t end conditions to thrive. And the rust can’t survive the winter on
in victory. The rust was never completely vanquished. And now, Ribes plants (though it is perennial on pines).
more than a century after it was discovered in North America, a
You’d think, with those caveats, that white pine blister rust
new mutated version of the rust is on the loose in New England would be an easy enemy to defeat. Not so.
and eastern Canada. Forest pathologists are worried that it could
The rust is native to Asia, so North American pines have no
pose a renewed threat to one of the Northeast’s iconic (and most resistance to it. Interestingly, it arrived here via Europe on eastern
valuable) trees. Especially as a new generation of homeowners white pine seedlings. The first European settlers were in awe of our
and berry producers are once again enthusiastically growing eastern white pines – very tall, straight grained, a plentiful source
currants.
of easily worked wood – and so they took seeds and seedlings
Barbara Schultz, the forest health program manager for back to Europe with them. Two hundred years later, Paul Bunyan
Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation, said and his ilk had chopped their way through much of eastern North
she’s very concerned about the recently detected strain of rust America’s mature pines. And in an attempt to re-establish the
that’s attacking newer cultivars of currants thought to be resis- eastern forest, America imported seedlings from Europe, where
tant, and what it may mean for the future as the region’s mature highly efficient tree nurseries had been propagating eastern white
pines are cut and younger ones, which are more vulnerable to pine for a long time. It was on some of those seedlings that white
blister rust, grow in.
“I’m also concerned that people are
developing a taste for local currants, but Clockwise from top left: A close-up view of the aecia of white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola) on a pine branch.
might not be aware there’s a downside. I A look at one past research project aimed at finding white pine blister rust resistance in seedlings. Eradication efforts
want to get the word out, so growers and lasted for decades and involved federal, state, and local agencies. What the eradication crews were after: currants.
consumers understand that the risk to Currant leaf showing signs of white pine blister rust. Inset: Basidiospores seen germinating in stomata, magnified 40x
white pines is going to increase wherever with fluorescence. The basidiospores are produced on Ribes plants in late summer or fall and then travel to pines.
currants are planted nearby,” she said.
An All-Out Assault
White pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola) has been called one of the most
destructive diseases of five-needle pines
in North America. It attacks whitebark,
sugar, and limber pines in the West, and
white pines here in the East.
Its life cycle is complex. Pines are
infected by spores – called basidiospores
– that are produced on Ribes plants in
late summer and fall. The spores ride the
winds to nearby pine trees and alight on
the needles, where they enter through the
stomates, the tree’s pores. Masses of slimy
spores grow under the bark, rupturing it.
The disease spreads along a branch to the
trunk, where it slowly strangles the tree.
A different type of spore – called an
aeciospore – is produced on infected
pines and then windblown and spread
back to Ribes plants, where the process
starts all over again.
But the rust faces several challenges:
While spores from one Ribes plant can
infect other Ribes plants, a pine cannot
transmit the rust to another pine. And
although the spores that spread the infec-
44
USDA FOREST SERVICE / FORESTRY IMAGES
H.J. LARSEN / FORESTRY IMAGES
MIKE SCHOMAKER / FORESTRY IMAGES. INSET: USDA FOREST SERVICE / FORESTRY IMAGES
COURTESY OF REX WAITE
pine blister rust hitched a ride to North America.
The rust is believed to have arrived in shipments of seedlings
from Germany in 1898 and it began spreading west and north.
A separate introduction via a nursery in British Columbia was
an unwelcome second punch. In 1912, the U.S. government
prohibited the importation of pine seedlings. Canada did so
two years later.
Early on, plant pathologists recognized that the rust’s twohost life cycle could be used against it. Laws were passed prohibiting the movement of currants and gooseberries west of the
Mississippi and authorizing destruction of domesticated currants.
States imposed bans on planting the shrubs. By then, of course,
the disease was already widespread, but eradicating it by wiping
its alternate host out was seen as doable. What was undertaken
was, as one scientist writing in the journal Phytopathology in 2003
described it, “ecological warfare on a biblical scale.”
During the Great Depression, the storied Civilian
Conservation Corps sent a veritable army of men into the
woods to seek out and destroy Ribes plants. States fielded their
own crews, with the help of federal money. The eradication
campaign far outlasted the Depression. In fact, some states
continued eradication work even after the federal government
stopped funding the effort in the 1960s.
Hollis Prior joined the Vermont program as a crew chief
in 1959 and worked at it until 1966. He has fond memories of
the job.
“I loved being outdoors. I loved being in the forest,” he said.
There was really no pressure or conditions placed on how he
45
Maine. All you could say was they were welcome to try to change
the law, but their plants, especially near significant pine stands,
were to be destroyed. Sometimes when you stopped at a farmhouse to explain yourself, if you found an older housewife she
would whisper that she certainly had no currants, but if I went to
the next house.... A few old scores were settled that way.”
Always in the back of a picker’s mind were bears. No one
wanted to stumble through the brush into a sow with cubs.
Waite said he only saw two in his many years as a crew chief.
“One time I was walking a trail when I looked up to see one
ambling toward me, totally unaware I was there. I had a clipboard, my walking stick, and a sheath knife, none of them at
that moment big enough to suit me. With each step I began to
clap the stick and clipboard together. The bear stopped, peered
my way, and slowly drifted sideways into the brush. By the time
I got to that point I couldn’t see or hear a thing, but I kept moving at a quick step.”
Currant Cultivation
Currants and gooseberries are present throughout temperate
regions of the northern hemisphere and along the mountain
ranges of Central and South America. Some 150 species have
been identified. They’ve served as food for humans for probably thousands of years and have been cultivated at least since
the Renaissance. American Indians used them. Early European
settlers imported them from the Old World.
According to histories of currant cultivation, red currants
have been cultivated since the 1400s for food and medicinal
COURTESY OF REX WAITE
46
USDA FOREST SERVICE / FORESTRY IMAGES
did the job, except a requirement to map the pine stands that
would be targeted, a prerequisite to getting money from the
towns to support the work. Some nights, Prior found his dreams
sprinkled with currant leaves.
Prior was a roving crew leader, and at any given time had
crews working all over Vermont. “They started us in the centralwestern part of the state. They handed me a snakebite kit and
said that I would need this.” He didn’t know why, but found out
that rattlesnakes (along with the occasional angry bull) were
an occupational hazard for Ribes hunters in parts of the Green
Mountain State. They learned to step up on a log and look
before stepping over, and to throw a rock down in a ravine and
listen for the rattles before venturing into it. Still, he saw only
two or three dozen rattlers in his years on the job.
The work was concentrated mainly around pine stands.
Crews, usually made up of six people, would walk through the
woods six feet apart, the crew chief following behind, said Prior.
In his early years, they used the infamous herbicide 2,4,5-T (one
of the ingredients in Agent Orange), but after questions began
to be raised about its health effects, they went back to pulling
plants by hand. Some days they might kill 50 or 60 plants, other
days thousands. Each team kept a running tally shouted out
along the line of march. Most victims were native Ribes species,
the “pasture gooseberry” being the most common. But cultivated gooseberries and currants were killed, as well. Sometimes,
said Prior, a homeowner would try to keep the Ribes crew
talking on one side of the house in an effort to keep them from
spotting lovingly tended currant bushes on the other side.
Rex Waite joined the war on Ribes in 1965 as a crew chief,
leading patrols into the woods of southern Maine, armed with
topographic maps, flyers outlining the state law giving them
access to private property, herbicide sprayers, plenty of fly dope,
and what he calls a “Ribe stick” – a walking stick that doubled as
a tool to poke through the brush looking for plants.
Gooseberries and currants were easy to spot early in the year,
he said, because they green up earlier than other plants. They
found plants growing around old cellar holes, where settlers had
planted them, and along stone walls, where bird-dropped seeds
found the perfect combination of soils and moisture to thrive.
“We were trained to check the plants for signs of the spores, as
well as looking for sick pines,” Waite said. “There we used the
classic expression ‘it looks as if a giant had grabbed the trunk
and squeezed it.’ Many times you would spot the dead tops of
the young pines or one dead branch where the disease worked
its way in.”
The Ribe-pickers, as they called themselves, got a chance to
see some great views and walk trails and old wagon roads that
few people trod. Some pickers were extra diligent about checking around old cellar holes for treasures they could take away.
Others noted trout streams and bird covers for future reference.
There were also down-sides to the job. In addition to the hordes
of biting bugs in the springtime, there were “cranky farm dogs”
to contend with and cranky landowners, as well.
“Some people were defiant about their plants,” said Waite,
“despite a Maine law making it illegal to have them in southern
Clockwise from top left: “Rust” seems an appropriate term for this shot of an infected
eastern white pine. A log detailing the painstaking work (and the record keeping) done
by eradication crews. A keepsake photo of Rex Waite’s days as a currant eradication
crew chief in southern Maine. “The little red arrow by the truck showed the crew which
way I’d gone,” he explains.
purposes, initially across the area from The Netherlands to the
Baltic countries. And it wasn’t long until plant breeders were
working to improve them. Ribes have since been bred for everything from berry size to juice content, cold hardiness to disease
resistance. A century-and-a-half ago, U.S. garden catalogs
offered multiple varieties and a good percentage of the yards
in the U.S. and Canada had at least one currant or gooseberry
bush. The fruit was used to make jams and jellies and wine.
Then came blister rust, followed by efforts to breed a rustresistant currant cultivar.
By the mid-1930s, a Canadian fruit breeder, A.W. Hunter, had
succeeded in incorporating a Siberian currant’s natural resistance into European black currants, according to a fascinating
paper on Ribes domestication in the journal Forest Pathology in
2010. But the resistant varieties – Consort, Crusader, Coronet –
didn’t have great fruit and were vulnerable to powdery
mildew, a major disease of Ribes plants. Other efforts in Europe
produced the currant variety Titania, which has its own drawbacks, including poor quality fruit and the fact that the plants
don’t lend themselves to machine picking. The search continues
even today for a truly great-tasting cultivar that is resistant to
rust and a good half-dozen other major diseases and pests.
Other scientists tackled the rust problem from
the other end, working to breed blister rust-resistant
pines. While much of the work has been done on
sugar pines and the western white pine, University
of Minnesota researchers are working on screening
eastern white pines for resistance and
trying to figure out how the resistance
mechanisms work.
The promise of rust-resistant Ribes
cultivars was undoubtedly a factor in the
eventual dissolution of the Ribes eradication effort, said Dave Struble, the Maine
state entomologist. But there were others.
After decades of war on Ribes plants, the
domesticated European black currants,
which were a prolific producer of rust
spores, had been largely wiped out. But
it was apparent that eradicating native
Ribes plants – 15 species are native to
the Northeast – was a losing proposition. They could reproduce from long
dormant seeds or portions of root left
in the ground. The region’s pine stock,
moreover, had grown. Mature pines are
much less susceptible to the disease and
so less of it was seen.
In addition, the eradication program
was increasingly seen as too expensive.
By some estimates, $150 million was
spent on eradication.
In 1966, the federal government
removed the national ban on planting
gooseberries and currants, and states in
47
the Northeast took separate approaches to the issue. Some maintained scaled-down eradication programs. Vermont’s secretary
of state determined in 1998 that any bans on growing Ribes had
lapsed, though just when is something of a mystery. New York
designated berry-growing zones where Ribes could be planted.
New Hampshire relaxed its ban beginning in 1999, allowing the
planting of resistant gooseberry and currant cultivars with a
permit. As of 2012, there were 144 towns in Massachusetts that
still prohibit Ribes plantings.
Despite perennial pressure from would-be berry growers,
however, Maine never let its guard down. The eradication program was abandoned in the 1980s, though the state continues to
educate private landowners on Ribes eradication techniques if
they ask. Maine forestry officials successfully fended off repeated attempts to alter Maine’s statewide ban on the plants.
“In the southern part of the state, we have a viable white
pine sawmill industry and people were very protective of that
resource. And it’s going to take a long time to replace it if we lose
it,” said Struble, Maine’s state entomologist.
Struble said one reason that forest pathologists in the state
remained concerned was because all the resistant cultivars
had the European black currant, Ribes nigrum, as an ancestor.
That species, when infected with the rust, produces prodigious
numbers of spores. Maine forestry officials worried about what
could happen if a resistant variety hybridized with native Ribes
and passed that trait along to its offspring.
Not So Rust Resistant
In the end, the concern seemed prescient, though the new threat
didn’t come from precisely that direction.
In 2011, Connecticut researchers announced that white pine
blister rust had been confirmed in a large planting of Titania
currant, a variety supposedly resistant to the disease.
Earlier this year, researchers announced that DNA testing
had confirmed the presence of rust on 17 of 19 Ribes cultivars
sampled in New Hampshire, including four varieties of black
currant that had the Cr gene that supposedly conferred resistance. Spores collected from New Hampshire Ribes plants and
pines were then used to infect resistant Ribes cultivars stored
in the Canadian Clonal Genebank, proving the existence of a
mutated race of the rust. The researchers also said that sampling
showed that the chances of finding rust-infected white pines
near rust-infected Ribes plants in New Hampshire was much
greater than near non-infected Ribes plants.
“Results from this study suggest that the breakdown of
Cr-based resistance in Ribes poses a threat to the white pine
resource and to cultivated Ribes production,” the researchers
said in a draft version of a study slated for publication in the
journal Plant Disease.
Isabel Munck, a plant pathologist with the U.S. Forest
Service’s State and Private Forestry Program and the lead author
on the study, said the confirmation of a mutated pathogen is
“definitely cause for concern.”
“It’s a huge deal if it’s ignored,” she added. “Most of the white
pine resource is older. Because of that, it’s likely to be harvested.
48
What’s going to replace it is younger trees, and those are going
to be more susceptible to the rust. We need to encourage disease
management. I think it can be managed, but the key is not to be
complacent.”
Research has shown that pines under nine feet tall are most
vulnerable. That’s because the spores are more likely to land on
them and find favorable cool, moist conditions to keep them viable until they enter the stomates. A young pine’s shorter branches
also mean a shorter journey from needles to trunk, where the disease can girdle and kill it. Still, trees of all ages can be infected.
It’s too early to say whether the new strain of rust is more
virulent than the original or just able to infect “rust-resistant”
Ribes varieties, said Munck. And given the fact that the mutated
strain was just discovered, it’s likely too early for plant breeders to
begin work on developing a new line of currants resistant to it.
Protecting the White Pine
The new rust pathogen poses a threat not just to the white
pine industry of the Northeast, but also to the small, until now
growing, gooseberry and currant business.
“I think it probably spells the end of it, unless they can come
up with new varieties that are resistant, which I’m sure they’re
working on. But then there’s probably going to be another one.
New disease strains come on, new pests come on,” said Peter
Hingston of Cherry Hill Farm, Vermont’s largest producer of
currants and gooseberries, with 18,000 bushes, mostly black
currants. The fruit is sold pick-your-own and to wineries and
ice cream and frozen yogurt makers.
Hingston wasn’t surprised at the news of the mutated rust
pathogen. “I thought I had seen it before,” about seven years ago,
on the supposedly resistant currant cultivar Titania he grows.
But no tests were done and an expert at Cornell assured him
Titania was resistant.
Then, last year, something attacked his currants. “Titania is
not a great variety, but it’s always performed reasonably well.
But last year it pretty much totally failed on us. The leaves fell
off and it just looked awful. We put the machine through and
picked everything we could. But it was pretty pathetic. The
fruit looked good, but there was very little of it. You can’t judge
something by one summer, and maybe it’s something else, but I
feel that that’s what that was,” said Hingston.
He sounds resigned, and often uses the past tense when he
talks about his currant and gooseberry crop. “I’ve enjoyed it. I
really enjoyed growing them. They’re a nice crop to grow. But
that’s not a very good reason for me to be growing them if there’s
definite proof that I’m going to do harm to the pine industry.
There’s plenty of alternatives in the fruit world for people to eat.”
Currant growers could probably combat the rust with a regimen of chemical sprays. But Hingston doesn’t want to engage in
what he calls a “high-tech chemical” battle with the rust. For one
thing, he’d have to find a new market. For his pick-your-own
customers, heavily sprayed berries are “an absolute no-no.”
While some experts, like Munck, say it’s unlikely that the
days of Ribes eradication programs will return, given the rising
popularity of growing them among homeowners and small
farmers, Hingston is not too sure. New Hampshire reinstituted
its ban on planting Cr-type Ribes after the rust was found. He’s
heard talk of a ban in New York. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a
total ban comes on again,” Hingston said.
Making a Difference
Maine, which still bans growing currants and gooseberries in
southern regions and black currant varieties statewide, is “in
a better place than some of our neighbors are, and I don’t take
any delight in that and no pride,” said Struble, Maine’s state
entomologist. Yet, since spores can travel hundreds of miles on
the wind, the existence of a mutated strain is “still worrisome”
for the state, he said.
Maine has some 700,000 acres of white pine and is the largest producer of eastern white pine lumber in the nation, sawing
200 million board feet a year. It has the highest-production
white pine sawmill in the U.S. and three of the top five in the
This map of just one town shows how crews worked parcel by parcel to eradicate
currants. And then returned, sometimes a decade later, to re-eradicate.
VT FORESTS, PARKS & RECREATION ARCHIVES
Northeast. Together they saw lumber worth, conservatively, $80
to $100 million.
Banning cultivation of gooseberries and currants is one
thing. Bringing back the expensive and labor-intensive blister
rust war of the early- and mid-twentieth century is another. But
experts like Struble and surviving Ribe pickers like Waite and
Prior say that the campaign worked.
“I’m sure of it,” said Prior. “There was a period of time that
you saw very little infection in the pine and it was very difficult in the area to find a Ribes plant.” Part of that might have
been the fact that Vermont’s weather was a little dryer then and
spores didn’t live to make it into the needles, he said, adding he
believes that it was a combination of the two factors.
Struble said that studies done in the 1980s show that Ribes
control did cut the incidence of the disease around southern
Maine white pine stands, and an analysis of the economics
showed that the program was worth the cost. The biggest payoff
was in areas where white pines were regenerating, and particularly where the regeneration was scattered and every young pine
counted, Struble said.
Maine has included Ribes plants in the list of
species monitored as part of its Forest Inventory
Analysis plots. The data are mined for all sorts
of information on tree and shrub species and
growth rates. It shows that the “frequency of
Ribes inside the blister rust management area
and outside it are markedly different,” Struble
said. “You can find Ribes everywhere, but when
you get to southern Maine the frequency is way
down,” showing the efficacy of the eradication
and the fact that the state is still benefitting
from the efforts of yesteryear.
These days the ranks of the old Ribe pickers, who kept an eye out for rattlesnakes, bears,
and bulls as they tramped rough ground, eyes
peeled for the distinctive leaves of currants
and gooseberries, are growing thin. Both Prior
and Waite say they’re among the last of their
crews.
Waite is left with fond memories of his days
as a crew chief on Ribes patrol. “I still have my
Ribe stick, carved and stamped with my name,
sections of shotgun barrel pinned at each
end to prevent splitting. I cannot imagine the
miles I walked with it. I still have some of my
reports, too, and a couple old signs and posters
from the day. It was a great job for someone
happier in the woods than in a cubicle somewhere.”
Joe Rankin writes on forestry and nature from his home in
central Maine.
This article was supported by Northern Woodlands’ Research and Reporting Fund, established by generous donors.
49
50
A golden Acroneuria stonefly emerges as a winged adult directly from its larval skin. Imitating
the life cycles of insects on the river is the mission of fly-fishers. Inset: Caught-and-released
fish like this brown trout rarely swallow artificial flies, resulting in greatly reduced mortality.
52
Story and photo by John Burk
IN THE EARLY MORNING OF OCTOBER 8, 2014, an autumn thunderstorm unleashed winds of more
than 100 miles per hour as it crossed the western slopes of Mount Tom, a familiar landmark in the
Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts. Within a matter of minutes, thousands of trees in a
mile-long corridor were uprooted or snapped. Fortunately, there were no human fatalities. The damage
was a testament to the power of microbursts, which as their name suggests, are small columns of
sinking air that produce strong straight-line winds on the ground. They were first identified by noted
meteorologist Theodore Fujita in the 1970s, after an analysis of storms that had caused fatal plane
crashes. As explained by Mount Washington Observatory staff meteorologist and observer Ryan Knapp,
“Thunderstorms have an upward and downward component that most often stays in balance, but
occasionally, a stronger upward movement causes an opposing reaction to evolve and ultimately send a
small shaft of air to the ground.”
The strongest winds, which are at the point where the downdraft reaches the ground, can exceed 100
miles per hour, comparable to a small tornado. The outflow then spreads away from the initial contact
point, like water being poured onto a floor, until friction causes the winds to dissipate within a matter of
seconds or minutes. Downbursts where the swath of damaging wind is less than 2.5 miles in diameter, as
was the case at Mount Tom, are classified as microbursts, while those that impact larger areas are called
macrobursts. When a group of storms combine to produce consistent straight-line winds along a front that’s
hundreds of miles wide, it’s called a derecho. Because of their rapid formation and short lifespan, all of these
phenomena are notoriously difficult to forecast.
Microbursts occur with greater frequency than tornadoes, which require more complex weather
conditions to form. The orientation of fallen trees is one of the primary clues meteorologists look at
when trying to determine the type of storm that struck. Tornado damage produces a swirling pattern
indicative of rotating winds, while downburst windfall is linear or radial. It is possible for a storm to
produce both straight-line and tornadic winds, which happened during the July 2006 storm that
damaged the Wendell State Forest in central Massachusetts.
Though microbursts in the Northeast are most likely to occur in interior regions, where mountains
and hills pinch the wind into a thinner slice of atmosphere, causing it to accelerate, they can strike
anywhere. Microburst storms in 2014 caused damage in areas ranging from Mount Mansfield, Vermont,
to the Maine and Massachusetts coasts. In July 1995, straight-line winds in New York’s Adirondack
Mountains damaged 125,000 acres of forest and brought back memories of the 1950 derecho that blew
down 800,000 acres. The strongest wind gust ever recorded in the U.S. was at the summit of Mount
Washington and was of the straight-line variety.
Because of its cool climate, the Northeast generally experiences fewer thunderstorms than hotter
regions of the country, and therefore has fewer microbursts. The storms in the eastern U.S. are considered
wet microbursts, meaning they are associated with rainstorms. In arid regions, especially west of the
Rocky Mountains, dry microbursts often occur without accompanying precipitation.
Though forest damage often appears catastrophic following microbursts, such disturbances are part
of the natural cycle. Some trees that are blown down can still be suitable for lumber, while the remainder
can often be salvaged for firewood or chips. And when left undisturbed, the fallen wood, snags, and early
successional regrowth will benefit a variety of wildlife that have suffered from the loss of such habitats
in recent decades.
A view from the Mount Tom ridgeline shortly after an October 2014 microburst shows clear evidence of the damaging straight-line winds.
53
By Barbara Mackay
54
ince childhood, I’ve been bringing home unusual rocks, vibrantly colored
maple leaves, intact snakeskins. At some un-remembered point, I decided
to take a more formal approach and purposefully gather items for study
and preservation; afterwards, I’d document and display the collections. While
this fit right in to my work as an elementary school teacher, I found collecting
and preserving to be an enjoyable hobby in its own right – something that anyone
who loves the outdoors could take part in.
If you’d like to try your hand at this, you might start by gathering specimens from a
A sugar maple display
single tree throughout the year. Fall is a great time to collect colorful tree leaves, and ripe
seeds are often available, too. Winter is a good time to sketch a silhouette of the tree, as
it’s most plainly visible then. You can also snip a twig with buds on it. In spring, you can
photograph the buds as they swell and collect the tree’s flowers when they pop. Summer
is a good time to take a bark sample or rubbing and to finish out the collection with some
green leaves. Putting these parts together creates a comprehensive picture of a tree – one
that’s impossible to see in a single encounter in nature.
Here are just a few techniques to turn a tree collection into a permanent display.
55
Leaves
ake leaves directly from a tree – they preserve better than leaves taken from the ground.
Place them in a plastic bag between two damp paper towels so that they don’t dry out
before you get them home. There are several ways to preserve deciduous leaves, and each
method has advantages and disadvantages.
One of the simplest is to dry them in the middle of a thick, folded newspaper or inside a
big telephone book, making sure the leaves don’t touch each other. Set about 15 pounds
on top (heavy books work well) to keep them flat as they dry. Move the leaves to a fresh newspaper each day, and again cover with weight; after three days, a five-pound load is sufficient.
Depending on the moisture and thickness of the leaves, they should dry in about a week. This
method preserves most of the color of an autumn leaf, but I find that it also causes them to
become brittle over time.
Sandwiching a leaf between sheets of clear contact paper preserves its true color,
creates an attractive ornament when hung in a bright window, and lasts for years, but you
lose the tactile aspect and the finer details of the leaf, such as its tiny hairs. Wipe off any
dew or moisture and place the leaf front-side down on the sticky side of a piece of contact
paper. Gently press on every part of the leaf’s surface to remove any air bubbles. Cover
with the second sheet and press again.
Immersing a fresh leaf in a glycerin solution makes it soft and supple and easy to examine
with a lens. Unfortunately, the original color darkens a bit. A glycerin solution can be made
by mixing one part glycerin (available at pharmacies) with two parts water. Leaves must
remain submerged for three or four days, with large or thick leaves taking a little longer.
After removing them, blot the excess solution from the leaves and set them aside to dry
over the next few days.
My preferred method of showcasing leaves is to press and dry them, then paint a decoupage
mixture on each side. The solution dries clear, preserving the color, but it does make the leaf
shiny and less supple. Decoupage is available in craft stores, but I make my own by mixing
three parts white school glue with one part water. Generously paint one side
and lay the leaf coated side up on wax paper. The next day, coat the other side,
laying it on a fresh piece of wax paper. On the third day, I hang the leaf by
its stem to allow it to fully air-dry. The excess decoupage can be snipped
or me, this is a winter activity. I study many buds before
away with scissors.
selecting a twig to take. Specifically, I look for a good
representation of terminal and lateral buds, evidence of
If you want to mount leaves, be sure to include two specimens so both the front
bud scales, leaf scars, and any special markings such as
and back can be shown. If the leaf is large – a compound ash leaf, for example –
lenticels. At home, I cut off and save the bottom inch so the
bend the stem in the middle and fold it up next to the leaflets.
pith can be examined with a lens.
Twigs and Buds
In spring, I return to photograph the swollen buds, and do so
again just as the buds open. I take a final round of photographs
as the nascent leaves unfurl.
I make a display card with the pith piece (the bottom inch
of the twig that I had cut off earlier) taped to it and a sketch
of the pith shape. To display the twig upright as part of your
display, tie it onto a poster with a string that reaches around
the twig, through holes to the back, where it is tied.
56
Flowers
use styrofoam meat trays to carry flowers as I collect them. The
non-slip surface supports their structure and helps keep small
parts from falling away. Some species require a special approach.
To collect birch seeds, for example, set out several trays for the
seeds to fall onto. To carry the tray home, place it into a paper bag
– flat-bottomed lunch bags are perfect.
In many cases, I add the tray directly to my display without pressing
or drying the flowers. If you prefer to glue a flower onto a card,
the flower should be pressed (see photo at right) and dried first.
Drying flowers is similar to drying leaves: I use a six- or sevenpound weight so that the flowers are flattened but not crushed.
Instead of trying to move the flowers directly, I lift the paper they
are lying on and transfer that to the fresh newspaper. Flowers
may take up to two weeks to dry. After drying, delicate flowers
can be stored in glassine envelopes, which are available at the
Post Office or philately supply sources.
Fruit
like to collect three similar fruit samples from a focus tree. I keep
one intact, showing the fruit as a whole. I open the second sample
but keep the seeds inside to show their arrangement. I remove a
single seed to display from the third sample. If a seed has interesting
internal features, I display one opened up, as well.
A display of fruit and seeds really pops when placed on a white paper
set in a shallow tray. I attach a photograph of the fruit when fresh, as
some seeds, especially berries, change color as they dry. If applicable,
a display card is included to explain how I use the fruit. For example, I
make jelly with highbush cranberries and flour with acorn meats.
White school glue works well to adhere pressed flowers to a card:
dilute it one to one with water and use an artist’s paintbrush to
dab it onto the paper. Place the flower on top of the glue, cover
with a sheet of wax paper, and press with a two- or three-pound
book. A couple of hours is usually enough to ensure that the
flower parts have dried into the glue.
To display cones, I collect both an unopened and a fully opened
one. Between the two seasons, I gather seeds from an opened cone
before it is devoured by critters and birds.
Bark
ark appearance varies considerably between different trees.
Collecting and displaying samples is a great way to illustrate this
diversity. To include the most detail possible, I preserve bark from
three areas: a new branch, an older branch, and the main bole.
There are three ways to add bark samples to your collection. One is to collect a piece of actual bark,
another is to make a rubbing, and the third is to take a photograph. I like to combine the three.
To collect bark, use a heavy hunting or utility knife to slice a representative section from a recently downed or dead
tree; if you’re cutting live trees for logs or firewood and want to collect some bark as well, the best time to do this is
in early July, when the bark is loosest. Each type of bark is a little different. With black cherry, for instance, the sample
might be four by eight inches to include a full “potato chip” curl. Try to include the inner bark on your selections.
Bark rubbings can be made with tagboard (on heavily textured barks) or paper (on smoother barks), and a
selection of crayons or oil pastels. Combining colors usually lets you produce a close match to the bark. Rub
steadily with large strokes. Pressing the paper very slightly into nooks and crannies will help them stand out
on the finished product.
Photographing bark can be as simple as a close-up snapshot. Taking pictures in both the sun and the shade can
sometimes reveal different characteristics of the bark.
A nature collection can be as formal or as casual as your time and interest dictates. For those more
serious about the endeavor, plant presses can be purchased or made with plywood and corrugated
cardboard. Mounting paper can be acquired from a biological supplier or its substitute picked up at a
local store. Display cases can be custom-built. Alternatively, you can keep things simple and just exhibit
everything on a small table. However you choose to build and organize your collection, I hope that
your connection to nature deepens as you gather, study, preserve, and share your outdoor treasures.
Barbara Mackay is a teacher and naturalist who lives in northern Vermont.
57
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59
The Diminishing
Woodpile
By Jonathan Stableford
all should be a placid time. From my porch I
can see ample firewood for this year and
next, but it must be natural when you reach a
certain age, with most of the adult responsibilities
behind you, to obsess about the trivial.
Like everyone who heats with wood, I keep a watchful eye on
my woodpile. Last winter was exceptional with its streak of bitter
nights throughout February and March, day after day without
a thaw. It turned me from watchful to nervous and raised the
curtain on a false drama of survival. Yes, a furnace will come on
in our house if the wood runs out. But running short is anathema
for me, with the deep woods just a few hundred yards away and
the knowledge that if I am willing to work hard enough a wood
stove should heat our house all winter.
There are many ways to go about getting wood in for the
winter, but mine all involve summer days made for laziness,
sunrises when the ground is already warm and the air filled with
the sounds of dog-day cicadas. On Sunday mornings in August,
the sounds of chainsaws ring in the hills like church bells.
Long ago, I learned the value of dry wood the hard way. We
had turned our house over to a renter who bought his wood so
late that all he could find was green, and twice that winter I had
to drive a few hundred miles to clean the chimney. Now we live
in the house year-round and it’s tighter, too. We have replaced
our temperamental wood furnace with an efficient stove, and
each summer I cut and split the wood we will burn two winters
down the line.
Even in a normal winter I obsess on my wood supply. Every
armful I bring into the house diminishes what remains outside,
and there is always a point when I begin to calculate how many
days it will take to run out. My goal, of course, is to start the fall
with more wood than I could possibly need, so when I’ve built
the last fire some time in May, there will be a little left to carry
over. Until that day arrives, however, there is always doubt. Our
porch runs into a hillside, and under the roof there is room for
seven stacks. I like to think of the near one as October’s wood. I
60
pilfer from it in September knowing it will last into November
because each stack is a little more robust than a month’s needs. I
like coming into the house and saying to my wife, “It’s Veteran’s
Day and we are still using the October wood.” And so it goes in
a normal year, the wood and my smugness in a kind of Doppler
effect, seven piles for nine months and a little left over for the
following year.
Last year, I must have had an intimation of what was coming
because I built our early fires not with wood from the October
stack but with odd pieces that had accumulated for years near
my splitter, wood too chunky or gnarly to stack. The first time
I touched the October pile there were snowflakes in the air, and
everything looked good into November. Then the sun seemed
to disappear for three months, and I heard a tremor in my voice
one day as I said, “I think we may have to dip into next year’s
wood.” I began seeing posts on the local listserv from people
looking for wood. One Sunday morning in February I was out
for a run on a remote and snowy road, and I saw two fuel trucks
making emergency deliveries.
Why obsess when there is no real danger of the house going
cold? It’s a matter of principle, but perhaps more than principle, it’s
the feeling of control that motivates me. Despite all the idealism
and the truckloads of wood loaded on hot summer days, despite
the afternoons at the splitter and the memory of the soreness in
my back, there is always the possibility of running short.
As it turned out, we didn’t. Spring hesitated at the doorstep,
then entered like a prodigal son. On some chilly mornings,
rather than start a fire, we put on sweaters and trusted the sun
to warm the house. Somewhere in my past I learned that if
you never use more than half of what you have – money, food,
toothpaste – you will never run out. But last winter issued a
warning, and from now on I’ll cut and split just a little more
firewood.
Jonathan Stableford was an English teacher for 43 years. He and his wife now live
year-round in South Strafford, Vermont.
CHRIS MAZZARELLA
61
FIELD work
By Patrick White
At Work Developing Carbon Offsets
with Finite Carbon
Carbon has gotten a bum rap lately. Once called the fundamental
building block of life, it’s now better known as the thing that’s
going to destroy the planet. As if this weren’t confusing enough,
at the same time carbon is being demonized it’s also an asset
– something of value that someone else will pay money for.
This is the world that Finite Carbon works in. As a “developer
of forest carbon offsets,” the company helps landowners get
paid for the carbon that’s stored in their trees by selling carbon
credits through the State of California’s cap-and-trade program.
To grossly simplify the backstory, California requires heavily
polluting companies (think large petroleum and electric companies) to offset their emissions by buying carbon permits from
the state or carbon offsets from landowners who have been
issued credits for verified projects. Typically, the offsets sell for a
little less than the state permits, so most companies buy as many
as they can – up to eight percent of a company’s total emissions
obligations can be met this way.
Unlike past carbon offset offerings that were voluntary
(helping companies to bolster their environmental cred), the
California Air Resources Board program is compliance-based,
which creates a more-or-less guaranteed demand for offSeth Clifford of Fountains Forestry works on the inventory for the Downeast Lakes Land
Trust’s Farm Cove project; developed by Finite Carbon in 2013, it was one of the first
forest carbon projects to be issued offset credits by the California Air Resources Board.
COURTESY OF FINITE CARBON
62
set credits – estimated to be about 200 million credits ($2
billion, at current prices) between now and 2020. While the
requirement applies only to companies doing business in
California, the program will issue offset credits to verified
forest projects anywhere in the continental U.S. For forestland
owners in the Northeast, this creates an opportunity to sell carbon
credits, though it’s an expensive and painstaking process.
That’s where Finite Carbon comes in. “We provide all of
the capital and all of the expertise,” explains Sean Carney, the
president of the Pennsylvania-based company and one of its
three co-founders. “It costs a couple hundred thousand dollars
for every project we do to get it off the ground, and it takes a lot
of effort to do this work. We provide all of that up front, so it’s a
turnkey solution for the landowner. At the end of the day, they
receive credits and we sell those credits for them. They get paid,
and we get a percentage of the credits that we create for them.”
While there are other types of offsets (like agricultural
methane gas destruction) accepted by the California program,
Finite Carbon works exclusively with forestland. Although the
California program is now just a little over two years old, Carney
says there is growing knowledge among larger landholders about
just how it works. The very early adopters of the carbon offset
marketplace tended to be land trusts, he notes. The New England
Forestry Foundation and the Downeast Lakes Land Trust were
two of the first groups that Finite Carbon worked with. “They
were the ones who really wanted to be at the forefront and show
that this could work,” says Carney. “When the Downeast Lakes
Land Trust held up that check and said, ‘Look, money came out of
these trees for practicing responsible forestry,’ that was a big day.”
Once the program was shown to work, other entities – including large timber investment and publicly traded forestry companies – followed suit. In the last two years, Finite Carbon has
worked on projects with The Forestland Group, Lyme Timber,
Molpus Woodlands, and Potlatch, among others. The Forestland
Group, for example, had two projects – one on 102,899 acres in
the Adirondacks and another on 141,062 acres in northern New
Hampshire – successfully registered with the California offset
program in 2014. Together, these projects were awarded roughly
1.3 million offset credits, which generated nearly $12 million
in revenue. The Passamaquoddy Tribe of Maine is currently
working with Finite Carbon to have a 99,000-acre parcel accepted
into the California program, and the expectation is that it, too,
will generate more than one million credits.
While the payoffs are big, so is the commitment required to
get the credits. One of the first steps is to be sure a particular
parcel of forestland is suitable for the program. For starters, it
needs to be big in order to make economic sense. Figure a bare
minimum of 2,500 acres, and usually much larger than that,
given all of the costs involved.
The forestland also really has to start with above-average
stocking levels because part of the initial credits issued will
essentially be a reward for past behavior. For example, if a forest
has 100 tons of carbon per acre and the comparison level is 80
tons per acre (based on U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and
Analysis datasets for similar forests), then the landowner will
receive credit for 20 tons per acre.
There are different ways that forestland owners can earn
offset credits in the California program: Avoided conversion
projects are those that keep land that otherwise might be cleared
or developed in forestland. Improved forest management projects,
which are the most common, are based on forest owners
managing in a way that will sequester more carbon than would
normally be the case. That’s what creates the offsets.
Once the land is deemed suitable, the real work begins,
starting with the mother of all inventory jobs. “When a traditional
forester looks at an inventory, they think merchantable product,”
says Carney. “We’re thinking about a merchantable product,
too. Except that our merchantable product is carbon.” A carbon
inventory is focused on biomass, he explains. “That’s everything
– the roots, the stumps, the tops, the branches, all of that gets
factored in. When we go out to do a measurement, we’re looking
to calculate total carbon, not just board feet or cords. So within
every plot being sampled we have to measure diameter on every
tree one inch DBH and up; we have to measure the merchantable
tree height and the total tree height on every tree. As you can
imagine, when you’re in an eastern hardwood forest, this is not
an easy task at all.” Even standing dead trees are accounted for.
Finite Carbon’s own foresters design the inventory and bid
the job out to local forestry firms who have been trained in
the nuances and precision of the work, which can take several
months. Field crews as large as 10 people are not uncommon, with
Finite Carbon’s foresters overseeing everything in conjunction
with the local firms. “Quality control is incredibly important.
Because after we finish all of our work, a verifier who has been
approved by the state of California comes out into the field and
does a random sample of all the plots that we measured and
goes through them tree by tree,” Carney explains. “Failing on
even one tree in a plot can cause you to fail the verification.”
While a typical inventory is capturing just a snapshot in
time, a carbon inventory needs to be a tool that can be used
to monitor that forest for a 100-year timeframe – the life of a
carbon project. Plots are mapped, marked with rebar, and will
be monitored regularly for the next century.
It’s not only the carbon identified in the inventory, but also
the management plan that will ultimately determine how many
offset credits California will issue to a project. “It becomes a
calculation of how much of your growth you’re harvesting.
The golden rule of a forest carbon project through the state of
California is that you don’t harvest more than annual growth,”
says forester Dylan Jenkins, the company’s vice president of
portfolio development. “You can absolutely actively manage
these forestlands. Almost all of our projects are actively
managed for a mix of forest products and forest carbon offsets.
So the revenue a forest landowner receives [for carbon] can be
additional. It’s not necessarily alternative revenue.”
Once a project has been completed and verified, the state of
California issues a certain number of compliance offsets (credits),
based on all of the parameters of the project. These credits
can then be sold directly to an individual buyer. Here again,
Finite Carbon handles the process for the landowner, which is
good because the big buyers are mostly the big oil companies –
Chevron, BP, Shell, and so on – and negotiating with
multinational corporations is beyond the expertise of most
landowners. “There are some pitfalls you want to avoid, and
having extensive transactional experience helps us look out for
our sellers and protect them,” says Carney.
At the moment, Finite Carbon has 18 projects under
development across the U.S. on over 1.3 million acres generating
over 20 million offsets through 2020. Given the built-in demand
coming out of California, Carney expects the number of carbon
offset projects to increase. But will the program ever make sense
for smaller landowners, say those with a 500-acre woodlot?
“I really hope it will. But since we started in 2009, the cost of
doing these projects has increased dramatically,” he explains.
“I would say the cost to verify a project has doubled, and the
cost to inventory a project has quadrupled. So things are going
in the wrong direction, and the minimum size requirements
just keep going up.” He hopes that, in the future, there may be
different sets of program requirements for different-sized projects,
allowing those with smaller parcels to get paid for their carbon.
Wagner Forest Management, Ltd., is pleased to underwrite Northern Woodlands’ series
on forest entrepreneurs. www.wagnerforest.com
63
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65
D I S C O V E R I E S
By Todd McLeish
Extra Genes = Killer Fungus
RICHARD HAMELIN
Poplar tree with a stem canker caused by Mycosphaerella
populorum.
66
LEIF RICHARDSON
A scientific investigation into the genetics
of 20 fungi that infect trees has turned
up an unusual explanation for why one
particular fungus is killing plantationgrown poplars. According to Richard
Hamelin, a forestry professor at the
University of British Columbia, the fungus
Mycosphaerella populorum has co-evolved
with wild poplars, and the wild trees and
fungus have come to a sort of truce. The
fungus causes round black spots on the
leaves in mid-summer, and the leaves fall
off a little earlier in the fall than usual,
but the trees in natural settings are otherwise unaffected. But in the hybrid poplars
typically grown in plantations, the fungus
infects the stems and woody tissue, which
often leads to the tree’s death. Hamelin
said that’s because the fungus that infects
the stems has “extra genes.”
When Hamelin sequenced the genome
of the fungus attacking the stems of plantation trees, he found genes that are not
in the variety that only affects the leaves.
And when he analyzed those extra genes,
he discovered that they were not inherited
from close relatives but from a completely
unrelated species.
“The way human genes are inherited,
your progeny get half their genes from
each parent, and it works the same way
with fungi,” Hamelin explained. “But the
surprising thing we found with this pathogen is that the extra genes in the steminfecting form were inherited through a
horizontal gene transfer in a way we don’t
yet understand.”
He speculates that as leaves fall to the
ground, microbes and other organisms
that live nearby could cause a gene transfer. “It’s probably rare, but it appears to
be more common than we ever thought,”
he said.
Hamelin said that as scientists sequence
the genomes of more and more species,
they are finding it to be common that
some organisms tested have more genes
than others of the same species. And
those extra genes are frequently acquired
by horizontal gene transfer from an unrelated species.
What those extra genes do is usually
unknown, but Hamelin believes that the
extra genes in the poplar fungus produce a toxin that affects the tree tissue.
“The genes we found code for secondary
metabolites, which are typically toxin producers,” he said. “We haven’t yet identified
what the toxin does, but that will be our
next step.”
The discovery of the extra genes in the
poplar fungus was somewhat surprising.
Hamelin and his research team set out to
compare the genomes of various fungi that
infect trees to determine what genetic factor turns a fungus into a tree-killer. “The
ability of a fungus to infect and kill plant
Bee foraging on turtlehead (Chelone glabra).
tissue is unusual,” he said. “Most fungi are
beneficial; the ability to kill living plants is
an exception. We’re trying to understand
the genetic makeup that kills trees.”
Mycosphaerella populorum lives exclusively on poplars, but its close relatives
use wheat and bananas as host plants,
while other relatives cause pine blight
and sudden oak death. “We’re still on the
lookout for what is causing the other fungi
to become tree killers,” he said, “and we’re
finding some pretty exciting stuff.”
Chemicals That Bees Need
We hear a great deal in the news about the
decline of managed honeybee colonies,
but little has been reported about the crisis facing native bumblebees. According to
Leif Richardson, a University of Vermont
postdoctoral researcher, more than a third
of North America’s 50 bumblebee species
are considered rare or endangered, and
some of these species have experienced
rapid declines in recent years.
Richardson focuses his research on
how naturally produced chemicals in nectar and pollen affect bumblebees. He said
that plants produce these chemicals in
their leaves and other tissues as a defense
against herbivory. And he hypothesized
that the chemicals may benefit pollinators
like bumblebees by providing an “antiparasite benefit.”
benefits and costs.”
Based on his results and those of followup studies, Richardson says he may come
up with recommendations for how farmers
and land managers can expose bees to
more of the beneficial chemicals and less
of the harmful ones. “It may be that some
bees are eating health food and others are
eating more junk food,” he said.
Technology Tells the Tale
For decades it was hypothesized that
blackpoll warblers, tiny black-and-white
songbirds that breed in boreal forests and
winter in South America, migrate south
entirely offshore in a nonstop flight. Only
recently have technological advancements
allowed that hypothesis to be tested and
confirmed.
“Blackpolls had been singled out as a
migratory champion because this feat is so
unbelievable,” said Bill DeLuca, an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. “There were a number of papers
that provided indirect evidence that it was
true, but it had been debated for years.”
Recent advances in geolocator technology enabled DeLuca and colleagues
from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies
and elsewhere to capture 40 blackpolls in
Vermont and Nova Scotia in 2013 and
attach dime-sized devices to the birds’
backs to identify the routes they take during migration. When the birds returned
north the next year, five of them were
recaptured and were found to have flown
offshore for about 1,500 miles to Puerto
Rico, Cuba, and the Greater Antilles before
continuing on to South America.
“Some of them flew really far offshore,
so they’re making a full-on commitment,”
DeLuca said. “Once they’re out there,
they’re either going to make it or they’re
not. They can’t just jump back to the coast
if they’re in trouble.”
Because a water landing would be fatal
to the birds, the logical question is why
do they take the risk of flying over water
rather than traveling via a land route like
most songbirds? No one really knows, but
DeLuca has a guess.
“Migration, for most birds, is the riskiest time of the year, when most of the
K.P. MCFARLAND
Parasites have been implicated as
contributing to some bee declines, so
Richardson inoculated newly emerged
worker bees with a common parasite,
Crithidia bombi, that lives in the gut of
bumblebees, making the bees sick. He
then fed half of the bees sugar-water laced
with one of eight naturally occurring
chemicals found in plant nectar, while the
other half was fed a control diet. A week
later, he counted the number of parasite
cells in the bees and found that four of the
chemicals – thymol from basswood tree
nectar, catalpol from turtlehead flowers,
and nicotine and anabasine from plants
in the tobacco family – had a strong negative effect on the parasite. The other four
chemicals also had a negative effect on
the parasites, but not to the point of being
statistically significant.
“We demonstrated pretty conclusively
that bees can benefit from an enhanced
diet of these nectar and pollen chemicals,” said Richardson. “We found that the
chemicals had no effect on the survival of
the bees, and the bees getting the chemicals had a lower parasite load.”
But his results made him wonder
whether there were any longer-term consequences of consuming the chemicals,
especially whether there were negative
implications for bee reproduction. So
he did another experiment focusing on
anabasine, the chemical that had the
strongest effect in the first experiment.
This time he found that the chemical had
no effect on the lifespan of the bees, but
the bees did start laying eggs two days
later than those not fed the chemical.
“Is a two-day delay a problem?”
Richardson wondered. “We’re unsure. It
may depend on other factors, like available
pollination resources and environmental
conditions.”
“But these bumblebees are probably
exposed to much higher concentrations
and diversities of plant chemicals than
those tested in our lab experiment,” he
added. “So we probably underestimated
the effects of the chemicals. We fed them
only one chemical, but in the life of a
bumblebee colony, they’re consuming a
lot of pollen and nectar and eating a
number of plant chemicals from different sources, so there could be even more
A blackpoll fitted with its “backpack” and ready for
migration.
annual mortality occurs,” he said. “So
to compensate, they may just fly over
the ocean to get the journey over as
quickly as possible. Migrating over land
has its own problems: hawks, housecats,
development at their stopover sites. Both
routes are risky.”
Besides, DeLuca said, blackpolls are
physically able to complete the two- or
three-day flight. The birds double their
weight in fat before departing and are
highly efficient fliers. Once they are navigating their way south, they reduce the
size of some of the organs they are not
using, like their digestive systems. And
there is evidence that other physiological
adaptations occur to help the birds maximize their oxygen intake; this enables
them to fly at higher altitudes than other
songbirds.
Now that the migratory pathway of
blackpolls from the Northeast is known,
DeLuca wants to use the same technology
to document the route taken by blackpolls
that breed in Alaska and western Canada.
Based on records of blackpoll sightings
during the migration season, it is believed
that those birds fly across the continent
and join their eastern counterparts in
migrating south over the Atlantic. DeLuca
intends to find out if that is true or if they
use a different migratory strategy.
67
68
69
T H E
O V E R S T O R Y
Story by Virginia Barlow
Illustrations by Adelaide Tyrol
Mountain ash
Sorbus americana
Our front yard is home to the most godawful-looking mountain ash on earth. It’s been
pecked by sapsuckers for most of the past 20 years and, aside from a bustle of green
shoots low on the trunk, is either dead or half-dead. Well-intentioned pruning has
only made the situation worse. Why is it still standing? Every time I’m about to reach
for the chainsaw, it comes up with some redeeming feature: bees love the flowers, birds
eat the fruits, the leaves are pretty, the birdfeeders it holds are close to the house. Plus,
a visitor just last week reminded me of the widely held belief that a rowan tree in the
yard brings good luck.
Mountain ashes thrive in the boreal forest’s rocky slopes at high elevations or
bordering cold wetlands. Among goldthread, partridge berry, starflower, and bunchberry
– wherever the song of the white throated sparrow is heard – that’s where mountain
ash is at its best. They’re compact trees, usually 20 feet high or so, and can be lovely,
especially in autumn when yellow leaves complement the bright orange-red of many
clusters of berries. That’s why mountain ash is known as the holly of the north woods.
The pinnately compound leaves have 13 to 17 leaflets, and it is this superficial
similarity to the ashes that led to its name. True ashes are in the olive family and
have opposite compound leaves. The mountain ash is in the rose family; it has alternate leaves with lots more leaflets, and the leaflets have sharply toothed margins.
Technically, the fruits are pomes, not berries, despite the fact that at about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, they look more like berries than apples to most of us.
There are well over a hundred species in the genus Sorbus. They grow worldwide in
temperate regions and are most diverse in the mountains of western China. In North
America, they are restricted to cooler regions: eastern Canada and the northeastern
states, plus high in the Appalachians south to Georgia. In yards and gardens, especially
in warmer climes, sapsuckers are not their only problem. This little tree is often shortlived due to fire blight, mildew, and boring insects. They don’t grow well in urban
areas if the air is polluted.
The name rowan was originally given to a
European species but now is used for many other
Sorbuses. Nobody knows exactly how many Sorbus
species exist because its members hybridize freely
and sometimes reproduce without fertilization.
This occurs in other plants, too, and is called
apomixis. It’s when viable seeds are produced
without pollen. Unlike most other plants,
Sorbus species often cross with species in other
genera. The shipova, a Pyrus (pear)-Sorbus cross, for
instance, has been traced back to the early 1600s.
70
Though the wood is light, soft, weak, and
of limited commercial value, it is strong
enough to be used for walking sticks, where
the good luck it brings is believed to outweigh its frailty. How this little tree gained a reputation for
warding off evil is lost in the mist of time, but it spans many
cultures as well as many eras. Perhaps it began when someone saw
that the fruits are marked at the base with a pentagram, believed
to be a sign of protection. In olden days in England, it was thought
that bewitched horses could only be controlled with a whip made
of rowan, and pieces of the wood were tacked over doors – to the
stable, the cattle byre, to the head of the bed, and so forth – as charms
to ward off evil spirits. In Finland, rowans were planted in the yard in the belief
that lightning never strikes near the tree.
It’s not just humans that seem to revere mountain ash. In summer, our tree is often
full of wasps, butterflies, beetles, flies, ants, and opportunistic hummingbirds, all
seeking out the newest, most productive sapsucker wells. When the sapsuckers return
in May before most flowers have opened, hummingbirds follow them to filch sap and
to pick off any small insects that are doing the same thing. The creamy white flowers
open in May, after the leaves are out, and are borne in beautiful dense clusters about
three inches across. Bees of all kinds gather both nectar and pollen.
Deer, moose, and snowshoe hare browse the leaves, twigs, and bark.
Though the fruits aren’t a first choice for many birds, they
stay on the tree all winter and by spring have been eaten by
grouse, robins, brown thrashers, wild turkeys, catbirds, waxwings,
grosbeaks, and bluebirds. Squirrels, other small rodents, and bears
also eat the fruits.
People have used the fruits over the years, as well, although
they are very acidic when raw. They contain anti-oxidants, iron,
and vitamin C, and have been used as a gargle for sore throats and
to treat malaria and scurvy. The fruits are said to make a reasonably
good wine, though waiting to harvest the pomes till after a hard frost
reduces the sourness. The jelly that can be made from them is best
used with meat.
Keeping evil spirits at bay may still be the best human use for
mountain ash. In addition to having to worry about bad luck and
lightning strikes if we cut down our ugly specimen, the sapsuckers will
no doubt redirect their efforts to the nice apple tree that’s nearby.
71
72
TRICKS of the trade
Story and Photos by Brett R. McLeod
Chainsaw Carving 101
Teaching at a forestry school, I’ve noticed there are certain
hobbies that students naturally gravitate towards. I’m not talking about Netflix marathons or dorm room design parties; I’m
talking axe throwing and chainsaw carving. While axe throwing
might be thought of as a big game of darts, chainsaw carving is
akin to painting with a 10-pound motorized paintbrush.
Like most art, chainsaw carving is far more difficult than
it appears. Invariably, people want to make their first carving
a bear or some other fairly complicated woodland creature.
I would recommend beginning by carving a simple chair, a
project that introduces and helps to develop the same skills
– such as bore-cutting, ripping, and judging the depth of cuts
– that are needed for more complicated carving. Better yet, this
project can be done without the use of specialized carving bars
and micro-pitch chain.
Begin by selecting a three-foot log section, at least 12 inches
in diameter. Make sure the ends are cut squarely and stand the
log on end.
The first cuts will form the legs and will allow you to practice
angled cuts and notching to the proper depth. In this case, the
goal is to make a “V” that is approximately four inches deep. 1
Keeping the same angle, cut parallel to your V-notch to form
the legs. Make sure the legs are at least a couple inches thick for
stability, and then cut from the outside of the log in, meeting the
angled leg cut. 2 The outside legs of the chair can be dressed up
with a simple notch cut.
With the legs complete, you can begin cutting the chair back.
As you make this bore-cut, it is essential that you use the lower
corner of the chainsaw bar, which is the “attack” portion of the
bar. Never try to bore-cut with the top corner of the bar – the
saw will kick back!
Bore entirely through the log, and continue cutting at a slight
angle to form a curved seat back. 3 The process of cutting with
the grain is known as ripping. Before making the final cut, check
to make sure your bore-cut is at an even height on both sides of
the stump. If not, adjust as necessary before making the final cut
from at the front of the log. 4
If you’ve matched up your cuts, the chair will break away
from the stump with the final seat cut – voilà, you’ve got a
chair! 5 This same procedure can be used to make larger
seats, too. 6 No matter the complexity of the project, the keys
to successful chainsaw carving are a sharp chain and the ability
to envision where each cut will intersect the next.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Brett R. McLeod is an associate professor of Forestry & Natural Resources at Paul Smith’s
College and the author of The Woodland Homestead: How to Make Your Land More
Productive and Live More Self-Sufficiently in the Woods (Storey Publishing, 2015).
73
Ad Index
A. Johnson Company................................. 35
Adelaide Tyrol Art Shows ........................... 51
Allard Lumber Company ............................ 65
Bay State Forestry Services ....................... 64
Berry, Dunn, McNeil, & Parker ................... 41
Brattleboro Museum..................................... 8
Britton Lumber Co., Inc.............................. 72
Catskill Forest Association, Inc. ................. 10
Cersosimo Lumber Co., Inc. ...................... 65
Cersosimo Lumber Mill .............................. 69
Champlain Hardwoods............................... 59
Champlain Valley Equipment ..................... 35
Classifieds .................................................. 34
Colligan Law ............................................... 58
Columbia Forest Products ......................... 59
Consulting Foresters .................................. 26
Econoburn .................................... back cover
F&W Forestry .............................................. 50
Forecon ...................................................... 50
Fountains Forestry...................................... 74
Fountains Real Estate ................................ 41
Gagnon Lumber Inc. .................................. 41
Garland Mill Timberframes ......................... 72
Greenleaf Forestry ...................................... 24
Hollow Hill Forestry, LLC ............................ 74
Hull Forest Products................................... 68
Itasca Greenhouse ..................................... 64
Land & Mowing Solutions, LLC ................. 68
LandVest Realty ................ inside back cover
LandVest, Inc. ............................................. 72
Lashway Lumber ........................................ 12
Lyme Timber............................................... 58
Maine Forest Service.................................. 35
McNeil Generating...................................... 58
Meadowsend .............................................. 69
N.E.W.T.: Northeast Woodland Training ..... 59
NE Forestry Consultants, Inc. .................... 12
NE Wood Pellet .......................................... 50
NEFF........................................................... 24
Northern Forest Land for Sale ................... 64
Northland Forest Products ........................ 25
Oesco, Inc. ................................................. 12
Scotland Hardwoods.................................. 10
Scythe Supply, Inc. .................................... 74
Sustainable Forestry Initiative .................... 64
SWOAM ...................................................... 68
Tarm USA, Inc. ........................................... 69
The Taylor-Palmer Agency, Inc. .................. 10
Thompson School, UNH ............................ 25
Timberhomes, LLC ..................................... 65
Vermont Agricultural Credit Corporation .... 10
Vermont Woodlands Association ............... 65
VWACCF..................................................... 78
Walden Hill Company ................................. 24
Wells River Savings Bank........................... 12
Winterwood Timber Frames ....................... 74
Woodwise Land, Inc. .................................. 72
Yankee Farm Credit .................................... 50
Find all of our advertisers easily online at:
northernwoodlands.org/issues/advertising/
advertisers
74
up COUNTRY
By Robert Kimber
Country Mice, City Mice
Rita and I are country mice, through and through. So strong is
our attachment to our old farmhouse and to this little upland
valley in western Maine that Rita once said, “I think this place
has gotten into my DNA.”
“I’m sure it has,” I said, in full agreement with her metaphor,
if dubious of its biological accuracy.
But, that said, we are not above making occasional visits to
the city. If we’re feeling bold and feisty enough, we’ll even take
on New York, though not too often. Boston is more our speed.
For one thing, it’s a lot closer, just three-and-a-half or four hours
by car. For another, it’s the unofficial capital of New England,
maybe not politically but spiritually. Don’t people in the northernmost reaches of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire all
root for the Red Sox? Bostonians may be city people, but they’re
still New Englanders. We speak just slightly different dialects of
the same language. And despite the crop of skyscrapers Boston
has sprouted over the last several decades, it still feels more
like a big village than any other megalopolis I know. It’s got the
Charles River and Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace
of parks winding through it. It has lots of ponds. It has cobblestones on Beacon Hill and streets that meander every which
way. It also has old friends of ours who are roughly our age,
which makes them old friends indeed.
In Aesop’s fable of the country mouse and the city mouse
– and in the many adaptations of it ever since – the country
mouse goes to the city, drawn by the promise of fancy foods
his city cousin claims are far tastier than any rural fare. Though
we grant there’s some good eating to be had in cities, venison
tenderloin from the Maine woods and fresh kale from Rita’s
garden can hold their own against anything an urban five-star
restaurant can cook up; so what we’re looking for on our city
visits is a different kind of nourishment, a connection with the
energy and imagination and productivity that critical masses of
people engaged in shared pursuits can generate, whether in the
arts, sciences, or whatever.
A case in point: On our last Boston visit, we stayed with a
young couple who live in Jamaica Plain just a block away from
Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. After we’d arrived on a Friday
afternoon, we walked over there and wandered around until dark
among all the exotic trees on the arboretum’s 281 acres. Despite
the distant origins of those trees, the genera of many of them
are familiar to any visitor from our northern forest: Acer, Tsuga,
Pinus, Quercus. I’ve rarely, if ever, met a tree I didn’t like, so I take
particular pleasure in making the acquaintance of Japanese or
Chinese or Korean cousins to our own maples, hemlocks, pines,
and oaks, seeing how much alike yet also how different they are.
The creation of this extraordinary living collection of some
3,800 primarily woody plants from temperate regions around
the world has been the work of many hands over many decades,
but considerable credit for shaping the arboretum as a scientific
institution as well as a park for the education and enjoyment of
the public must go to its first director, Charles Sprague Sargent.
Collaborating with Frederick Law Olmsted, Sargent chose to organize the plantings by family and genus. “It is hoped,” he said, “that
such an arrangement, while avoiding the stiff and formal lines of
the conventional botanic garden, will facilitate the comprehensive
study of the collections, both in their scientific and picturesque
aspects.” Over the next 54 years of his directorship, he had the
satisfaction of seeing those hopes realized many times over.
A second case in point: The next morning we took a bus
downtown to the Museum of Fine Art, where Rita and I had
not been since long before the new Art of the Americas wing
opened in 2010. Once there, we headed straight for an exhibit
of photos by the great African American photographer Gordon
Parks. This collection records Parks’ return to his home town of
Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1950 to find and photograph 11 classmates
with whom he had graduated from the segregated Plaza School
in 1923. If Karen Haas, a curator at the MFA, had not happened
across a single photo by Parks showing a young couple outside
a movie theater, she might not have been moved to contact the
Gordon Parks Foundation, which had the other 42 photos from
the series that Parks had shot on that assignment for Life magazine. Never published in Life or shown anywhere else in Parks’
lifetime, this collection is but one of the thousands of treasures
the staff of the MFA has found and made available to us all. Get
enough talented, public-spirited city mice together and these are
the kinds of wonders they can work.
I’m happy to report, too, that the restaurant in the spacious
atrium of the new wing serves up a superb lunch, and unlike the
mouse cousins in Aesop’s fable, we could enjoy our meal in peace
without being chased away from our food by a pair of dogs.
Robert Kimber has written often for outdoor and environmental magazines. He lives
in Temple, Maine.
75
wood LIT
Apples of Uncommon Character:
123 Heirlooms, Modern Classics,
and Little-Known Wonders
By Rowan Jacobsen
Bloomsbury, New York, 2014
Apples are so common that it is easy to mistake
them for commonplace. In Apples of Uncommon
Character: 123 Heirlooms, Modern Classics, and
Little-Known Wonders, Rowan Jacobsen entertainingly proves just the opposite. For more than
two centuries, thousands of varieties of apples
have sustained homesteads across the continent,
only to dwindle over time to a handful of varieties
that were easy to store, easy to transport, and
easy on the eyes. Fortunately, we are in the midst
of an apple renaissance and, Jacobsen tells us,
“we have more varieties of extraordinary apples
within reach…than any people who have come
before us.”
For Jacobsen, a well-established writer with
several books and two James Beard Awards for
excellence in food writing behind him, the moment
of apple enlightenment came a decade ago when
he and his wife bought an 1840s farmhouse in
Calais, Vermont, with an old orchard beside it.
Having previously lost interest in the apples generally available in supermarkets, he was intrigued by
the unusual trees he now owned:
“But the apples hanging in these trees didn’t
look like any I’d ever seen in a store. In one tree,
they were large, round, and striped red and yellow
like little beach balls. In another, they were brown
and fuzzy, more like miniature Asian pears than
what I thought an apple was supposed to be. I
tried one. It was strangely dry, yet very sweet,
crunchy, and nutty….”
Unlike most fruit trees, apples can flourish
even when uncared for, so many older trees are
still around and productive. That’s not the only
76
unusual attribute. “The apple has one of the
largest genomes of any food plant, and it’s full of
recessive genes and genetic switches. In every
apple seed, the genetic deck is reshuffled, new
combinations of genes interact in mysterious
ways.…What this means is that apples do not
come true from seed,” writes Jacobsen. The vast
majority of seeds lead to the likes of crab apple
trees. When you find a winner, the only way to
reproduce the same apple is by grafting.
In our time, we have both universities with
apple breeding programs that rely on DNA testing
to determine which seedlings are the most promising progenitors and “apple sleuths” who track
down rare or ancient apple varieties. Jacobsen
appreciates the work of both.
At the heart of this beautiful book, though, are
the apples themselves. He includes useful information about each variety, including its aliases,
origin, appearance, flavor, texture, season, and
uses. And there are great stories that bring out the
personality of each variety. “Like Forrest Gump,
the Newtown Pippin has managed to intersect
with an improbable number of historic personages and places over the course of its career,
and has shown a knack for effortless success
at whatever it was called upon to do . . ..” I have
been re-reading the info and stories about the
apples I am eating. The book has a slight bias in
favor of apples from the Northeast, which is fine
with me.
Even before you reach Jacobsen’s conclusion
– “There has never been a better moment to be an
apple geek in America” – it is obvious. Interested
in planting your own orchard? He lists resources
for buying hundreds of different varieties. The
“portraits” of the apples will help you decide which
trees you may want to get. Want just the apple and
not the tree? He lists mail-order options for apples
you may not find near home. Looking for hard
cider? An apple festival? He lists those, too.
In the end, of course, the best thing about
apples is that you get to eat them. Besides letting
you know which ones are best for eating fresh,
Jacobsen includes over 20 creative and tasty
recipes. Plus, he doesn’t believe in peeling, so
there’s a big draw.
Earlier I called this a beautiful book, and that
deserves emphasis. Jacobsen’s writing is bright
and lively, and Clare Barboza’s striking photographs complement it perfectly. Every turn of the
page presents yet another interesting way to look
at an apple.
Tom McKone
Mushroom Guides for
Field and Forest
Skyhorse Publishing, New York
North American fields and forests harbor mycological treasures, but the good edibles constitute
a tiny fraction of the myriad mushroom species. A
good field guide is a reliable roadmap to the wild
world of mushrooms, helping the forager confidently distinguish the deadly from the delicious.
The most well researched, thorough, timetested guides are Gary Lincoff’s The National
Audubon Society Field Guide to North American
Mushrooms [Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,
1981] and David Aurora’s Mushrooms Demystified
[Ten Speed Press, 1986]. Lincoff’s The Complete
Mushroom Hunter [Quarry Books, 2010] is more
accessible and equally scientifically rigorous, with
sidebars that describe the sociocultural dimensions of mushrooming and in-depth chapters
on poisonous, medicinal, and psychotherapeutic
mushrooms.
Adding to these standards are several recent
offerings from Skyhorse Publishing designed to
help mycophiles find and identify the safest and
most delectable species. Edible Mushrooms, by
Last Day on Earth
If it’s the title of a movie you expect
everything to become important—a kiss,
a shrug, a glass of wine, a walk with the dog.
But if the day is real, life is only
as significant as yesterday—the kiss
hurried, the shrug forgotten, and now,
Barbro Forsberg and Stefan Lindberg, is a standout field guide for the forager interested in learning to find and safely enjoy the culinary gems of
the mushroom world. All of the major groups of
charismatic, gourmet species are profiled through
clear writing and vivid photography that facilitates
confident mushroom identification. One gets the
sense that the authors, from the mycophilic
country of Sweden, have been foraging since
childhood. Forsberg and Lindberg’s passion for
mushroom hunting comes across in the colorful
stories and sensory descriptions that introduce
each species – the cauliflower mushroom “smells
of pine and turpentine,” and the aroma of fresh
chanterelles is “like a full-bodied aftershave.”
Lindberg’s wide-angle photographs of the wet
woods are so vivid you can almost smell the
mycelium, providing a visceral feel for the proper
habitat. Edible Mushrooms was so engaging that,
after reading it, I promptly grabbed a basket and
knife and headed to the nearest woodland in
pursuit of morels.
Mushrooming Without Fear and Mushrooming
With Confidence, both by Alexander Schwab,
provide beginning and intermediate foragers with
a set of ground rules for safe and rewarding
mushroom hunting. The rules, including “Never,
never take a mushroom with gills!” and “Never,
never eat a wild mushroom raw” may be overbroad but are useful basic guidelines. These
books feature checklists and photographs to
ensure proper identification, as well as descriptions of notable look-alikes of the edible species.
Both of Schwab’s guides have close-up photographs that distinguish gills, ridges, tubes (pores),
and spines (teeth). By sticking to the species with
ridges, pores, teeth, or the “mavericks” such as
the giant puffball or black trumpet, beginning foragers can safely hunt for the table while avoiding
the possibility of deadly look-alikes.
The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms, by Pelle
Holmberg and Hans Marklund, emphasizes safety
and clarity while providing tips on picking, cleaning, preparing, and preserving each species. This
book is conveniently sized for use in the field
and has a classification system that ranks edible
mushrooms by their risk of confusion with other
edible, inedible, mildly poisonous, and dangerously poisonous species. This book contains
plenty of useful photographs, featuring specimens
of each species at different maturity levels as well
as cross-sectional images. For more experienced
mushroom hunters looking to branch out, this
book provides detailed direction on identifying
gilled mushrooms, including the Russula (brittlegill) and Lactarius (milk-cap) species – favorites
in eastern European nations that are often overlooked by North American hunters.
Readers should note that these four guides
from Skyhorse Publishing are written by European
authors. Nearly all of the species they cover fruit
in North American fields and forests, as well, but
foragers from this continent should be aware
of some important distinctions. The Leccinum
(scaber stalk bolete) species profiled in all four
of these Skyhorse field guides, though widely
consumed as a staple throughout Europe, have
been reported to cause gastrointestinal distress
among North American foragers. Only Forsberg
and Lindberg’s Edible Mushrooms explicitly notes
the risks this genus – notoriously difficult to identify at the species level – may pose to mushroom
hunters in North America.
There is no substitute for a foray with an
expert, and books should not be used as the sole
basis for identifying a gourmet mushroom. Still, a
good field guide is indispensable. Throw one of
these books in your basket, put on your forager’s
eyes, and head to the nearest forest today – tasty
treasures await the patient and prudent hunter.
Ari Rockland-Miller
on the path by the river, you don’t notice
the sky darkening beyond the pines because
you’re imagining what you’ll say at dinner,
swirling the wine in your glass.
You don’t notice the birds growing silent
or the cold towers of clouds moving in,
because you’re explaining how lovely
and cool it was in the woods. And the dog
had stopped limping!—she seemed
her old self again, sniffing the air and alert,
the way dogs are to whatever we can’t see.
And I was happy, you hear yourself saying,
because it felt as if I’d been allowed
to choose my last day on earth,
and this was the one I chose.
LAWRENCE RAAB, from Mistaking Each Other
for Ghosts (Tupelo Press, 2015)
Lost in the Woods:
A Photographic Fantasy
By Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick
Carl R. Sams II Photography, 2004
Lost in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy is an
award-winning children’s picture book that is
sure to delight young and old. The photographs
will enthrall young children, while adults hoping
to nurture young nature enthusiasts will consider
this book a lucky find.
Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick, internationally
recognized nature photographers, skillfully tell the
story of a newborn fawn left alone by his mother
at the “edge of the meadow where the trees start
the forest.” Various creatures of the forest, each
stunningly photographed, assume the fawn is lost
and offer their advice. The fawn assures them
he is not lost, but that, “Mama said to wait, to
wait right here.” He stretches his legs as Mama
77
advised, “to make them strong,” but his courage
begins to falter as Mama doesn’t return.
When the sounds of voices come into the forest, the fawn nestles into the tall grass, remembering his mother’s warning to “lie still, oooh so
very still.” A well-camouflaged tree frog congratulates the fawn for hiding so well and eventually a
saw-whet owl warns of someone approaching.
The fawn is relieved to discover that it is his
mother who has returned; as she licks him in
greeting she explains her absence was because
he is “a newborn, born without a scent...I have to
leave so trouble’s nose cannot find you.” As the
fawn spends his days getting stronger, he meets
a chickadee getting ready to fledge and a young
raccoon who is practicing tree climbing. Finally,
readers see the fawn bound across the meadow
when Mother Doe decides he is ready to accompany her into the forest.
Although all the animal photographs are incredible, the photos of the fawn are especially heart
warming. Children as young as three years old will
enjoy this adventure as it gives them a peek into
the lives of forest animals.
Lorraine Ravis
78
Bear-ly There
By Rebekah Raye
Tilbury House, Thomaston, Maine, 2009
Bear-ly There is a Moonbeam Award-winning
book by Maine children’s author and illustrator
Rebekah Raye. In this book, Raye deftly blends
rich, informative text on black bears with vibrant,
detailed illustrations.
Bear-ly There begins in the spring as the sun is
“melting patches of crusty snow on the hillside,”
and a bear is coming out of hibernation. The fullpage illustration accompanying this first page
shows the friendly face of a huge black bear. The
bear pulls himself out of his den and promptly
treats himself to an obviously satisfying back
scratch that “also left his scent to tell other bears
he was there.” He continues on in search of food,
at which point readers are treated to a picture of
a very happy bear lapping army cutworms off a
dead log. Unfortunately, with his excellent sense
of smell, the bear is drawn out of the woods by
the aroma of grain and bird seed stored in a
family’s shed.
Young Charlie is awakened that night by the
sounds of the bear breaking into his family’s grain
shed. Movement in the house frightens the bear
back into the woods and Charlie finds out the next
day that it has been visiting the neighborhood bird
feeders and compost piles. Neighbors don’t know
what to do and some talk of shooting the bear.
Charlie does research to learn how to keep the
bear away from people and in the woods – from
safely storing grain, birdseed, and garbage, to
cleaning barbecue grills after use.
Charlie’s family moves the grain into the cellar
and makes a plan in the event the bear comes
back. The bear does return to the storage shed,
but is successfully frightened away by the clanging
of Charlie’s cymbals, the banging of mom’s pots,
and the blare of dad’s air horn. Later that summer
while the family is blueberry picking, they catch
one last glimpse of the bear as he is enjoying
some blueberries. The scent of the humans quickly
drives the bear back into the forest.
Raye’s illustrations always portray the bear as
a huge but friendly looking creature. This book
would be suitable as a read-aloud for children
ages four and older.
Lorraine Ravis
the outdoor PALETTE
By Nona Estrin
Rescue, Oil on Panel, 2012, 72” x 24”
For 16 years, Adelaide Tyrol has been writing this Outdoor
Palette column. Since she’s an accomplished artist in her own
right, we thought we’d turn the tables this time and put the
spotlight on her.
Readers will know Tyrol’s illustrations from the “Overstory”
and “Outside Story” columns that appear in every issue of
Northern Woodlands and in newspapers around the Northeast.
What most won’t know, however, is that Tyrol splits her time
between Vermont and New York City, where she’s a principal
artist at Oliphant Studios. Her work involves creating backdrops
and environments for television, movies, and events such as
Fashion Week, where she builds fashion runway interiors for top
designers. The work is done at break-neck speed for exacting
clients under high pressure.
The attention to detail that Tyrol exhibits in her “Outside
Story” illustrations, and the style and technique of her set
design work, both inform her studio paintings. With her canvas
stapled to the floor and her large brushes attached to the ends of
bamboo poles, Tyrol walks around her canvas. She works with
speed and urgency, her technique automatic and gestural as she
splashes, drags, and sponges pools of paint.
The above work, entitled “Rescue,” is a diptych – a painting
made up of two parts. In the left side, the viewer’s attention is
thrust to the upper-left corner by the directional flow of both
sea and sky. Here, the burnt sienna clouds are breaking, and
we see the promise of a ship on the horizon. But less than an
inch away, in the right panel, the horizon dims, and the viewer
is swallowed by the dark green, turbulent waters of the sea. “I
wanted to impart a sense of uncertainty – balancing a sense of
panic with a sense of hope,” said Tyrol. The work conveys the
power, and force, and wildness of nature, through a humbled
human perspective – one that teeters between silence and
salvation, sea water black and sunset gold.
Adelaide Tyrol has two solo shows this fall: one at McGowan Fine Art in Concord, New
Hampshire (running September 8 through October 9), and another showcasing her
work illustrating “The Outside Story,” to be held at The Montshire Museum in Norwich,
Vermont, from October 16 through November 12. She will also be exhibiting in a group
show at the Great Hall in Springfield, Vermont, from September 17 through April 29,
2016. Along with McGowan Fine Art, Adelaide is represented by Furchgott-Sourdiff
Gallery in Shelburne, Vermont, and West Branch Gallery in Stowe, Vermont. She may
also be reached through her website: adelaidetyrol.com
Call for entries: Send us your Outdoor Palette submissions. Contact Adelaide Tyrol at (802) 454-7841 or atyrol@ostudio.com for details.
79
A PLACE in mind
By Mike Minchin
Horns Pond
80
not be the truth. Still, the small trout we did catch were beautiful
– their underbellies golden-yellow and their bright red spots
encased in hazy blue halos. We sent them back into the water.
Let them grow bigger, we thought. Mostly, I lost a few flies to
the trees and spent a good deal of time practicing my roll cast
and tying on new tippets with numb fingers. At times, I stood on
boulders just beneath the surface, wearing a fleece hat and thin
gloves, watching my fly rest on the water, sink, and lift again as
I false-cast to dry it off. For hours we cast in near silence as the
sun colored the sky around us.
It is not the fishing that makes Horns Pond special; I can
think of several more productive fishing spots, all of them with
far easier access. But the difficulty of getting there and the challenge of fishing it has etched Horns Pond into my mind. Or
maybe it is just the feel of the place I’m drawn to, the strangeness
of fishing high up on the shoulder of a mountain. Despite its
proximity to the Appalachian Trail, that day it felt as secluded
and peaceful as any place I’ve found in Maine.
I looked over at Alex at one point that morning. He had
switched over to his hand-tied muddler minnows, and he was
having more luck than I was. He was standing waist-deep in
the pond, wearing his wide-brimmed hat, his rod tip bending
under the weight of a fish. He looked over and smiled; neither
of us said a word.
Mike Minchin’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, Green
Writers Press, Mud Season Review, and Vermont Magazine. Originally from Maine, he
now lives in central Vermont with his wife and two children.
MARY MAXAM
It was still dark when my friend Alex and I pulled onto Route
27, just north of Farmington, Maine, our fly rods and gear
tossed in the back of Alex’s Subaru. The autumnal equinox had
passed a few days prior and the leaves had started to turn, their
colors getting deeper by the day. We were pushing the end of
the fishing season, just a day or two shy of October, and the air
was already infused with the kind of cold that makes you think
about firing up the wood stove for the first time.
We were set on exploring Horns Pond, a three-acre glacial
tarn about 3,000 feet up in the Bigelow Range. It was a place I’d
hiked by a few times but had never thought to fish. Alex had
heard there were trout up there, though, so the whole way in I
was imagining thick-bellied brook trout swimming in the 20 or
so feet of water out in the middle.
We hiked up from the southern edge of the Bigelow Range,
through a damp, semi-dark forest, before turning northwest
up the steep Horns Pond Trail, a narrow swath cut through
fir and spruce trees that grew progressively more dense as we
went. Despite the cold, we were down to T-shirts by the time
we linked up with the Appalachian Trail and hiked the last few
tenths of a mile. There were no other people around, though in
the warmer months the campsite near the pond is popular with
backpackers. That morning, we didn’t even see the caretaker
for the lean-tos. Most of the north-bound thru-hikers were
probably well on their way to Katahdin. The woods were quiet
and the pond still, the water dark and reflective and dotted with
water lilies and boulders near the shore. From above, Horns
Pond is an irregular teardrop of water cradled by rock ledges.
North and South Horn – the mountain
peaks for which the pond is named – rise
several hundred feet higher to the east.
As we began to cool down, we pulled
our waders on over thermals and set up
our rods with small, number-12 Adams
dry flies, then stepped out into murk that
felt spongy and bottomless. I could feel
the cold pressing around my legs, and I
wondered if the water had ever warmed up
over the summer. I was suddenly wishing
I’d brought another layer. With the spruce
trees crowding the shore, I had to wade
out as far as I could to avoid losing flies in
their branches, and I was quickly up to my
chest in water.
Alex moved up the shore and waded in,
and after only a cast or two he had a strike
and pulled in a brook trout, maybe eight
inches long. I would like to say we caught
some bigger ones that day, but that would

The Blister Rust Battle Resumes

Transcription

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