From Nature’s Halls to the Halls of Congress

Posted by Tara Miller

It’s a hot May day in upstate New York, hitting 80 degrees already by late morning.  I’m walking around a wide-open grasslands area with a group of people as Ralph Tabor, local Fish and Wildlife Service volunteer extraordinaire, points out the bobolinks swooping above the grass and the dying ash trees.

Hikers enjoy Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge in Wallkill, NY

I’ve organized a hike at Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge, which is a mouthful.  The event is an opportunity for people to get to know their local public lands and connect with other wildlife enthusiasts.  This is part of what I do working for Defenders of Wildlife.  The other part takes place in a different kind of wilderness.  

A month ago, I was in Washington D.C., guiding a small group of New Yorkers between meetings.  Shoes clicked down long marble hallways.  We ducked in and out of offices, sometimes even standing in hallways to meet with a staffer and argue our case.  Our nation’s bedrock wildlife protection laws – including the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act – are under attack.  People from the Adirondacks down to Staten Island traveled to D.C. to remind their representatives why wildlife is important.

New Yorkers walk the halls of Congress to advocate for wildlife

Shawangunk Grasslands reminds us of why this work is important.  It’s one of two grasslands sites remaining in the Hudson Valley in New York.  Birders drive from all over the region to catch sight of a particular migratory grasslands bird as it stops through this haven of suitable habitat.  We can’t let these areas slip away.  And it takes active work to ensure that our wildlife protection laws and public lands will still be around for future generations.

Surveying birds in the national parks of the west

Posted by Amanda Gallinat

“It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.”

-Thoreau in his Journal, 30 August 1856

This spring, my partner Sam Roberts and I are surveying birds for the National Park Service out west. Between early-May and early-July we will have surveyed twelve parks across the Northern Colorado Plateau Network (NCPN), which is a region of parks located primarily in Utah and Colorado. Launched in 2005, the goal of these annual bird surveys is to determine what bird species are using the parks in this region, how species densities are changing over time, and what is driving those changes.

Sam uses a rangefinder to measure the distance to a Juniper Titmouse in pinyon-juniper habitat at Capitol Reef National Park

To determine which birds are present and in what densities, we use a point count method. Every day before sunrise, Sam and I each navigate to a transect located in one of three target habitats: riparian, pinyon-juniper, or sage. At each of fifteen points along the transect, we then look and listen for any and all birds for five minutes, recording the species of each bird and the distance it is from us. For the most part, we detect small songbirds that are breeding in the area.

We identify most birds by their songs and calls; in this video, taken in sage habitat at Bryce Canyon National Park, you can hear a nearby Western Meadowlark

Sampling with point counts allows us to estimate changes in the densities of birds over the past thirteen years of the project. Birds with densities that have declined significantly over that time include Black-throated Gray Warblers (primarily associated with pinyon-juniper habitat), Lazuli Buntings (riparian habitat), and Sage Sparrows (sage habitat).

Lazuli Buntings breed in riparian habitat, and are declining in density in the NCPN; Photo by Alix d'Entremont via the Macaulay Library

We also conduct habitat/vegetation surveys at each point, recording information like the height, abundance, and plant species present in the canopy, shrub, and ground cover, as well as the presence of snags, tamarisk, bare rocks/cliffs, and prairie dog towns.

Me, noting the presence of (lots of!) tamarisk during a vegetation survey in a riparian transect

One next step for this project, in addition to continuing long-term monitoring, is to identify the drivers of changing bird densities. Possible predictors include the habitat/vegetation characteristics we have been recording, as well as remotely sensed information like precipitation patterns. You can find more information on this project, run by the NCPN and the Shriver Lab at the University of Delaware, here. Read last year’s annual report here.

Nor’easters knock down trees

Posted by Richard Primack

“A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist…. Why does not the village bell sound a knell…I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles.”  

- Thoreau in his Journals.

Trees in the Boston area took a tremendous beating during the March’s Nor’easter storms that combined strong winds and wet snow. Many trees toppled over and the trunks of other trees snapped, leaving whole trees on the ground. Trees blocked roads, damaged buildings, and pulled down power lines. In addition, branches, large and small, broke from standing trees and created woody tangles on the ground. At times like these, trees seem like an annoyance, and we forget the many benefits that they provide us, such as shade, windbreaks, and wildlife habitat.

 Trees tops broken off during the storm

While most of the woody debris has now been cleared away, evidence of the storm is readily apparent in the fresh scars on tree trunks where branches broke off, and in the cracked and broken branches remaining in the treetops. In the forests, piles of branches and trunks remain on the ground creating a danger of summer forest fires. 

Pine stem cracked and broken

According to climate change models, New England will have more frequent nor’easter storms in coming decades. To minimize damage to trees and property, a trained arborist should periodically inspect trees. Trees may need to be pruned or removed if they have spreading branches that are vulnerable to breaking, are towering over houses, driveways, and powerlines, are leaning, have obvious defects in their trunks, or have signs of sickness, such as many dead branches in their canopies. This type of preventative work will help protect trees in cites and around our homes, and reduce the costs of expensive cleanup if the trees fall or break during a storm.  

Wildflowers sometimes need to sleep for a few years

Posted by Richard Primack

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”  

- Thoreau in Walden.   

In a famous short story, Rip Van Winkle falls asleep in colonial New York and wakes up 20 years later to discover that the American Revolution has changed everything.  In a recent article published in Ecology Letters, we report that a surprisingly large number of wildflower species display a similar phenomenon called prolonged dormancy, in which individual plants remain alive in the soil for one or more years, before reappearing above ground just like Rip Van Winkle.  Some plants have even been recorded to remain dormant for ten years or more. 

A large proportion of the examples of dormancy are found in orchids. Orchids apparently survive underground for one or more years by obtaining nutrients from soil fungi.

Pink lady’s slipper orchids in Massachusetts sometimes remain dormant in the ground for one or more years before re-emerging.  

These observations of dormancy are made during long-term studies of plant populations in which researchers monitor tagged and mapped individual plants. The results can inform conservation managers, who typically aim to protect rare plants and their habitats. Dormant plants represent special challenges to land managers if they are not seen for many years. 

The ability of some plants to successfully enter and emerge from dormancy may give them an advantage in surviving periods when there are harmful conditions, such as drought or large numbers of herbivores.  This seems to be a bet-hedging strategy in which the disadvantage of missing a growing season by remaining dormant is less than the disadvantage of emerging from the ground in an unfavorably year.  Our study demonstrates that wildflowers, just like Rip Van Winkle, sometimes need a good long sleep. 

This article has also been widely reported on in the popular press.  For example, here is an article in NexusMedia.

Giant Snow Mounds

Posted by Richard Primack

“For many years I was the self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms.”  

- Thoreau in Walden. 

Giant snow mounds still towering in our parking lots in late April remind us of the three powerful northeaster snowstorms that made this past March one of the snowiest on record. Government departments and large landowners are no longer allowed to dump excess snow into rivers, the ocean, or other bodies of water because of salt, trash, and possible toxic materials that might be intermixed with the snow. So they create mountains of snow that melt in the spring.

The parkway snow mound was dirty white in late March

This year’s snow mound on the Hammond Pond Parkway in Newton was enormous; a 300 foot long, 48 foot wide, and 21 foot high wall of snow. Making some simple assumptions, this mound was about 5000 cubic yards in volume, or 400 dump truck loads of snow.

In late March the parkway mound was dirty white, but it has now become blackish, as the snow melted, leaving behind sand, soil, and other debris on the convoluted and eroded surface. Much of the surface dirt is jagged, rice grain-sized fragments of black rubber; this is probably “crumb rubber” used to provide cushioning on athletic fields. The surface of the mound also has scattered grass clumps, large rocks, logs, sticks, chunks of concrete, and metal and plastic junk.

As the snow melted, the surface became convoluted and increasingly black

Three weeks ago, the air temperature was a pleasant 55 degrees, and the nearby forest floor was 62 degrees where it was warmed by the sun. In contrast, the snow mound surface was a chilly 36 degrees and a frigid 28 degrees 6 inches below the surface. Water dripped from the sides and small springs of icy cold water emerged from the base of the mound. Most of the water leaving the mounds was probably evaporating and sublimating directly from snow to airborne water vapor.

Much of the debris on the surface was black crumb rubber from athletic fields

It is a fun game to guess when the giant snow mounds might finally melt in the spring. We will probably have many more opportunities to observe the melting of such snow mounds—because of climate change, winter storms are predicted to become more frequent for our region.

This posting is a summary of longer article published in the Newton Tab.

Walden Pond is not as pure as in Thoreau’s time

Posted by Curt Stager and Richard B. Primack

“Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth."

 -  Thoreau in Walden.

Walden Pond, like the rest of the world, is now quite different from what Thoreau knew 160 years ago. We have become a force of nature in our own right, and the story is written into Walden's muddy layers, as we describe in a recent article in PLOS One.
  
In Thoreau’s time, Walden Pond was a low nutrient pond of crystal clear purity. By studying six sediment cores extracted from the bottom of the lake, we showed that soil running off from disturbed shorelines, along with human wastes associated with swimmers, appear to have increased nutrient levels in the lake during the past 70 years. This has allowed algae to thrive, reducing the clarity of the water.

Efforts by the park department to protect the lake's purity have thus far kept it from turning green and murky.  But hotter summers and more swimmers will favor even more algal growth.   

Walden Pond is not as pure as in Thoreau's time

Recommendations to maintain and improve water quality include (1) reducing the swimmer-impacts through education programs, (2) stabilizing eroding banks, and (3) monitoring water quality and lake vegetation to see if there is any improvement or deterioration. 

Using eBird checklists to estimate bird population trends

Posted by Amanda Gallinat and Richard B. Primack (adapted from an editorial in Biological Conservation by Richard B. Primack and Vincent Devictor)

"He who cuts down woods beyond a certain limit exterminates birds.” 

-Thoreau in his Journal, 1853 

In a recent issue of Biological Conservation, researchers Joshua J. Horns, Frederick R. Adler, and Çağan H. Şekercioğlu describe a novel approach for using eBird data in bird conservation, in an article entitled Using opportunistic citizen science data to estimate avian population trends.

This study examines if the extensive records gathered by hobby birdwatchers can be used to determine changing trends in bird abundance. To investigate this question, the researchers compared trends in changing abundance over time calculated from two types of data: formal bird census data, which has long been considered the gold standard for determining population trends, and checklists of birds that have been gathered and submitted to eBird by birdwatchers.

Citizen scientists creating a checklist for eBird in Alta, Utah; photo by Joshua Horns 

eBird, a large citizen science database organized and maintained by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, currently contains over 26 million checklists of birds submitted by over 330,000 users. This study finds that trends produced by eBird data are almost identical to the trends produced by the bird census data, in terms of which bird species are increasing and decreasing, and the rates of population change.

An eBird participant gathering data in Barrow, Alaska; photo by Joshua Horns 

The researchers also conclude that estimating changes over time from eBird data is best suited for widespread species, and improves with greater numbers of checklists. This validated eBird approach could be particularly valuable in tropical countries that lack formal bird census programs, where checklist submissions are increasing rapidly.

This study is a dramatic example of how well-designed, well-funded, and creatively analyzed citizen science programs can contribute to the science of conservation biology!