From the Nyanza disaster comes renewal
By Taryn Plumb |
Globe Correspondent
July 18, 2013
SUDBURY — Clutched carefully between two sets of hands, the
dark-winged, white-bellied bird offered the littlest bit of resistance —
just a flutter here and there.
The two men gently handling the roughly 6-inch-long veery, a member of the thrush family, on a recent damp and overcast morning took just a few minutes to band its legs and secure a miniature geolocator on its back. Then they sent the bird back on its way amid the mist and the mosquitoes.
The songbird is one of 45 from a number of species that the Gorham, Maine-based Biodiversity Research Institute hopes to capture and tag throughout the Sudbury River watershed this summer. The effort is part of a conservation focused network of projects born from the environmental calamity of the Nyanza Superfund site in Ashland.
“We need to know where they’re going for the winter,” said Evan Adams, the institute’s migratory bird program director, and one of the veery’s taggers at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. “We need to make sure the breeding grounds are right, the migrating routes are right, the wintering grounds are right. We need to be thinking about their whole life cycle.”
One of the largest projects, with an expected cost of nearly $1.5 million, is the attempted control of two invasive plants, purple loosestrife and water chestnut, along the Sudbury, Concord, and Assabet rivers.
Both plants essentially choke out native species and eventually create a “monoculture,” according to US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Molly Sperduto, and they eliminate key habitats and food sources for native wildlife.
For the water chestnut, which covers the surface of waterways in large, seemingly impenetrable green masses, settlement money is being used to pay volunteers to hand-pull it from certain areas. Meanwhile, for other areas, the plan is to purchase an aquatic harvester to mechanically remove it. The effort is currently using a harvester — a giant, bright-orange contraption with paddle wheels, a cutter head, and conveyor — on loan from the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“It is successful,” biological technician Amber Carr said as she stood by the harvester, docked next to a bridge near Great Meadows. “You just have to be persistent.”
For the purple loosestrife, which Sperduto described as an unfortunately pretty “haze of purple” that takes over wetland areas, the best line of defense is a natural predator: the leaf beetle galerucella calmariensis.
Housed behind the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge’s visitor center in Sudbury is a rearing facility for the insects: 50 pots of the plants spread out across five blue kiddie pools, covered with netting to keep the beetles in and their predators out.
According to Katrina Scheiner, a Fish and Wildlife Service intern, there are between 500 and 1,000 beetles per pot. But in the watershed, there are thousands of acres of the invasive plant. So once ideal sites are chosen, the plants and beetles are put out, pot and all.
Uncovering one of the netted plants, Scheiner carefully picked off a beetle, brown and tiny, about three-eighths of an inch long. The insect’s larvae does the most damage, eating the loosestrife’s top buds and keeping it from flowering, she explained, pointing out the plant’s brown and shriveled leaves, and others dotted with holes.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, just inside the Great Meadows gates, Adams and his crew were at work capturing and tagging birds. The goal, he explained, is to fit geolocators, which track locations by recording changes in light levels, on a mix of veeries, gray catbirds, Eastern kingbirds, and orioles.
The hope is that at least a few of them will winter or stop over in southern Belize, where the $75,000 project also includes reforesting five, 30-acre plots of cleared land with cacao trees, which provide nesting and feeding habitat for migratory and resident songbirds.
Then, next year, the team will return to the watershed to recapture as many tagged birds as they can, detach the geolocators, and collect the information they contain about the bird’s travels.
Adams said restoration, management, and conservation plans are often centered around breeding grounds, rather than migration grounds, which are just as important to a particular species’ life. Particularly in the case of the veery, populations are declining because their wintering areas in South America are being developed, he said.
On this day, his team started at 4 a.m. Moving through muddy areas and sometimes thick brush, they rotated three, roughly 35-foot-long fine mesh nets accompanied by sound systems, repeating veery territorial calls.
By around 7:30, they had captured and tagged one male and one female; soon another male was ensnared. Adams called it an “after-second-year” bird, one that had “likely been here before, bred before, and been back.”
After extricating the bird, Adams and Patrick Keenan worked together to band its legs with a red-aluminum-black color combination — so they can identify it next year — then outfitted it with the geolocator “backpack.’’ As Adams attached the tiny device with a knotted, superglued band, Keenan kept the bird still by holding its neck in the wedge of space between his index and middle fingers — wide enough to fit the bird’s neck without injuring it.
At times the bird shifted and fluttered, but it was generally quiet.
When the job was done, the bird was given a few minutes in a darkened cage on the ground; time to stand, move around, flap its wings, calm down, and readjust.
Adams then retrieved the bird, checked the device once more, then knelt with the veery nestled on his open palm.
The bird puffed its feathers, looked around, and then flew off, low to the ground.
“You let them leave whenever they want,” Adams said as it disappeared into the brush. He nodded approvingly. “He’s flying strong.”
Nyanza settlement project
Jackie Ricciardi for The Boston Globe
The two men gently handling the roughly 6-inch-long veery, a member of the thrush family, on a recent damp and overcast morning took just a few minutes to band its legs and secure a miniature geolocator on its back. Then they sent the bird back on its way amid the mist and the mosquitoes.
The songbird is one of 45 from a number of species that the Gorham, Maine-based Biodiversity Research Institute hopes to capture and tag throughout the Sudbury River watershed this summer. The effort is part of a conservation focused network of projects born from the environmental calamity of the Nyanza Superfund site in Ashland.
“We need to know where they’re going for the winter,” said Evan Adams, the institute’s migratory bird program director, and one of the veery’s taggers at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. “We need to make sure the breeding grounds are right, the migrating routes are right, the wintering grounds are right. We need to be thinking about their whole life cycle.”
From a disaster now comes a renewal: For decades,
the 35-acre site of the Nyanza Color and Chemical Co. in Ashland was a
literal dumping ground. Mercury, used solvents, chemical waste, and
heavy metals were disposed of and buried, or simply allowed to leak into
the ground, on the property. The location became one of the country’s
first Superfund sites, and in 1998, Nyanza representatives settled for $3 million
with state and federal entities in an attempt to mitigate its legacy of contamination.
Now, 15 years later, 11 projects are underway to study, restore, and
improve — as well as provide access to and education about — the Sudbury
River and its watershed area, at a proposed cost of $4.72 million (some
of that funding coming not only from the settlement, but from various
local, state, and federal entities).One of the largest projects, with an expected cost of nearly $1.5 million, is the attempted control of two invasive plants, purple loosestrife and water chestnut, along the Sudbury, Concord, and Assabet rivers.
Both plants essentially choke out native species and eventually create a “monoculture,” according to US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Molly Sperduto, and they eliminate key habitats and food sources for native wildlife.
For the water chestnut, which covers the surface of waterways in large, seemingly impenetrable green masses, settlement money is being used to pay volunteers to hand-pull it from certain areas. Meanwhile, for other areas, the plan is to purchase an aquatic harvester to mechanically remove it. The effort is currently using a harvester — a giant, bright-orange contraption with paddle wheels, a cutter head, and conveyor — on loan from the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“It is successful,” biological technician Amber Carr said as she stood by the harvester, docked next to a bridge near Great Meadows. “You just have to be persistent.”
For the purple loosestrife, which Sperduto described as an unfortunately pretty “haze of purple” that takes over wetland areas, the best line of defense is a natural predator: the leaf beetle galerucella calmariensis.
Housed behind the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge’s visitor center in Sudbury is a rearing facility for the insects: 50 pots of the plants spread out across five blue kiddie pools, covered with netting to keep the beetles in and their predators out.
According to Katrina Scheiner, a Fish and Wildlife Service intern, there are between 500 and 1,000 beetles per pot. But in the watershed, there are thousands of acres of the invasive plant. So once ideal sites are chosen, the plants and beetles are put out, pot and all.
Uncovering one of the netted plants, Scheiner carefully picked off a beetle, brown and tiny, about three-eighths of an inch long. The insect’s larvae does the most damage, eating the loosestrife’s top buds and keeping it from flowering, she explained, pointing out the plant’s brown and shriveled leaves, and others dotted with holes.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, just inside the Great Meadows gates, Adams and his crew were at work capturing and tagging birds. The goal, he explained, is to fit geolocators, which track locations by recording changes in light levels, on a mix of veeries, gray catbirds, Eastern kingbirds, and orioles.
The hope is that at least a few of them will winter or stop over in southern Belize, where the $75,000 project also includes reforesting five, 30-acre plots of cleared land with cacao trees, which provide nesting and feeding habitat for migratory and resident songbirds.
Then, next year, the team will return to the watershed to recapture as many tagged birds as they can, detach the geolocators, and collect the information they contain about the bird’s travels.
Adams said restoration, management, and conservation plans are often centered around breeding grounds, rather than migration grounds, which are just as important to a particular species’ life. Particularly in the case of the veery, populations are declining because their wintering areas in South America are being developed, he said.
On this day, his team started at 4 a.m. Moving through muddy areas and sometimes thick brush, they rotated three, roughly 35-foot-long fine mesh nets accompanied by sound systems, repeating veery territorial calls.
By around 7:30, they had captured and tagged one male and one female; soon another male was ensnared. Adams called it an “after-second-year” bird, one that had “likely been here before, bred before, and been back.”
After extricating the bird, Adams and Patrick Keenan worked together to band its legs with a red-aluminum-black color combination — so they can identify it next year — then outfitted it with the geolocator “backpack.’’ As Adams attached the tiny device with a knotted, superglued band, Keenan kept the bird still by holding its neck in the wedge of space between his index and middle fingers — wide enough to fit the bird’s neck without injuring it.
At times the bird shifted and fluttered, but it was generally quiet.
When the job was done, the bird was given a few minutes in a darkened cage on the ground; time to stand, move around, flap its wings, calm down, and readjust.
Adams then retrieved the bird, checked the device once more, then knelt with the veery nestled on his open palm.
The bird puffed its feathers, looked around, and then flew off, low to the ground.
“You let them leave whenever they want,” Adams said as it disappeared into the brush. He nodded approvingly. “He’s flying strong.”
Nyanza settlement project
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