by Luke McNally, RGS & AWS Champlain Region Forester
The name woodcock – wood bird – almost limits its many personalities. Those of us in the know have observed woodcock in a multitude of environments. We work to establish young forests to provide a variety of cover for woodcock and ruffed grouse through careful successional planning and management. However, we often still ask the question: How can we make our cover even more different?
We don’t know nearly as much about the “Ws” as we know about the ruffed grouse. The “Ws” are a suite of conservation priorities that include American woodcock, Wilson’s snipe, whip-poor-will, warblers and wood turtle. The W species all require similar habitat to one another and span a gradient of habitats that often benefit deer and turkey, and where we can also find trout. The Ws aren’t officially branded as such, but maybe they should be. Conveniently, the Ws lend themselves to agriculture and forestry. In a nut shell, that’s what the idea behind “Working Lands for Wildlife” is meant to condense.
More and more evidence suggests that it’s the juxtaposition of habitats in close proximity to one another that is the birthplace of biodiversity excellence. That’s what led me to the multidisciplinary Beaver Brook Restoration Project.
Floodplain corridors lend themselves to disturbance – that tangly mess of dogwood, alder, viburnum and willow that grouse, woodcock and warblers love. For centuries, Americans removed wood from streams, which was ill conceived. Now, we’re developing ways to put it back. Post assisted log structures, induced meandering, strategic wood addition and geomorphic erosion control are all fancy words for an umbrella of restoration treatments for eroded floodplains called Low-tech Processed-Based Restoration. Such work’s already part of the toolkit for the original Working Lands for Wildlifespecies: the sage grouse.
It’s Ph.D.-level stuff, but to boil it down, let’s just say that too much erosion is bad, and more than 50% of all U.S. freshwater streams are eroded and degraded. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone in our crowd that wood and trees are a solution to our problems. Wood is the baseline of aquatic ecosystems. It’s what bugs eat. It’s what traps unwanted sediment, and displaces the dangerous energy of spring runoff and floods. Woody debris jams in streams are like condos for trout, and they trap unwanted phosphorus and nitrogen pollution up in the high country and out of the large waterbodies where they create problems.
Wood jams slow water velocity and keep that water up on the landscape where farmers and wildlife need it, and beaver dams act as gigantic swamp coolers that lower the temperature of surrounding environs.
One of my favorite things about this work is how well it pairs with the many forms of timber stand improvement, which is an umbrella term that includes crop tree release.
The Boquet River Association had to overcome a mountain of permitting with regulatory agencies, because, until now, no one had ever done a low-tech process-based restoration project in Adirondack Park before. After what seemed like a thousand board room meetings, this unique brand of restoration finally came to life. The trio includes the Essex County Soil & Water Conservation District, RGS & AWS and the Boquet River Association. Sometime soon, I hope North Country Public radio will laud over the first beaver dam analogs in the Adirondacks. Back in the spring, we planted 685 trees with volunteers to help diversify the cover, replacing invasive species and replacing culled trees with higher value native shrubs.
To generate materials for this project, the team cut inferior stems of maple, beech, red cedar and white pine as well as honeysuckle and buckthorn. Relying on the practice of crop tree release, we cut stems that were crowding out some beautiful red oak and shagbark hickory trees.
We invited all our friends from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the New York State Dept of Environmental Conservation, the Adirondack Park Agency, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, all the local county Soil and Water Conservation Districts and several contractors and other academic and other non-governmental organizations. What we didn’t expect was how electric the energy felt with so many folks all together. Among a tribe of their peers, office-bound natural resource professionals came alive with their boots in the creek. Those used to sitting behind computers and living the ever so lonely work-from-home lifestyles really dig fieldwork. Sun shining warm, tools in hand, mud and sticks everywhere and the noise of multiple small engines screaming.
