Karl Meyer Writing Blog

First fish: the nose of the run © 2010, Karl Meyer

April 5, 2010, Connecticut River mouth

Head down to the mouth of the Connecticut River on an unusually sun-warmed April 5^th, and you’ll find the coastal plain opening onto Long Island Sound shrouded in a cool, 50 degree fog on an Easter Sunday.  It’s a dozen degrees warmer just a mile inland.  Looking out across the small state access, restaurant lot, and private marina, you can make out Saybrook Light just off Fenwick Point—a place probably best known as the former haunt of Katherine Hepburn.  What I also see in my mind’s eye as I look across that sandy lip is the massive storm surge of September 1938, thundering, Katrina-like, directly up this river opening.  Some 800 people died.

But I am here to find fish, and to plot out a route to take upstream by bicycle early next month.  Still, the pull of history and landscape in this place is strong.  Here golf courses and manicured lawns spread right to the edge of Long Island Sound.  Old money.  But, I get a feeling if I looked a little harder, I might be able to find some of those bank bailout funds us earthly folk have been forced to fork over in the name of the inflated desires of others. I spend much of an hour scratching around the town’s historic representations of Fort Saybrook, 1635, and how the Pequot, Niantic, and Mohegan seem to eventually get ticketed with bringing about their own demise here.  It’s a recounting full of holes in logic and history, interesting nonetheless.

The other piece I see here is that the myth of a grand salmon run on the Connecticut River is amply represented, right from the first—at the very mouth of the river.  An historical story-board notes an anecdote stating the salmon on the Connecticut were so numerous at times that one could walk across the river’s mouth on their backs—if a person had snowshoes on.  Snowshoes?!  Who came up with this one?  The species base on this river in terms of sheer numbers and the ecological pyramid had been anchored by foot-long alewives and blueback herring, followed by waves and waves of nearly two-foot American shad, steaming up the shoally currents here—for millennia.  Salmon never accounted for more than one fish in ten thousand, and that tiny run died out in 1809.  But the hype begins at the very entrance to this river.  Is there any question why we are losing ground on migratory fish on the Great River here?

Still, it’s wonderful to be along this shore.  I put on my yellow windbreaker and cycle south along the shore road against a good headwind.  There are just a few places the public can actually access the shoreline.  I scoot along a broadened bit of salt marsh, and also down to a little public viewing spot.  Here a pair of osprey sits in vigil, resting at their nest on a wooden platform.  Surely they know there is a growing compliment of fish soon to blossom nearby.

I head the 5 – 6 miles into Westbrook, around salt marsh curves, and then along what is the old Post Road in places.  I pass a house over three centuries old, and another, scrappier looking place that’s nearly as antique–the Jacob Chalker House from 1735.  This, I’m thinking, was an old fishing shack at its inception, and perhaps a trading site.  I snap a few pictures, and then one more of a fish market, with its salmon advertised on the sign board.

I head back along the Post Road and down through the center of Old Saybrook.  Nearing my start point at the old fort site at Saybrook Point I pass a house built in 1671, before King Phillips War.  But that is not the war that decided things in this neighborhood.  The battle for this turf was settled decades earlier, when a significant proportion of the Pequot were massacred in their fort at Mystic, just northeast of here, in 1637.  Part of that siege was engineered from this very spot.  I spend some time poking around in the 17^th century cemetery just up the road from the fort site.  Here, most stones are effaced by time.  Perhaps the most interest thing is the racket made by the nesting parrots—an introduced species here.  Their large, rounded nest with a bottom opening occupies an old red cedar.  They are both curious and annoyed with me.

I head out onto the public walk bordering the Sound and the river’s headlands.  It’s not particularly busy here, too early in the season.  However, I do find two salted fishermen with poles and tackle about to be put away.  One is well into retirement age.  I ask them about the fishing.  Nothing much today.  I ask about the shad.  “Not in yet.”  Soon, they think.  The younger one, in his fifties, says that maybe two years ago the shad came in all at once, and were just pushing up against the seawall in a big, waving froth.  Here, I’m thinking–is the remnant of those true fish of old, fantasized into salmon by those desirously in need of something more “sexy” than the waves of green-gold, two foot long shad that brought this spawning river to its peak year in, and year out.  No snowshoes needed.

These guys are chatty, full of stories.  The older fellow is “sure” they are already getting stripers up at Chicopee.  That’s a stretch for April 5^th, I’m thinking.  He takes out his fishing license, showing me that you now need one for saltwater here too.  It’s a one-time fee for seniors, good for the rest of his days as long as he does the renewal paperwork.  I agree with them that it does seem a shame its come to this—a salt water fishing license, just to toss out a hook.

I jump in the car, head north a bit, having noted a sign for pedestrians and cyclists to use the I-95 Bridge over the river.   I find it, and even though I’m pooped, I can’t resist the idea.  It’s warmed inland, mid-sixties at least.  I find a place to stash the car, and the next thing I know I’m looking upstream and down, over Long Island Sound and the tidewater meadows of Lord Cove, with traffic roaring by at 70 mph.  I’m delighted to be able to cross here.  I shoot down into Old Lyme, and simply must explore further.  I make it into town after intersecting Rt. 1, and head upstream a bit through the old, outlaying sections.  Here is an art colony complex, but also hints of tributaries and fish runs.

I follow a promising ancient way, Sill Road, upstream, as it follows the Lieutenant River,  then stop at a tiny bridge crossing and change out of my sweaty shirt.  Suddenly, I look down into the sun-dappled waters and twenty herring shoot under the bridge, as if I’ve startled them.  It’s so quick, I can’t quite believe my eyes.  I look for more in the afternoon current, but don’t see any more fish.  I walk across the little road, not expecting anything, and a similar number of herring dash forward, out of the shadows and upstream.  They are here!  Here are the first fish, my first fish.  As far as identity goes, they are most likely alewives who generally head upstream first.  This is also the species reported in runs here.

I linger for a bit, imagining these fish having traveled a thousand miles or more in the ocean—at least to the Bay of Fundy and back.  Now, here.  A sweet moment to witness.  There is a sign at this site forbidding the capture of any herring.  I walk back over to my bike for the few miles back across the river to my car, tired, satisfied.  As I reach for my helmet, maybe a dozen alewives shoot forward, then aside and back into downstream shadows–having somehow seen my shadow or sensed a presence.  They’ve fallen back temporarily, but I quickly relinquish their upstream destination to the sunshine and this unusually warm, early April afternoon.

Heading home, I check for commercial seiners up toward the Goodspeed Opera House and bridge near Haddam.  The crusty fisher guys said a few still pursue shad up that way.  But, it’s too early in the season.  I snap a shot or two of the famous “shad shack” up along that stretch, and head home on back roads until I reach Middletown.

*    *    *

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The following piece appears in the Spring issue of Sanctuary, Journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

© 2009, Karl Meyer

The State of the Snake

A black racer saved me once.  Not to over-glamorize it, that snake was dead.  Still, it came between me and the fast-closing mongrel bent on ripping me from my bicycle on a lovely spring day.  It was inches from my calf when it suddenly yelped, screeched to a halt, and circled back timidly–the fur raised on its neck.  I too had noted the large snake looped along the pavement.  But I knew something the canine didn’t–I’d examined the beautiful gray-black scales of that mostly-intact black racer corpse the previous afternoon.

Where snakes are concerned, I’m a lot like that dog.  Our shared mammalian fear of snakes, ophidiophobia, appears to be a hard-wired survival trait harkening back to an age when reptiles were far more prominent. “Fables about snakes far outmatch reality,” herpetologist Tom Tyning will tell you.  None of Massachusetts’ fourteen species provoke much fear in Tyning.  He’s studied snakes for four decades and today is one of the Bay State’s staunchest advocates for preserving populations and critical habitats for increasingly rare species, “Since Europeans arrived in North America our response to snakes can be summed up on one word: persecution.”

Tyning authored the Stokes Nature Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles.  His UMass graduate work included radio-telemetry tracking of timber rattlesnakes.  For the past decade Tyning’s been a professor of environmental science at Berkshire Community College–on the heels of 24 years as a touted trip leader and master naturalist with Mass Audubon.  Our inordinate snake fear is evident in the near extirpation of the state’s two venomous species, copperheads and timber rattlesnakes, but all species suffer persecution and, “In encounters where snake identity comes into question, the snakes always lose.”

Common patterned species like northern water snakes and milk snakes are often misidentified and killed—yet the chances of someone happening across a venomous snake, even in their few remaining habitats, are minuscule.  “There have only been two recorded snake bite deaths in Massachusetts in over 200 years,” Tyning notes.  Curiously, venomous species are not even the rarest snakes in the Commonwealth.

Five native snakes are today protected by penalties of hefty fines and/or imprisonment– it’s illegal to “harass, kill, collect, or possess” them.  “Geographically challenged,” is how Tom Tyning describes the state-threatened worm snake’s predicament.  At just 7-11 inches, these sandy soil burrowers both prey-on, and resemble, earthworms.  The worm snake is a more southern and western species whose biological footprint brushes just north into the metro-Springfield area.

As habitat and size goes, black rat snakes are at the other end of the spectrum.  With a few specimens measuring over six feet, they are the state’s longest snake.  Endangered rat snakes are noteworthy for their climbing ability, even laying eggs in the rotting cores of trees.  Black rat snakes are found in pockets of habitat in central Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley.  But most of us, even if we stare up into the sun-dappled May woods for the rest of our days, will never see one.

“The coolest thing about them is their climbing ability,” researcher Peter Mirick will tell you.  Mirick is widely known for his nearly 30 years as editor of Massachusetts Wildlife, the Commonwealth’s quarterly on natural history, conservation, hunting, and fishing from the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.  But few know that his biology studies in grad school focused on reptiles and amphibians.  Today, Mirick’s field work continues–including an ongoing study of a population of endangered rat snakes in Sturbridge begun in 1997.

“In spring they are very arboreal, looking for birds and squirrels,” he says, “They’ll stick to a pine tree like Velcro.”  A kid’s enthusiasm creeps into his voice, “They have a whole different set of muscles.  They’re shaped like a loaf of bread in cross-section.”  Peter Mirick devoted nearly an entire issue of Massachusetts Wildlife to a guide describing the Commonwealth’s snake species in 2009.  Thanks to radio-tracking, he once witnessed the combat “dance” between two male rat snakes, “They intertwined from end to end.  They don’t bite each other, they wrestle. The point seemed to be holding your opponent’s head down.”  Once the loser skulked off, the winner went into a hollow log, “Apparently to mate with the female.”

Peter Mirick says common snakes like garter, ring-necked and northern water snakes seem to be doing fine, but populations of state-listed species, including the Eastern hognose snake–which receives only minimum protection, all face challenges.  He notes that decades of public and private land protection work has made great strides in protecting habitats, but speaks at a time when the MA Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program and the state’s ability to protect rare species have come under attack.

The attacks include both a private lawsuit and a legislative challenge to the state’s powers.  House Bill 4167, the Coakley-Rivera bill, was backed by an unusually large and somewhat unlikely group of Western MA state representatives.  The bill is largely viewed as spearheaded by complaints about development rights raised by Springfield WWLP TV Channel 22 Vice President and General Manager William Pepin.  Pepin objects to restrictions or changes that might be required through Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program considerations as he seeks to build a luxury retirement home–plus a second house on a smaller parcel, on 36 acres of land purchased with his wife in April 2009 in Hampden, MA.  Parts of the tract turned out to be the habitat of the increasingly rare Eastern Box Turtle.  Pepin is currently challenging NHESP powers in court.

Many business and development interests—and legislators in the Channel 22 viewing region, are rooting for the heavy-handed challenge to the state’s species protections in Coakley-Rivera.  But those worried about the viability rare populations see the bill as a knee-jerk, statutory-response to problems that could be addressed via minor procedural changes.  If passed as written, House Bill 4167 would strip the state’s NHESP of significant review powers—including long-held-and-rarely-used failsafe tools that are critical to ensuring the Commonwealth’s biological heritage will be protected for future generations.  Peter Mirick describes today’s species protection work in the face of developer demands as doing ‘wildlife triage’, “There’s only so much habitat to go around—with them wanting everything.”

Last September 30^th, Dave Small, the state’s Assistant Regional Director of the Ware River Watershed at Quabbin Reservoir, received a call and then an email about snakes.  He was out the door in a heartbeat, “I told my boss I had to leave,” he chuckles.  The reason for the departure: baby Eastern hognose snakes.  Small zipped over to a sandy Quabbin site where friends hovered over marvelously patterned hognoses, each barely six inches long.  The snakes moved cryptically in grass and sand, just off the pavement’s edge.  They counted four in all, but one was dead–likely crushed by a pedestrian or passing cyclist.

Dave Small, President of the Athol Bird and Nature Club since 1988, is also Acting Executive Director of the Millers River Environmental Center.  They stood vigil until the snakes retreated to sandy burrows with the day’s setting sun, but worried more would be lost if they were using the pavement for warmth.  The next morning, October 1, 2009, Small and a friend were back.  Gingerly walking the pavement edge, they spotted three tiny hognoses; then another two—five in all.  They circled outward and returned: and five snakes had morphed into seven.  What happened next is described in Small’s blog, “Almost immediately movement caught our attention as another snake appeared from below ground, than another and another. Fourteen in all!”

The tiny, adult-look-alikes burrowed straight up through sand, moving “in fits and starts out into the undergrowth shedding their skins along the way.”  Bulky-bodied hognose snakes rely on their fabulous coloration—ranging from mustard to gray, to black and brown, for protection.  These harmless snakes specialize in consuming toads in their sandy habitats.  But if surprised or challenged, they will inflate an almost cobra-like hood and hiss, feigning strikes to fool predators.  If that doesn’t work they may simply loll over, playing dead in a singularly unappetizing display.

As the rarity of watching snakes hatch sank in with Small, he phoned Peter Mirick–partly to share the event, but also to check with the biologist about what was taking place, “I was on the cell phone with Peter making sure what I was observing; I wanted to fully understand it.”  In retrospect, “I just felt so privileged to be there,” Small says.  Like many of us, Small has a healthy snake phobia, “I’m definitely not one that has to pick up every snake,” he laughs. Yet if conditions permit each March 31^st, he spends his birthday looking for snakes.

Though the Eastern hognose snake is mentioned beside our rare species in NHESP documents, “It’s a snake that is, at the moment, totally unprotected,” says Tom Tying.

At UMass, researchers are currently satellite-tracking six hognose snakes, he notes, “They tend to be big fat snakes that people notice, and kill.  They are truly uncommon.” Peter Mirick says he wouldn’t be surprised if the hognose was proposed for listing as a species of special concern, “It is probably at that level.”  And Dave Small–fascinated for decades by birds, butterflies, and all manner of herps since he was growing up in Athol, agrees about the hognose, and notes anecdotally, “Overall, there just aren’t as many snakes around as there used to be.”

Anne Stengle will also be out on spring’s earliest days searching for snakes.  The UMass undergrad got interested in them partly through her job at a Southampton exotic pet shop (it no longer offers reptiles), and later as a Holyoke Community College student where she signed on to do research work on the black rat snake under Tom Tyning’s guidance.  It was the first study of the black rat snake in the western Massachusetts.  It got into her blood, “Rat snakes are incredibly gorgeous, especially when you see them coiled up in a tree. They can go back and find the same spot year after year.”

At 24, Stengle’s among the new generation of herp researchers.  She worked on surveying native snakes in the Holyoke Range in 2007, incorporating radio-tagging.  That field work is done, but she continues working up data.  Meanwhile, she has moved on to tagging and studying endangered timber rattlers in the Berkshires—snakes Peter Mirick calls, “Our number one wilderness animal.”

Asked about any snake phobias, Stengle replies, “Nope—never,” She notes that most people think of snakes as egg-layers, yet half the state’s species have live births.  Stengle loves getting out to the places where those rare study species reside.  Though she favors rattlesnakes, one of her most memorable sightings was a litter of newly-born copperheads, “There were seven of them they were a muted gray–they hadn’t shed yet.  We just sat and watched.”  What amazes Stengle in her rattlesnake studies is also part of what makes this species vulnerable, “Female timbers go almost two years without eating in order to give birth—they don’t eat their entire gravid year.”

Tom Tyning’s work on snakes is providing new information on timber rattlers, copperheads and rat snakes–some of it through genetics.  In some rugged habitats where populations still exist he’s finding distributions and combinations of co-habiting snakes that begin to look like a little the Galapagos Archipelago, “We don’t know why they all coexist in some places together, but we get these oddball distribution maps that don’t quite fit what we would have guessed.”  Without further habitat protection its unknown how increasingly small, genetically-isolated populations can do, “Work in Sweden has shown that these populations can go fine for a while, and then crash,” he says, “Last year’s cool, wet summer here resulted in lots of reports of dead females or partially developed young.”

Tyning will continue mapping genes on species that can live 20 – 30 years, but only breed every two years.  Swedish biologists are making progress introducing new gene-mixing techniques in their rare populations.  But Tyning also notes a troubling development in some rare species here: anecdotal reports of disease similar to the “white nose syndrome” that has decimated the Northeast’s hibernating bat populations.  “Some claim they are seeing a health issue with some species—a fungus or bacterium.”  The worry again is that human visits and disturbance in these isolated habitats and hibernacula are possible vectors in distributing a catastrophic pathogen.  Global warming could also prove part of the scenario, “If these diseases are a real factor,” says Tyning, “We need to try and get a handle on this and inoculate or isolate populations.”

One bedrock necessity is simple enough: habitat for snakes to go about life cycles unmolested by ever-widening human consumptive patterns.  Smaller, less mobile populations like worm snakes may require just a few protected acres to remain viable.  But, for sunning, hunting, breeding, and hibernating, the sometimes-intermixed populations of copperheads, timber rattlers and rat snakes may require relatively-untrammeled tracts of hundreds—or even 1,000 acre, to continue into the future.  That means an absence of ridgetop houses, ATVs, mountain bikes and poorly chosen windmill sites with attendant road networks.  It may mean leaving the dog at home.

Tom Tyning notes with relief that one notorious rattlesnake poacher, Rudy Komarek–who reportedly removed thousands of timber rattlers from New England sites for his carnival barker lifestyle, passed away in Florida just a few years back.  But what ultimately is most needed is perhaps a simple acknowledgement that snakes have a right to exist as life forms, co-evolved with humans across millions of years on earth.  “We fail to ask the right questions,” Tyning insists, “They have their own intrinsic value. These are creatures that live without arms and legs; they hunt animals, and navigate in complete darkness.  They are nothing short of miraculous.  We are lucky to be alive with them at this time.”

Karl Meyer’s story about an encounter with Common Nighthawks along the Deerfield River will appear in the May/June 2010 issue of Bird Watcher’s Digest.

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Salmon eggs in school: a few things schools, teachers, and students should be questioning if they intend to raise salmon in their classrooms

In the last three years, Connecticut River hatchery fish have been found to harbor deadly diseases that could be tragically dispersed through egg, fry, and smolt stocking programs:

Didymo was discovered two years back in the White River’s waters above the White River National Fish Hatchery—water that the hatchery used to grow salmon eggs and fry.  Didymo smothers river bottoms like a gooey sponge and suffocates aquatic habits.  Hatchery eggs and fish can easily be didymo carriers, schools a volunteers could have unknowingly spread this disease far and wide.

Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis: in 2007, IPN—a deadly salmon disease spread to salmon populations mixing in rivers and at sea, was discovered at the Cronin National Salmon Station in Sunderland, MA.  Tests confirmed that Atlantic salmon broodstock used in the Connecticut Migratory Fish Restoration Program tested positive for a viral disease.  Dr. Jaime Geiger announced that 718,000 eggs were destroyed at the White River National Fish Hatchery, in Bethel, Vt. The eggs were collected in the past month from wild salmon, known as “sea-run” salmon, at the Cronin National Salmon Station in Sunderland, Mass., where infectious pancreatic necrosis was discovered in two fish on Nov. 16.  Scientists believe the salmon tested at the Cronin station may have picked up the virus in the Atlantic Ocean.

Hatchery fry are half as likely to survive to reach the ocean as wild-spawned fish that grow with all the environmental influences, signals, and genes they received from evolving in a natural environment over time.

Cataracts: In 2009 a sampling of one of the groups among the thousands of one-year old hatchery salmon raised for stocking each year were examined at the White River hatchery.  Sixty percent were shown to be developing cataracts.  This cripples their ability to feed.  Thousand of fish had to be destroyed.

Dying spawning specimens: Also in 2009, ten of 21 returning adult hybrid salmon recaptured at the Holyoke turned a blood-red and were found to be dying by the time they reached the North. Attleboro hatchery station.   There, they were to be “reconditioned”—bulked up and pampered, before being used for spawning new salmon.  Hatchery managers had no explanation for this deadly turn.

Below, from CRASC Meeting minutes,  July 11, 2007

Cold water disease: Roger Reed State Fish Hatchery experienced an outbreak of cold water disease this spring. The hatchery lost 250-300,000 salmon fry to these bacteria. Losses were curtailed when the hatchery obtained an INAD permit for the use of Chloramine-T and then treated the fish. It is unknown whether the Roger Reed broodstock are carriers of the bacteria.

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© 2010, Karl Meyer                                                                             March 10, 2010

All Rights Reserved

“Time to redirect the effort”: a reply to the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission response by CRASC Technical Committee Chair Dr. Caleb Slater

In rebuttal to my OpEd in the Greenfield Recorder on the shortcomings of the salmon program and migratory fish restoration on the Connecticut, Dr. Caleb Slater, of CRASC, chipped in a defense of his program in a piece entitled: “Not time to abandon effort: What’s working with the salmon restoration”

Since I was not accorded a chance to respond in the paper, I will reply to Dr. Slater’s assertions here:

To open, I must mention that Dr. Slater and CRASC did not respond to the central argument of my OpEd: how many millions of public dollars go into creating a few dozen hybrid salmon annually while the other federal trust fish on the Connecticut founder?; how much, total, has been spent by taxpayers on salmon to get to this point after 43 years?

CRASC offers the public good-news tidbits about salmon, but turns away from informing people of a now-extinguished blueback herring run that returned a half million fish just twenty years back.  Dr. Slater today describes a blocked shad run as “stable,” though it’s half of what it was just ten years back.  It should be noted too that CRASC did nothing when an already-hobbled shad run past Turners Falls virtually tanked by 85% beginning in 1999, and has continued to bleed along at that level to this day.

That came almost a decade after an incomprehensible silence when, just upstream, the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant gained permission to by-pass its cooling towers and dump thermal effluent into the river just upstream of Turners Falls at Vernon, heating the river up a full five degrees.  Just another in a long line of disasters for the living, native fish runs, while CRASC led the salmon charge.  Vermont Yankee is now trying to dump still-hotter water in the river, and fish passage at the Vernon dam is hovering close to zero.

Why isn’t CRASC educating the public on these developments?

None of this is in keeping with a mandate for the protection of federal trust fish.

My reply to Dr. Slater’s assertions:

1. “The fact that we have regular annual returns of sea run salmon is a testament to the success of the core strategy of the program.”

Response: the most recent five-year returns for hybrid salmon at Holyoke dam, the first dam upstream from the sea on the main stem Connecticut are: 2005—132 fish; 2006—115 fish; 2007—107 fish; 2008—86 fish; 2009—60 fish.  There seems to be a pattern.  This is after four decades and at least a half billion dollars of stated expenses to create a run to replace an extinct native strain, gone since 1809.

The founding goal of the state and federal restoration partners in 1967 was a run of 38,000 salmon.  If 60 fish making it to the river’s first dam is considered success after four decades, what constitutes failure?

2. “These fish were not bred in test tubes or designed by computers—the program allows natural selection to act on the fish that are stocked;”

Response: today’s “Connecticut River” salmon are manufactured from eggs fertilized in the sterile environments of hatcheries, by mixing the genes of the few dozen returning hybrid-salmon trapped at Holyoke dam in as mathematically complex a way as they can–in the hopes of not creating inbred-hybrids.  This “natural selection” is guided by computers.  Hatchery fish have been plagued by diseases.  The survival rate of hatchery fry in the real world of rivers and the ocean is half that of wild, naturally-breeding salmon.  Hatcheries are stirring in weak fish, with poor survival traits.

You could liken hatcheries to giant “test tubes” but I didn’t use the term.  I wouldn’t argue with fish factory, or fish farm—a term I did use.

3.  “Salmon returns to the Connecticut are following broader North American population trends.”

Response: since these are hybrids and not a true species that evolved naturally over the course of centuries in Connecticut River tributaries, it is disingenuous to compare these fish with the native salmon strains further north that are hanging on by a thread.  Dr. Slater never mentions the one factor agreed upon by all: native Atlantic salmon are a COLD WATER SPECIES, and the planet is getting hotter.  CRASC won’t use the term “global warming,” it’s just one more third rail for this program.

The southern-most runs in northern New England are all endangered, and more than half are extinct.  The further north into Canada you go, the more viable the native salmon runs are.  In the North Atlantic, the footprint of the prey species salmon feed on are shrinking northward, closer to the cold waters of now-melting polar ice flows.

The Connecticut River’s runs disappeared first because this is one of the southernmost rivers they ever briefly colonized.  Hence, from a basic, common sense standpoint, this river is among the poorest choices for “restoration”—one where there were no fish to start with.

* Below, is what NOAA–the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, predicted for those endangered salmon runs further north in Maine, via research published in 2006.  NOAA is a member of CRASC:

“Even with current conservation efforts, returns of adult Atlantic salmon to the Gulf of Maine DPS rivers remain extremely low. The 2006 status review [pdf] [2.8 MB] reports an estimated extinction risk of 19% to 75% within the next 100 years for the Gulf of Maine DPS even when current levels of hatchery supplementation are considered.”

4. “Research has implicated large scale changes in ocean current and sea surface temperatures that correlate with the observed declines in marine survival.  Scientists believe that these changes are cyclical and we can only wait for ocean conditions to change and again become favorable for salmon.”

Response I: This is called Global Warming.

Response II: below is the cycle that Dr. Slater may be referring to.  Until recently the only substantive science on when, and why, Atlantic salmon colonized the Connecticut River for a few centuries landed solidly on the colder temperatures of the Little Ice Age in New England.  Today there is some new science reexamining archeological fragments that support a cyclical southern migration of salmon into the New England region of North America.  From what has been pieced together that migration appears to occur about every 4,000 – 5,000 years.  The salmon visit for a few hundred years before retreating to more northerly haunts.  So, according to Dr. Slater’s own statement of intent, it appears CRASC will be spending public money on this restoration until the climate changes for salmon again.  That could be a very long time.  This is available through your library:

“Atlantic salmon, archaeology and climate change in New England”

From Brian S. Robinson et al, at the Univ. of Maine, Orono, in The Journal of Archeological Science, October 2009.

Abstract

A paucity of archaeological remains of Atlantic salmon in Northeast North America has been cited as evidence that the species may have been present in the region only during and after the Little Ice Age (ca. 1450–1850 AD), one of coldest periods of the Holocene. However, significant problems of preservation, recovery and identification remain. Here, improved methods of identification use vertebra structure to distinguish salmon from trout, and strontium/calcium ratios to differentiate sea-run from landlocked salmon. In addition to the Little Ice Age, Atlantic salmon is identified in tightly dated contexts at 7000–6500 and 3500–3000 calendar years BP, during climate periods that were comparatively warm and wet.

Keywords: Atlantic salmon; Calcined bone; Strontium; Northeast; Climate change

5. “The salmon restoration program was designed to benefit all migratory fish in the Connecticut River.  Far from being ignored, the American shad has been the greatest beneficiary.”

Response: Well before there was even a fish lift at Holyoke, a million or more shad were spawning every spring in the lower Connecticut, and knocking their heads on the base of Holyoke dam.  The main “vein” of the Connecticut River is virtually blocked at Turners Falls–to a point that could be compared to a time just prior to the patient having a stroke.

* Fact: American shad is the first fish mentioned in the federal and 4-state partnership’s 1967 Statement of Intent.  Without those living shad as impetus—and fishermen catching them, no one ever could have come up with the misguided concept of creating a new salmon strain out of whole cloth on a river this far south.

6. “Fish passage built as part of the salmon restoration program now allows free access from the Atlantic to above Bellows Falls in Vermont.”

Response: Patently misleading!–98 % of the American shad swimming up the Connecticut River can proceed no further on their own than Turners Falls dam, the site they reached back in 1956.  The idea that this constitutes “free access all the way to Bellows Falls” is patently ridiculous.  The salmon proponents demanded, and got, fish ladders built for salmon at Turners Falls in 1980.  They are a disaster for the other public trust species slated for upstream restoration in CRASC’s mandate.  CRASC receives money and in-kind assistance from the power company operating Turners Falls/Northfield Mtn. for its salmon work.  Is it possible this is why they have never demanded the fish elevators that would benefit the other public trust species at the site?  According to contractual agreements, those changes could have been implemented over ten years ago, in 1999.

CRACS’s own partnered research (USFWS Conte Lab research, Alex Haro, et al) at Turners Falls unequivocally concluded that only about 1% of the American shad that reach there–sometimes less, are able to make it past Turners Falls dam.  They exhaust themselves trying to ascend salmon ladders.  Most give up, though the few that make it often languish for weeks in the Turners Falls canal, unable to exit upstream.

This is one of the key reasons why the failed shad and blueback herring runs into Vermont and New Hampshire are generally not discussed today.  In the past dozen years they have all but disappeared; the public has nearly forgotten them.  That’s convenient, since it’s only salmon that CRASC talks about upstream of Massachusetts.

7. “Meyer’s contention that we should ignore salmon and concentrate on shad perpetuates a discredited single species model of mismanagement that lead to the sort of myopic approach that, ironically, he accuses us of.”

Response: in fact, American shad are the ONLY remaining fish in CRASC’s “public trust fish” mandate that still exist in numbers large enough for people to actually SEE.

But by and large they must encounter them at Holyoke, because so few succeed past Turners Falls.

There are today no blueback herring making it even as far as Holyoke.  They are today all but extinct above that site.   And the public doesn’t see any salmon because returns are in the dozens.

OK: CRASC does host a “salmon day” for people to see a salmon each May at Holyoke dam, and sometimes Turners Falls.  But the public is shown a captive salmon, in a tank.  It’s a fish on leave from artificial spawning from the hatchery program.

So–why the upside-down logic?

Why is CRASC NOT sounding the public alarm about herring runs going extinct, nor the languishing shad runs essentially blocked anywhere upstream of where they could reach 55 years ago—the Turners Falls dam.  And these fish do have the same ocean problems Mr. Slater claims prevent the success of a non-existent salmon run.  Common sense would lead anyone to the conclusion that you fix the river first–and prioritize the still-viable, age-old, native, “public trust” runs.  That’s where you start.

8. “We continue working toward the resolution of the fish passage issues at the Turners Falls Dam.  In fact, the poor performing Cabot ladder will be replaced with a fish lift (like the very successful one at Holyoke) when the project gets a new federal hydroelectric license in 2017 and the fisheries agencies are working with the utility to get this project completed well before then.”

Response: this is parroting the response FirstLight officials made at a CRASC meeting in December.  I attended the meeting.  The meetings are full of promises.  CRASC and FirstLight representatives seem to have a comfortable relationship.  FirstLight finances some of CRASC’s salmon work. Before that ,Northeast Utilities–the long-time owners of the Turners/Northfield complex, did the same.

Mr. Slater is saying, de facto, that the other public trust fish—including the 98 % that can’t pass today, can languish in the river at the base of Turners Falls dam where they have been stuck since 1956.

Also, Dr. Slater knows that the license expires in 2018, not 2017.  If you read the public notes on CRASC meetings over the last decade (www.fws.gov/r5crc ), you’ll see again and again where CRASC deferred pushing for fish elevators at Turners Falls—while they continued accepting money and in-kind donations for salmon research from the dam’s owners.  CRASC’s excuse was always that they were waited for “new ownership.”

The Turners Falls/Northfield hydro operations have changed hands three times in the last decade.  CRASC, as always, has stood up for little more than protecting their salmon experiment throughout these changes.  The power company, which makes millions upon millions of dollars using the public’s river, tinkered a bit recently with the canal and dam.  They spent a nominal sum in an attempt to pass a few more fish through the dam without spending money on elevators and a real fix.  The power company chose their own engineers for the study, and then applied a band-aid to a deep, decades-old, wound choking off the river’s runs.  It came to naught.

CRASC’s shad/herring subcommittee–under the guidance of Dr. Slater, has not held a meeting in years.  Under the name of FirstLight, the Turners Falls/Northfield Mtn. hydro complex is now owned by GDF Suez, the world’s second largest utility company. What’s the excuse for not getting fish elevators and a working canal exit built today?

Dr. Slater well knows that fish elevators and exit fixes are already overdue by ten years under the CURRENT federal license.  The idea of making fish elevators part of the NEXT 40-year license continues the ongoing theft from present and future generations of their biological heritage.  It’s been acknowledged at the CRASC table that on-the-ground changes negotiated in new licenses often take years to implement.  Power companies are motivated to use the public’s river in a way that maximizes shareholder profits.  This comes at the expense of migratory fish.  CRASC’s current “wait, and maybe” position with the power company is a repudiation of their own mandate to safeguard the public trust and the living fish runs.  This is not demanding a contractual public right, it is capitulation.  This lack of resolve further robs the Connecticut and its native migratory fish of desperately-needed relief at Turners Falls.  Vermont and New Hampshire have paid a price for this for far too long.

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© Karl Meyer 2010

Foibles of the $47,000 fish: the Connecticut River Atlantic salmon restoration, a poor return on investment

(Note: edited versions of the following OpEd appeared in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on February 6, 2010, and in the Greenfield Recorder on February 3, 2010.)

“There will always be a hatchery component to the program.” That statement came at the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission’s December meeting.  Hatchery production must continue forever in order to produce a few returning salmon—74 fish this year.  The restoration program is now admittedly fish-farming.  This prompted the USFWS Region 5 CRASC representative to ask about hatchery costs: “How much are we spending per year?” Answer: “$ 3 – 4 million, for personnel and supplies alone.” ”How much does that amount to per fish?” That answer was left hanging.

In my dreams the Connecticut is as it was in 1991—a four-state river recovering its age-old biological connection to the sea.  May currents met a run of almost a million fish: 520,000 agitated American shad and 410,000 blueback herring lifted upstream at Holyoke dam.  There were 41,000 lampreys and a tiny return of 200 hybrid-Atlantic salmon.  Fifty-five thousand shad pushed past the dam at the Turners Falls-Northfield Mountain hydro complex; a record 37,000 shad wriggled up the Vernon ladder to Vermont and New Hampshire.  This was a legacy for coming generations.

The answer is $47,000 per salmon.  Federal hatchery expenditures alone came to $47,000 per fish in 2009.  Millions more went to genetic tests, smolt study, inoculations, electronic tagging, tracking and recapture—and state hatcheries cranking out salmon fry.  Add-in infrastructure and personnel and you can guess at a real cost per fish.

More questions arose after a presentation by USFWS researchers investigating if salmon returns would improve if hatcheries raised output–pouring millions more fry and smolts into the river.  Models predicted no more than about 50 additional fish would result from the different scenarios.  In no case would more than about 300 hybrid salmon return upstream.  The study also asked whether costs and low returns would continue to be acceptable to the public—and suggested public acceptance might be swayed if more spawned-out hatchery salmon were dumped in rivers for fishing.  “You are talking about a put-and-take fishery?” CRASC’s Chairman responded, incredulously.

“Put-and-take” is stocking fish in water bodies for anglers to yank out.  This is how the salmon program essentially works now.   Expenses aside, hatchery fish are massively disruptive to ecosystems and natural populations.  The difference here is there are no real returns to catch—though you could start charging $100,000 for a hybrid salmon license.  This led to another question: “What are the goals of this program?”  There was a lot of looking at shoes until the Connecticut representative offered, “Well, we didn’t have a specific number in mind.”

In 1967 this program set 38,000 as its goal for returning salmon–with an annual recreational catch of 9,600 fish.  The target for shad: one million at Holyoke, 850,000 at Turners Falls, and 750,000 passing Vernon dam.  Their objectives were clear: create “high quality sport fishing” and “provide for the long-term needs of the population for seafood.”  Despite its name CRASC remains responsible for all the fish in the herring family here–the core of the runs: alewives, blueback herring and the American shad, “founding fish” of this river’s restoration.  These fish fed people; an extinct salmon strain never anchored anyone’s larder.

But CRASC doesn’t stress accountability—laying claim instead to hatchery output and the latest low figures coming upstream as accomplishments.  A salmon-focused program with “no specific number in mind” costs our river dearly.  Today, two-thirds of that once-riotous shad bloom is gone; a scant 1 – 2 % of the tens of thousands of American shad that reach Turners Falls now squeeze through.  Just 16 passed Vernon dam in 2009–adjacent to warmed effluent poured in the river by Entergy’s nuclear plant.  Only 39 herring swam past Holyoke in 2009.  None have reached New Hampshire in a decade.

Occasionally I talk a little philosophy with Dr. Boyd Kynard of Amherst, MA.  Boyd’s a brilliant guy and a world-class expert on fish behavior, restoration, and the Connecticut’s migratory species.  This “retired” professor emeritus and USFWS biologist has his feet wet most of the year–consulting with China’s EPA-chief about Yangtze dams; fish passage on the Amazon; endangered sturgeon in Europe; or dam-disrupted ecosystems on the Columbia.  Something he once said about the resources going to lab study of juvenile salmon struck me, especially from someone not prone to generality, “I bet more money has been spent studying this single life-stage of this one species of fish, than the money spent on all the fish species in the world.”

It’s all about priorities.  There are bright, thoughtful people at CRASC too–people who say they would like to see a change of course.  I believe them.  The big problems are now acknowledged at the table: fish elevators 10 years past-due at Turners, with fluctuations from the Northfield plant scuttling passage at that dam; thousands of young shad killed when FirstLight drained its canal in September; thermal effluent dumped in at Vermont Yankee—with record low passage at the Vernon ladder.  These are all problems good on-the-ground science could begin turning around–on a path to a river we all could be proud of.

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Karl Meyer’s “The State of the Snake” appears in the spring issue of Sanctuary.  He tackles nighthawks and bald eagles for Birdwatcher’s Digest in May and November.

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An shorter version of this piece appears in the spring 2009 issue of Sanctuary Magazine as “Turners Falls Turnaround”

Stagnation at Turner Falls © 2008 by Karl Meyer

“It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries,” Thoreau, on shad blocked by a dam.

I first watched a riot of migrating American shad nervously school in the fishway windows at the Holyoke dam over a quarter century ago. That Connecticut River was brimming with life: agitated blueback herring, slithering sea lamprey, fidgeting American shad. It so inspired me, I have scarce missed a season since, visiting three and four times annually from mid-May to June. Sadly, that great migration is coming undone. Each spring sees less fish. From the first half million shad tallied there in 1984 and 720,000 witnessed in 1992, to just 153,000 arriving in spring 2008. From the 630,000 blueback herring counted at Holyoke in 1985, to just four score and nine last year.

In 1955 the nation’s first fish passage success saw 4,899 American shad lifted past the Holyoke dam, 86 miles from the sea. A simple, bucket-type elevator had restored a spawning run blocked since 1849. From Holyoke it was just 36 river miles to the next dam, Turners Falls—a barrier that would surely fall quickly to this elegant solution. An 1872 Supreme Court ruling against Holyoke mandated fish passage at dams. It recognized shad runs as a rightful resource of hungry upstream citizens. It meant hope for the suite of fish that had used the Connecticut’s spawning highway to and from the sea for millennia. They included federal trust fish—the endangered shortnose sturgeon, the shad, and the blueback herring, plus migrating eels and sea lamprey.

Today, shad runs at Holyoke are half what they were in the 1990’s; herring are gone. The most recent 5-year average for shad has dropped 42% compared to 1999-2003—from 267,000 to 155,000 fish. Thirty-six miles upstream at Turners Falls dam, the center of linked to hydro facilities including Northfield Mountain and Cabot Station, passage has plummeted over 80% since 1999, when energy deregulation came to those sites. Passage there hovers near 1%, yet the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission listed the Connecticut’s shad population as “stable” in 2007

To understand you have to look to the 42 year-old bureaucracy emphasizing the reestablishment of an extinct salmon run on the Connecticut. It began in 1967 on the heels of the 1965 Anadromous Fish Conservation Act, when the US Bureau of Sports Fisheries and Wildlife, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and fish commissioners of CT, MA, VT and NH assumed responsibility for the restoration and preservation of migratory fish here. That mission–extended by Public Law 98-138 in1983, recognized the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission, CRASC, as the agency of record. CRASC has a Shad Studies Subcommittee and a Fish Passage Subcommittee.

Driven by sport fishing interests, that agency focused on the Connecticut’s only missing species—the restoration of a leaping, but extinct strain of cold-loving salmon to a warming Connecticut. Though shad and herring naturally range from Labrador and Nova Scotia south to Florida, they received poor step-child status. Market research for 1967 projected a yearly harvest of 9,600 salmon–bringing $120 per fish from high-end anglers. Two foot long shad were a bargain at $3 each, with a projected harvest of 150,000 annually. After 42 seasons, 82 salmon returned past Holyoke in 2008.

Despite millions spent on research, hatcheries, genetics, and Byzantine stocking programs, more American shad were lifted at Holyoke in 1955 than all the salmon returned there in the program’s history. The Connecticut’s salmon strain was extinct by 1815. A pioneering species, it was a recent transplant–its southward spurt the result of an all-too-current phenomenon: climate change. Salmon biology and archeological data point to an arrival on the changing Atlantic currents of a brief, northern hemisphere climate aberration, the Little Ice Age, 1400 AD – 1800 AD.

In 1992 Catherine Carlson said this in a dissertation in the Anthropology Department at University of Massachusetts. Carlson was doing masters archeology work at the University of Maine when she was surprised by the absence of salmon bones in digs at coastal, estuarine, and inland-river fishing sites. Her work impressed professor emeritus Dena Dincauze, head of UMass, Amherst’s Anthropology Department, who recruited her to continue that research at UMass.

Carlson’s thesis, The Atlantic Salmon in New England History and Prehistory: Social and Environmental Implications, showed the salmon’s importance in colonial New England had been largely over-stated by sport fish minded interpreters. My own research at Antioch New England University in 1995 bore that out after extensive examination of the Sylvester Judd (1789-1860) Manuscript at the Forbes Library in Northampton, MA. Judd is a primary source for colonial history, natural history and genealogy of Connecticut River towns from northern Connecticut to Turners Falls. His records and interviews with men who had fished opposite Holyoke in the 1750s and 1760s led him to conclude salmon “were always few in number compared to the shad.”

Carlson surveyed seventy-five digs across the northeast in which fish bones had been identified at least down to their genus. A 5,000 year record revealed regular use of shad and river herring as a food source at many locations. But just a single salmon bone from Maine was positively identified. At one Turners Falls site, 590 fish bone fragments were uncovered. All were shad or river herring.

Carlson outlined the Little Ice Age here—showing the salmon’s migration this far south was driven by that brief climate oscillation. Dams and pollution were minor factors in its Connecticut demise–as salmon still survived further north on Maine’s long-dammed Penobscot. Her findings were not welcomed at CRASC. Their 25 year-old effort—annually hatchery-raising millions of salmon fry from eggs; fattening smolts, and stocking it all in tributaries was languishing. Carlson had noted the taxpayer costs, $80 million by 1989, and that “One Fish and Wildlife study has predicted that costs between $120 million and $450 million will be spent between 1989 and 2008 to make the restoration effort successful.”

“Some of them were quite hostile to me,” Dr. Carlson recalls sixteen years later. After leading departments at two universities she’s now a consultant in her native Vancouver, B.C. “No amount of manipulating is going to change the environmental conditions for the reintroduction of that fish,” she says. Climate science agrees. Asked why her work didn’t receive its full due, she cites several factors, “First, it was archeology, not biology; you are trying to prove a negative—that salmon weren’t there.” Being female in a male dominated field wasn’t helpful, “It was all political. It didn’t have much to do with the actual science. My sense is that they were just so heavily invested in it.”

But Carlson’s findings couldn’t be rejected out of hand, particularly since Dr. Boyd Kynard, fisheries biologist at the USGS’s Conte Anadromous Fish Lab in Turners Falls was on her committee. An associate UMass professor, Kynard had a reputation as an expert in migratory fish behavior and fish passage. Today he consults with governments on fish passage and rare sturgeon species on major rivers in China, Europe and Brazil. His credentials couldn’t be impugned. Carlson’s work remains largely unchallenged today. In 2002, her “absent-salmon” conclusions received note in John McPhee’s shad tribute,” The Founding Fish.”

This spring thousands of Connecticut Valley kids will raise salmon eggs in school–guided by USFWS personnel, trout organizations, teachers and college instructors who recruit many for fry stocking. Programs like Adopt a Salmon and the Atlantic Salmon Egg Rearing Program (ASERP) are neatly tailored to classroom math and science requirements. It’s an easy fit for teachers and has great PR value for a restoration program always lobbying for funds. The USFWS Connecticut River Coordinator sometimes dresses as a salmon at these programs, which reach into167 watershed schools. In Maryland today, kids are hatching shad and raising American eels in their classrooms—learning, at least, about the real problems of viable species on local rivers.

Adult, spawned-out hatchery salmon are stocked to lakes, ponds and rivers in watershed states here. This agency PR gives weekend fishing families and trophy anglers a taste for big introduced fish, but no context for understanding faltering native stocks. But, complexities are mounting. Didymo, an introduced, smothering algae, a.k.a. “rock snot”, was recently found above the federal salmon hatchery on the White River in Bethel, Vermont. Didymo carpets river bottoms, choking off oxygen. Since the White River is used as a direct hatchery water source, its operations were temporarily shut down–lest didymo be transported via stocking.

This spring none of the eggs; six-million fry, and hatchery smolts seeded into Connecticut River tributaries will come from “wild” salmon stock. All the “wild” sea-run salmon had to be destroyed a year back because a highly contagious virus, IPN, was found in salmon at federal hatcheries. Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis, deadly to fry and smolts, is a by-product of fish farming. Farmed salmon are escaping ocean pens and infecting North Atlantic strains. IPN got into the new salmon hybrids migrating back to the Connecticut—fish that are recaptured for breeding. “Biosecurity” programs are now deployed at all hatcheries, as stocking programs are potential vectors for new disease.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that CRASC has known for 30 years that some of the biggest restoration problems center at the fishways and generating facilities linked at Turners Falls dam. They helped create them. In the late 70’s, those state fish commissioners and federal officials insisted Northeast Utilities install fish ladders there based on Pacific salmon runs on the massive Columbia River—this, despite evidence those ladders might not work for shad and herring. Two ponderously-long ladders and a narrow gatehouse exit were installed at Turners Falls in 1980. Millions were spent. The few arriving salmon passed easily, but just 10% or less of arriving shad succeeded.

Kept quiet, that single-species blunder effectively locked meaningful runs out of Vermont and New Hampshire habitats for at least the next twenty years. Completion of those prescribed fishways prevented any revisit of the issue for two decades under the site’s 40-year FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) license, which expires in 2018. FERC regulates operations at mainstem facilities and is tasked with enforcing protections for federal trust fish. Licenses can be reopened and FERC can halt operations if conditions injure runs. FERC receives information from CRASC–which recently characterized the Connecticut’s shad population as “relatively stable.”

Incredibly, a 5-year, CRASC partnered study begun in 1999 by the USGS’s Conte Fish Lab found that half the shad passing Holyoke “attempt but fail” to make it past Turners Falls: “Passage of American shad through the fishway complex at Turners Falls is poor (less than 1% in some years), and may be having a substantial limiting effect on the Connecticut River population as a whole.” This profound development—shad had plummeted from over 10,000 shad annually to around 2,000, was also left below decks. That drop was on the heels of energy deregulation at the hydro facilities owned by Northeast Utilities throughout the study. Some 70,000 shad were likely turned away at Turners Falls last spring.

What changed to cause the drop between 1999 and 2000 that continues to this day? Possibly something to do with the newly-deregulated, electricity “spot market” generation at the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project, sister operation to the Turners Falls dam and canal. Just five miles upstream, Northfield generates upwards of 1,000 megawatts of electricity by pumping water out of the Connecticut’s bed and into a 5.5 billion gallon mountaintop reservoir, and sending it back through turbines in downstream surges according to demand and spikes in the market price. Turbines for the 300 acre reservoir can reverse from sucking up water to sending millions of gallons downstream in minutes.

Water level fluctuations in that Turners Falls “pool” average 3.5 feet daily, but can range to 9 – 10 feet in the course of weekly operations. Those pumping and flushing effects through Turners Falls are felt by migrating shad and the river’s only breeding population of endangered shortnose sturgeon–slugs of water that must be reacted-to by operators at the Holyoke dam, 36 miles downstream.

Whatever the cause of the new Turners crash, urgency isn’t apparent at CRASC’s public meetings. Annually there is tinkering at the fishways; and a few truckloads of shad are dumped upstream to maintain a biological pulse for the run. But the partnership–the USFWS, Conte Lab, the National Marine Fisheries Service, reps from CT, MA, NH, and VT, watched this new disaster unfold and never brought it forward as their public trust. They left the public ignorant about the fish; the river. In fact they chose to “throttle back” shad monitoring at Turners, later stating in an April 3, 2008, discussion of failed herring returns, “There is less concern about the shad population since it has been relatively stable, though at a lower level than historic peaks.”

CRASC didn’t press FERC to intervene. FERC–who could reopen the license, shut down operations, or force a return to conditions that recently squeezed 10,000 shad through Turners, didn’t enforce. The eroding shad migration on the Connecticut can apparently wait for 2018.

Recently Dr. Raymond Bradley spoke on climate change here at Greenfield Community College. Decades back Bradley partnered in groundbreaking science–using polar ice core data to substantiate early signs of climate change. Included in those findings was a now-notorious “hockey stick graph,” vividly depicting spikes in greenhouse gases and temperatures. The Bush Administration tried to quash those findings. In 2007 Bradley, who directs the UMass Climate Research Center–along with Al Gore and other partnering climate scientists, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

This night Bradley, my “Climatology” instructor in the late-70s, has more sobering news—that Massachusetts and Vermont temperatures will likely align with the climate of today’s North Carolina and Virginia in just two generations. It’s a cold comfort message to deliver–one that would be small solace to Catherine Carlson, I’m sure. Still, basic biology shows that American shad would be at home in those climates; and, with help, herring could be at home there too.

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Karl Meyer is author of Wild Animals of North America, winner of a 2008 Teachers’ Choice Award for Children’s Books. His latest, Dog Heroes, is out from Storey Publishing.

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This essay first appeared in early May 2009 in several Connecticut River Valley newpapers, as well as the Worcester Telegram.

Towards a New River; or, How to keep a dead fish alive

© 2009 by Karl Meyer

Charles Darwin was born in 1809, the year the last wild fish from a minor strain of cold-loving salmon died out on a warming Connecticut River. Half a century later, On the Origin of Species placed evolutionary theory and reasoned science at the forefront of how we perceive our place among the world’s plants and animals. For 42 years now over half a billion public dollars has been spent turning the Connecticut into a four-state science experiment to create a new strain of “wild” Atlantic salmon from hatchery spawned fish. It has failed. It’s time for a new idea on the Connecticut River.

Predictions in 1967 from the bureaucracy that became today’s Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC) promised an annual angler’s dream of 9,600 returning salmon. Returns average 140 fish. Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Today, without the six-million hatchery fry dumped into tributaries annually by fisheries biologists, trout interests, scout leaders, teachers and school kids, the few fish that limp back each year would die off in an evolutionary heartbeat.

For decades CRASC has been responsible for the Connecticut’s age-old runs of American shad and blueback herring—part of a suite of “federal trust” fish that include the shortnose sturgeon. The herring run is essentially dead—from 630,000 fish passing Holyoke in 1985, to 89 fish returned in 2008. In 1992, Holyoke hoisted 720,000 shad at its lift. A decade back runs averaged 300,000 fish. Just 153,110 American shad returned in 2008.

Two hundred years after Darwin’s birth its time to stop thinking we are smarter than rivers; smarter than fish. The Connecticut was the southern-most river in the salmon’s biological footprint. In 1992, Dr. Catherine Carlson’s UMass anthropology thesis revealed a gaping absence of salmon in the region’s archeological record. Thousands of bones covering a 5,000 year sweep were identified as shad or herring. Across all sites–including 590 bones from two sites at Turners Falls, MA, just a single bone from Maine was positively identified as salmon.

Scores of Connecticut River town histories record 17th, 18th and 19th century farmers crowding riversides each May, confident in leaving with a supply of shad. But salmon was a new visitor. It arrived with the Little Ice Age–a period of cold winters and brief, chilling summers which lasted in New England from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s. When cold conditions warmed, salmon runs died out, helped off the stage by the first dams across the Connecticut. They persisted on the colder, dammed rivers in Maine.

The salmon limping back today are evolved in tanks, their genetics guided by computers. They are not what are best for our river. Hatchery fish mask the real problems of rivers—foundering native populations, warming currents, deteriorating habitats, and blocked access upstream and down. Hatcheries are now potential dispersal points for exotic plagues like deadly IPN and smothering didymo—which recently caused closures at federal sites in Sunderland, MA and Bethel, VT..

The historic significance of salmon here has long been overblown by lobby interests wielding clout far in excess of their numbers. In 2008 CRASC representatives from the US Fish & Wildlife Service scheduled “outreach” visits to Congressional offices at a rate of more than one per week. State fisheries managers annually dump fat, spawned-out hatchery salmon in lakes to whet angler appetites for big, exotic fish. Teachers bring salmon eggs into classrooms, where thousand of kids participate in mini-hatchery programs tailored to math and science goals. Shad and herring losses go unexplored.

It’s time to stop holding the Connecticut hostage to this experiment–conducted largely without public input, published budget data, or notice of public meetings. All but 1% of migrating shad are now blocked at Turners Falls–virtually next door to the Dept. of Interior’s million-dollar Conte Fish Lab created to protect runs of “federal trust” fish. That information never reached the public.

In October, Dr. Ray Bradley, Director of the UMass Center for Climate Studies, spoke at Greenfield Community College. I had Ray for “Climatology” in 1979. He is one of the team of scientists awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for documenting unprecedented climatic warming—information the Bush Administration suppressed. Our new President believes in evolution, science, and eliminating programs that don’t make sense. Dr. Bradley illustrated his talk that night with a graph showing Vermont and Massachusetts mirroring the climates of Virginia and North Carolina just two generations hence—hardly salmon country. Ages ago shad and blueback herring evolved to spawn in rivers as far south as central Florida. Its time we evolved too.

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Karl Meyer’s Wild Animals of North America won a 2008 Teachers’ Choice Award for Children’s Books. His “Turners Falls Turnaround” is in the spring issue of Sanctuary.

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Confluence: a river blog © 2009 by Karl Meyer

Confluence: entry one, January 28, 2009

I spent an hour walking in the snowy woods along the edges of a ridge that presides above the confluence of the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers. I walk there frequently. It’s a jumble of shorter and longer trails, some up, some down. You can pick your length and pretty much get what you want from a walk just ten minutes beyond the center of town. It’s an extension of the Pocumtuck Ridge, an ancient basalt escarpment that extends two miles to the north, and maybe six miles south of here. It’s interrupted by the water gap here where the Deerfield was forced to enter the Connecticut from an upstream angle due to this ancient rock formation. There is energy along this corridor.

As I walk the morning is cold, in the teens and sunny, but otherwise unremarkable. A few tufted titmice are beginning to hold forth with extended notes, foretelling their anticipation of spring—still months distant. If you take any one of the trails diverging from the main paths you can generally have a solitary walk in these woods. Noise from the outside world is not excluded completely, but it is generally a distant muffle against the sound of your own footsteps. As I circle down and then up along the shoulder of the ridge tumbling toward the Deerfield, I note through the trees for the first time that the river, half-obscured by my angle looking south from this ridge, is snow covered and frozen. I don’t recall that from last year—this being my second winter walking these trails.

What are remarkable, apart from the prints of snowshoes, skis, people and dogs along this trail, are the easily identifiable deviations of the wild creatures. Of most note are the tracks of coyotes which lead off in bee-line fashion at steep angles from the beaten paths, veering toward ridge lines and bounding down hillsides as they go about their wild business. It is pair bonding time for this species. These woods are busy each night as dusk descends. Rising up the hill from a site near the mouth of the Deerfield, comes a steady low hum and then banging echoes of a metal recovery works. Beyond that and opposite on the Deerfield sits the sprawling and sometimes busy track grid of the East Deerfield rail yard—still a significant switching station here in the Northeast. From there the rumbles of idling locomotives and the chain-slamming start-ups of train vibrate the air.

As I finish my loop here I am angling up hill with a view north toward a gap in the ridge with pure blue sky looming above. Something pulls my eyes in that direction and I’m struck with the absolute blue of the sky spreading beyond that snow covered lookout. It is such a deep blue I am momentarily dumbfounded—the stuff that you might pick out of the pure selections offered from a computer program for brochure printing. Only this is the real thing: deep, clear, clean blue. It is a saturated natural canvass, and one that I scarcely remember coming across before. There must be some interplay of sun, snow, and ridgeline color, and the angle of late-morning January light that has caused it, but all I can think is that it is magnificent.

I’m trying to capture this in my head, azure?—cerulean??—I’ve never been good with color descriptors. A speck glides into view against that canvass. It slides across with a flap or two of its wings, and then simply floats northward above the ridge. Though it is perhaps a seven hundred feet up there is no mistaking this raptor. White tail, white head, dark body—strong, flat-winged glide: bald eagle. I count back in my head and realize that this will be the ten year anniversary of the return of naturally nesting bald eagles to the shores of the Connecticut. That nest is less than three miles from here. It’s possible that’s where this bird is heading. Against the blue I’m reminded of the eleventh hour attempt by the Bush Administration to turn back many of the tenets that brought this species back here for the first time in over a century—the Endangered Species Act.

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A Fun Depression © 2009 by Karl Meyer

A Fun Depression: blogging through

Entry 1: January 25, 2009

Since early fall–when the scale of this financial debacle was becoming glaringly clear, I have mentioned to friends the idea of making this a “fun depression.” Heck, by then most of us had already been steeped in a stew of depression for the past eight years. The idea of a depression was nothing novel. In all cases the “fun” idea was favorably received: a small attempt at a bailout for the psyche for what was at hand—and of course for those gloomy days predicted on the horizon. So, this is my call to arms: let’s have a fun depression!

This one doesn’t have to be your parent’s depression; your grandparent’s market crash. Let’s wade into this downturn with the idea that there’s room for a few laughs. There is no need for the rest of us here in the rabble to OWN the damned thing. Let’s have a little fun with this ugly puppy, engineered by the greedy. Let’s let THEM be grim for a bit, and we’ll keep plugging along with a joke, and a story, and a grin from time to time. Like the last one, this one just ain’t ours. And once again, all we have to do is figure out how to endure it!

I’ve been trying to decide on a first Fun Depression entry, and it’s been somewhat daunting. You don’t want to head out on a downturn with a wrong turn. But then, over-thinking things has a whole rash of its own pitfalls. So, here goes:

Blog One: “A lone swallow in a dreary winter.”

“A lone swallow in a dreary winter,” I heard someone use this phrase this morning on the radio. It’s possible you’ve already guessed the chap was British. I was delighted upon hearing the phrase—so descriptive, quotable, delivered in that clipped way. I looked it up, but could not track down a specific reference. Still, it does have a literary flavor. His subject matter—birds, seasonality? Actually, and you might have guessed this too, he was talking about the financial market. That lone swallow referred to was a British bank called Barkley’s, I believe. It appears they actually made some money this quarter—as opposed to other banks in England teetering on the edge of default. Hence–his metaphor.

But gosh I liked hearing it. Loved thinking about that “lone swallow” out there. Here in Western Massachusetts the idea of a swallow—flocking, or on its own, in a winter with a good foot-plus of snow cover on the ground, is quite the image. A swallow set against these sub-freezing January days is a cheery thought indeed. Too bad he had to confuse such a splendid bird family with the cold realities of the banking industry. That is a mixed metaphor. Still, you can’t argue with his dreary winter characterization. I’m not quite sure why I let these “market” programs into my living room any more—they were the ones that helped whistle us right into the graveyard. I’ll have to be quicker on the button next time.

And yet, I like a lone swallow in a dreary winter. It has a utility to it, as well as some poetry. It could be describing that last swig from the bottle in some chilled January cabin in the north—or an apartment like my own for that matter. The beginning of a novel? The final act of a desperate debtor or market manipulator?? In the end, I’ve taken it to refer to my own winter circumstance. Here, I’ve deconstructed it into a mix of the literal and figurative in my own life: my little, suction-cupped bird feeder, fastened to the front window of my living room. It has been there for six weeks, full of seed. I saw two chickadees visit that first week, and the shadow of what might have been a nuthatch. Though it’s still full, they have been the sum total of my feathered visitors. I’d put the thing up to brighten my dark winter days.

As it turns out, they were my lone swallow in a dreary winter. Plural, of course. And yet, I haven’t minded missing them—the birds. Much. I’d debated picking up this rather modest thing—a stand alone perch that holds maybe a cup of sunflower seed smack against the middle of a west window. The neighborhood is rabid with gray squirrels, so this was the only site where I could hope to dodge the marauding rodents in any meaningful way. And, I knew having a few birds bounce around just beyond the glass pane would brighten these long, cold days.

So, I spent a little cash—which is somewhat scarce at the moment, and bought both feeder and seed. Once installed and filled, I’d waited. And waited. It took most of a week before I caught the quick flit and perch of first one chickadee, then another. They came in succession, stopping, glancing around for predators, then craning in for a seed and quickly flying off. “I’m in business,” I thought. These visits came closely on the heels of that shadowy retreat of what I believe was a nuthatch (white breasted, likely—I just got a glimpse.)

Unexpectedly, sadly, that was it. All she wrote. A lone swallow in a dreary winter. Day in and day out, that little, clear-plastic feeder sits smack in the center of my living room window–suctioned on invisible glass like some strange space ship hanging in the air. It’s still full of seed and promise. Day in, day out, it remains unvisited by birds; unmolested by squirrels. I guess I’ve taken to seeing it as a fun depression’s first artifact. It fits the bill. Its promise was of purple finches, goldfinches, chickadees, cardinals, maybe the odd red-breasted nuthatch. What it delivered were two minute- waltzes, from a pair of skittish visitors. Lone swallows in a dreary winter.

Well, toughen up old chap. Chin up old boy. Barkley’s is paying a dividend, and if I look far enough across the parking lot my friends Tracey and Michael have a gaggle of birds at their feeders. Perhaps I should be grateful there’s been no run on my bank.

In the end, my feeder is just exactly what it was when I brought it here: the promise of birds. This is Plato’s quintessential bird feeder; his perfect chair. It’s purely, the notion of itself. The longer it sits there, the more I appreciate it. It’s a time capsule, really, at this point. In a week it will be February. The sap will run. Six weeks from then, it will be March—my little space-ship feeder still suctioned and full at the window. A week after that, we’ll be approaching the equinox. I may just be looking out through the window past that feeder then, and there it may be—a lone swallow in a dreary winter. As promised. This one will be a tree swallow.

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The following article appears in the Fall 2008 edition of Santuary, from the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Fall’s well-fed bears, by Karl Meyer

I live bear country, Franklin County, west of the Connecticut River. Rolling up into the heart of the Berkshires are the deep woods and mature nut and pine tree habitats that state biologists say are prime bear habitat. And black bears are thriving in Massachusetts, after their near extinction here in the 19^th century. They’ve long since recrossed the Connecticut, swimming east. And today, though a good deal of it is sub-optimal suburban habitat, most people living beyond the crescent of Boston’s Rt. 128 again reside in towns visited by bears. Fearful of humans; largely hidden, they are out fattening up for hibernation right now.

“For bear, they be common, being a great black kind of bear which be most fierce in strawberry time, at which time they have young ones.” Thus wrote William Wood in New England’s Prospect, published in London in 1634, on the heels of his four-year New World sojourn. Residing in the fledgling settlements along today’s North Shore, of bears nearing winter, Wood observed, “Food being scant in those cold and hard times, they live only by sleeping and sucking their paws, which keepeth them as fat as they are in summer.”

And fat they must be. In late fall bears need to head to den sites with enough accumulated calories to cover the 30% of body weight that simply vanishes with the energy expended in hibernation. That fat is in large part the result of the black bear’s age-old association with nut trees: white oak, beech, red oak, hickory, and chestnut. These are the preferred fall buffet for bears. But if things get tough—if the mast crop fails as it does cyclically, black bears are wonderfully resilient. They’ll make up part of that deficit with grubs, roots, leaves, seeds, and berries, and supplement–or even substitute that lost forage with trips to isolated corn fields, orchards, or unsecured trash bins.

“Bears are omnivores,” emphasizes Massachusetts wildlife biologist Jim Cardoza, who has been the state’s Bear Project Leader since 1970, “They eat almost everything.” But wild game is rare, he says, “It’s hard for them to prey on live animals.” They do some scavenging though, and on rare occasions easy opportunities may tempt older males and they’ll prey on a penned-up goat, or get into a cage full of rabbits. Mostly it’s the nut crop they want in fall—the mast, plus wild cherry and the other succulent forest foods that Cardoza calls soft mast. “If necessary,” he notes, “they’ll eat whatever is: one, abundant; two, nutritious; and three, tastes good.”

Trackers and photographers often study bears. Ask MassWildlife photographer Bill Byrne and retired professional tracker—now turned nature photographer, Paul Rezendes, what would be heaven for a fall black bear, and their portraits nearly merge. Years of anticipating the needs of their quarry solicit these settings, “I think of a beautiful, old beech forest with some big canopies and big, old hemlocks—which are really good for cubs,” says Rezendes, “If there’s trouble the cubs and that bear can go up into the hemlocks and you’ll never see them. We’ll call that bear paradise.” Unapprised, Bill Byrne almost mirrors the image, simply adding in oaks, “A secluded oak and hemlock ridge, with a bumper crop of acorns and a scattering of beechnuts. The hemlock would provide security–I could feed undisturbed all day.”

A few decades after William Wood’s New England’s Prospect was published, a minister’s wife in Lancaster, Massachusetts was roused by a fierce attack on an icy February 10, 1676. It led to her three-month captivity among rebelling Native Americans. Mary Rowlandson lived and struggled alongside the embattled Nipmucs, Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and Pocumtucks of King Philip’s War until she was ransomed in early May. She experienced their desperate, subsistence flight from the standpoint of a virtual slave–retelling her story in The Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson, a colonial “best seller.” Rowlandson was dealt indignity, abuse and hunger–as well as unexpected kindness, while held by her captors. One turned out to be the Metacom, King Philip himself.

In early March the fat and meat of a bear, likely killed at its den, greatly fortified Rowlandson. She had met King Philip, who she could converse with in English, and did “extra” artisan labor for him and other captors—knitting, in exchange for food and small privileges. She shared a dinner with Metacom, “He asked me to make a cap for his boy, for which he invited me to dinner. I went, and he gave me a pancake, about as big as two fingers. It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear’s grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life.”

Starvation was never far off for the pastor’s wife, or the Indians. Often she was reduced to begging, and hoarding tidbits, “I was fain to go and look after something to satisfy my hunger, and going among the wigwams, I went into one and there found a squaw who showed herself very kind to me, and gave me a piece of bear. I put it into my pocket, and came home, but could not find an opportunity to broil it, for fear they would get it from me, and there it lay all that day and night in my stinking pocket.” Her treasure nearly rancid, she went back, “In the morning I went to the same squaw… I asked her to let me boil my piece of bear in her kettle, which she did, and gave me some ground nuts to eat with it: and I cannot but think how pleasant it was to me.”

Mary Rowlandson survived her ordeal; and those samplings of bear loom large in a hunger-filled memoir. Metacom and many of his people ultimately perished in their struggle for a homeland. Partly as a result, the following century saw the Massachusetts landscape wholly remade in the image of old Europe. Forests fell; fresh farms blanketed ancient woodland terrain. Wolves, beavers, bears, and wild turkeys quickly paid the price for an expanding drive for land and timber. Squirrels, cottontails, and the occasional deer, were what remained for game.

But black bears are survivors in every sense of the word. Nearly extirpated when hunters sought them in their last remaining stands, they somehow hung on in rugged Berkshire reaches into the 20^th century. But even in that sheltering place they witnessed the demise of one of their ancient staples, the American chestnut. Still, in the late-1970s when New England forests were slowly reaching maturity once more, those oaks, beeches, and hickories churned out ample mast. That, along with a supply of soft mast, ants, grubs, leaves, shoots, bird’s eggs, berries, mice, frogs, and sundry other omnivorous treats, helped the bear population begin to expand.

Today, from a core population of perhaps a hundred bears three decades back, the Massachusetts black bear population is estimated at nearly 3,000 animals according to Jim Cardoza. It’s thought to be growing by 8 % annually. The densest populations remain west of the Connecticut River, but bears are now fairly common in the central part of the state. Sightings in eastern Worcester County regularly make the news.

According to fact sheets from the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, average weights for Bay State bears are 140 lbs. and 230 lbs., for adult sows (females) and males (boars) respectively. These forest and swamp omnivores–basically the size of adult humans, have evolved a survival strategy that emphasizes retreat, into trees or dense cover. Untempted by the baits of human trash, bird seed, and untended food sources, they skillfully avoid human conflict. But to a bear, the scent of “grill grease” is tantamount to the mention of McDonalds to a 10 year old in a car, says Jim Cardoza. When bears develop a taste for our human food traps, they risk paying a high price as “problem” bears. The problem is that we’re baiting these animals.

Bear sightings are always remarkable. They bring people face to face with the presence of “other.” And when that other is a black bear, it usually stops an observer dead in their tracks. Most sightings are strikingly brief, recounted using terms like “big,” “small,” “lumbering,” or “scampering.” Though the largest, oldest, males may reach well over 400 lbs., most are much smaller. In the Bay State, upright black bears rarely rise to over 5-1/2 feet, and they are notorious for their response to most human intrusions: they run for cover.

Paul Rezendes knows the places where black bears run. He’s tracked them to dens, tree refuges; feeding sites. He knows their resilience—having witnessed their fall movements when food is plenty and noted their resourcefulness when its scarce, “They gravitate to whatever mast crop is producing heavily.” Rezendes says. He remembers one fall in the Savoy area where the mast crop had failed, the acorns and beech, “But there was this enormous crop of ash seeds. And the bears were climbing up in there and tearing those trees apart. I’ve never seen that before or after.” Given a choice though, Rezendes says bears seem to prefer beech nuts, “Even after the snow falls I’ve seen them digging through over a foot of snow to get to beech nuts. They probably smell them–they’ll even put off sleeping if there’s a good crop.”

Rezendes also remembers a particularly difficult fall for bears in New York State, “I used to do some tracking programs in the Catskills, and they had a mast failure there, with the oaks.” But the keen noses of bears led them to a bread bakery, where they repeatedly rifled through dumpsters, “They had a heck of time. When the mast fails, the bears start taking chances—start going places where they don’t normally go.” Bears are generally not risk-takers, they like the security of mature woods. If those woods happen to be oak, “The bears gravitate toward white oaks,” says Paul Rezendes, “If there’s lots of activity in a mixed oak area, you’ll probably find clawing and bite marks on the white oaks.” Another fall favorite is wild cherry, “They just love the stuff.”

State photographer Bill Byrne has been shooting pictures for MassWildlife for over three decades. He’s taken a lot of bear pictures in Franklin County. He’s also witnessed the seasonal diet change, from heavy foraging on late-summer blueberries to a nearly instant switch to mast—in one instance turning to acorns from red oak, “As soon as those first acorns were falling, they lost interest in the berries.“ Byrne says it’s all about getting the best pre-winter calories, “Its like how much fat can I gain before I have to sleep?” He’s witnessed other evidence of the black bear’s fall drive for calories; the signs of their foraging–they rip open paper wasp nests. “Insects are pretty high in protein.” Black bears also dig up ground wasp nests, “The bear will just open that up and expend the energy to consume the larvae. It’s not a big expenditure of energy–but it’s impressive how they’ll accept the pain of the stings.”

When mast and forage is less than optimal, these opportunists sometimes turn to other available soft “mast”: isolated cornfields. “When there is high productivity in berries, in grapes, in acorns, there’s less pressure on the corn fields,” observes Byrne, who says 90% of his observations are in Franklin County. But damage to feed corn is a regular occurrence. Many seasoned farmers just accept it as the price of doing business in bear country, telling Byrne, “I know they get my corn, so I just plant more.” It’s often the secluded fields that are hit most, he notes, “So some are planting more crops that keep an opening around the corn. They’ll seed-in alfalfa.”

Bill Byrne holds black bears in high regard. He wants people to know that conflicts with bears can be minimized if humans make good choices, “The more people can learn about them, the more they can actually protect the bears.” The photographer sees situations where people are actually putting out food to attract them, “That usually spells a death warrant for bears.” Jim Cardoza will tell you that bears have a long memory, returning season after season to check on an easy cache of sunflower seed—long after a wildlife enthusiast may have learned to take down the bird feeders between April and December. For bee farmers with hives and honey to protect, the standards for electric fencing are changing, “Some bears are learning to negotiate anything that is not hugely hot, “says Bill Byrne, “5000 volts now seems to be the standard if you’re going to protect hives. They are right up there with black angus.”

Still, with thick fall woods around, and good mast, most people won’t be encountering bears from year to year—even if they are in the neighborhood. Suburban sprawl and thoughtless human behavior will certainly be a continuing cause for difficulty as bears go about fall foraging. The American beech continues to struggle under a series of weakening plagues, and the relatively rapid loss of the eastern hemlock to the scourge of the wooly adelgid will present these shy creatures with a new security problem: the shielding branches of their favorite refuge trees are disappearing.

But, with winter approaching, it’s pleasant to contemplate this late-fall portrait, rendered by Bill Byrne. A friend had called, saying he’d discovered a bear den. It was basically the remains of an overturned tree–the base of the root ball. The two approached slowly, upwind, and watched a very large male from a distance. “It was December, there was snow on the ground,” Byrne says, “But it turned out to be a warm day, and he was dozing on top.” This bear was “sated,” Byrne recalls, “just waiting to put up the do not disturb sign.” Fascinated, they observed quietly, the photographer noting the impressive size of the head; the creature’s slow movements, “The males tend to hibernate last,” Byrne notes. But this would not be that day. As they stared, the logy bear roused a bit, “Then he turned around, like a dog, and lay down again.” For now, this bruin was just napping on top of the covers.

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