February 9, 2010

About a month ago, a harlequin duck appeared in the Farmington River on a stretch of water that parallels Garden Street. It is a most unusual place for the harlequin, winter or summer, and the question now is, how long will it remain?

Harlequin ducks spend summers in the far north, often well above the Arctic Circle, and prefer rushing, broken water. I’ve seen them in whitewater on the North Klondike River in the Yukon Territory. In winter, they prefer rocky coastlines, where they can be seen bobbing among the rocks even as the surf crashes around them. They are, it appears, very hardy creatures. In southern New England, one fairly reliable place to spot a harlequin is Sachuest Point in Rhode Island, where a small flock can often be seen in winter.

The harlequin duck on the Farmington River

A sighting in Connecticut is highly unusual, and especially on an inland river in winter. Hundreds of birders have come by to get a look at this single, male harlequin, which is easily identified. Male harlequins have a most distinctive pattern, with lyrical swooshes of white plumage and white dots.

Mergansers, mallard ducks, and Canada geese are abundant along the Farmington River in winter, and this single harlequin sometimes is among them. We are left to wonder where in the north it spent the summer, and where it was headed before it decided to stop on the Farmington. Did it somehow get separated from a migrating flock of harlequins? One assumes so, and this harlequin of Farmington most likely is one of nature’s little dramas.

December 15, 2009

Paddling my kayak on Dunning Lake in Farmington, Ct., one day late last year I passed close to shore near an apartment complex and happened upon a middle-aged man crouched at the edge of the water. He was washing a paint tray and a roller brush. In front of him was a milky-white plume easily 15-feet by 15-feet and expanding. I was outraged, and my face showed it I’m sure. We made eye contact. I stopped paddling and stared. He turned his head away, waited a few moments as I glided by, and plunged the roller back in the lake. I caught it out of the corner of my eye.

"Where the Great River Rises" is a newly published atlas of the upper Connecticut River valley. Cover image courtesy of the University Press of New England.

Lake Dunning is small body of water, perhaps three-quarters-of-a-mile long, maybe a half-mile wide at most, fed by springs, rainfall and a tiny inlet brook. Water from the lake flows west to the nearby Farmington River, then on to the Connecticut River and eventually the sea.

I thought of the incident as I read another new book on the Connecticut River, “Where the Great River Rises: An Atlas of the Connecticut River Watershed in Vermont and New Hampshire,” edited by Rebecca A. Brown and published by the University Press of New England. ($35.00) Its stated purpose is to heighten understanding of the Connecticut and its watershed, to increase awareness of “the whole interrelated fabric of the region.” After all these years, after the Clean Water Act, after so many Earth Days, after so much progress, we still need books like this atlas.

People still do stupid things.

Governments and businesses do stupid things, too, though far more subtly than the guy with the paint tray. Not always – as I said, there is progress, significant progress – but rivers like the Connecticut even now are too often abused, as the Atlas documents. True, factories and municipalities no longer flush untreated wastes through a pipe directly into the Connecticut, but at the same time there is little improvement in controlling the insidious runoff pollution from the ever growing volume of paved surfaces in the watershed, which drains parts of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Not to mention the other problems, like global warming, mercury deposition, and the degradation caused by dams, 14 of them on the Connecticut still functioning, another 3 slowly crumbling.

The Atlas is a project of the Connecticut River Joint Commissions, created by the legislatures of Vermont and New Hampshire to coordinate efforts to protect the Connecticut’s upper valley. Experts at Dartmouth College assisted with the book. The upper valley is a big area, nearly 7,000 square miles, draining places like Vermont’s rugged Northeast Kingdom and the westerly slopes of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, including part of Mount Washington. There are essays on the upper valley’s geology, forests, plant and animal life, agriculture, fisheries, and recreation. Other essays trace the impact of Native Americans, explore population trends, assess water quality, document the cultural history of the valley then and now. Color photographs and graphics are plentiful in this large-format paperback – including one showing public access points in the upper valley. Handy.

A canoe camper makes breakfast along the Connecticut River near Brattleboro, Vermont

There is graceful prose in places, but mostly this atlas is a kind of Upper Valley textbook with workmanlike, explanatory writing. Nothing wrong with that. There is an enormous amount of information about the river and its watershed between these covers, and it is the kind of vetted, reliable, factual matter that is valuable and needed. Connecticut River afficionados will snatch it up and add it to their increasingly sagging shelf of Connecticut River literature. We’ve been seeing a couple of Connecticut River books a year in recent years.

That is, I think, because there is something about the Connecticut that rings an emotional bell with some people. I’ve met dozens of people over the past few decades who feel proprietary about the river, who can’t spend too much time on it, near it, reading about it. I’ll count myself among them. What we Connecticut River groupies have to hope is that others will discover the Connecticut – or discover and fuss over the brook nearby that feeds the stream that feeds the Connecticut.

Rivers are not just moving water, they are the lyrics of the landscape, and their songs assess our stewardship of this planet better than anything else I know. A plume of paint-stained water draining to the Connecticut is, if we keep things in perspective, a reminder of the work still to be done.

November 14, 2009

Perhaps the closest thing we have to wilderness in New England is the vast forest overspreading much of inland central and northern Maine. It is rugged, mountainous land thick with spruce and fir, laced with clear streams and rivers and dotted with deep, cold lakes. Here you will find birds like the no-longer-common common loon and the spruce grouse, along with abundant moose. Much of this forest is five or more hours driving time from metropolitan New England, so you might assume it will stay what it is: trees, water and wildlife.

The Appalachian Mountain Club preserved a key piece of the 100-Mile-Wilderness in Maine. Map courtesy of the AMC.

Unfortunately, no. Long drive or not, the appeal of pristine waterfront property is powerful. Meanwhile, the economics of the forest products industry changed over the past two decades. As demand for weekend homes accelerated, even in these remote areas, large timber products companies discovered that the waterfront properties within their vast holdings are worth far more as residential real estate than as a platform for growing trees for pulp. So the pressure is on, and it is an issue, at least in Maine. It ought to be an issue taken far more seriously in the rest of the region. This is in effect New England’s last frontier. Must every inch of waterfront be seen through a window?

Strange then, that an announcement a few days ago from the Appalachian Mountain Club received so little attention.

The AMC bought a 29,500-acre parcel of land – a genuine missing link – that creates a 63-mile corridor of conservation land stretching from a point near Greenville, a small town at the southern end of Moosehead Lake, all the way to Baxter State Park, itself a massive holding permanently set aside as wild land that includes mile-high Mount Katahdin.

The West Branch of the Pleasant River in Maine in Winter.

This newly acquired parcel, known as the Roach Ponds Tract, is bounded to the north by state of Maine land, and to the south by another large AMC-owned property, the Katahdin Iron Works Tract, which is 37,000 acres. Those properties, along with others owned by The Nature Conservancy and the state are within an area known as the 100-Mile-Wilderness, a recreational playground for those who cherish nature as it wants to be. The new purchase provides a 20-mile buffer of deep forest for a section of the 2,175-mile Appalachian Trail, which passes through the 100-Mile-Wilderness.

Central and northern Maine forests are regularly logged by the paper products companies, and much of the area has been working forest for the better part of two centuries. They were cutting trees in Maine’s north woods when Henry David Thoreau visited in the mid-19th Century. But even with the industrial cutting, these forests are about as close to pristine wilderness on any large scale as you will find in New England.

To give you an idea: In heavily developed southern New England, a day of heavy rain typically causes streams and rivers to rise rapidly with runoff from cultivated and paved surfaces. Streams that flow clear in dry weather are murky for days after. The Roach Ponds Tract includes the upper reaches of the West Branch of the Pleasant River, as unspoiled a stream as you can expect to find in New England. Its banks are forested, its waters clear. It holds wild, native brook trout and the native shiner, the fallfish, and that is about it. What happens after big rain? The West Branch of the Pleasant River might rise 6 inches overnight. But it won’t be raging. It will flow clear as it does every other day. I’ve seen it. The West Branch is buffered – protected – by thousands of acres of forest, like streams were centuries ago.

The Roach Ponds Tract was purchased for $11.5 million from Plum Creek Timber Co. Inc., all from private sources, no public money involved. It is hard to imagine how this purchase will not be increasingly appreciated as the decades go on. It always seems to be that way with conservation lands. Look at the national parks.

Plum Creek, however, happens to be the same corporation behind a massive residential development project planned for the shores of Moosehead Lake, one of Maine’s biggest lakes with many miles of wild shoreline. It is a stone’s throw from the Roach Ponds Tract. Plum Creek plans three resorts and more than 2,000 residential units around Moosehead. Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission approved that development last month. The Natural Resources Council of Maine, long a critic of the Plum Creek development, already has appealed that decision to the Maine Superior Court.