Walk through a poison ivy patch and you’ll learn firsthand about plant defense mechanisms. The resulting rash you’ll get, the annoying pain you’ll feel, isn’t personal – the toxins in these plants weren’t meant to target humans specifically. Still, the fact that we’re merely collateral damage in a chemical war that has been raging for eons is of little consolation to someone soaking in a bathtub full of calamine lotion.

Poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) can be identified by its almond-shaped leaves that have subtle teeth along the edge. The leaflets appear in clusters of three, and the middle leaflet has a longer petiole. The plant grows both as a ground cover and as a woody vine that climbs trees by means of aerial roots.

If you brush up against any part of a poison ivy plant (or come in contact with a pet or a garden tool that has brushed up against poison ivy), you might contract a rash. Rashes typically appear a day or two after you’ve touched the plant and are characterized by red swelling and small blisters. The intensity of the rash varies among individuals.

To understand why some people seem immune to the plant while others get a rash just by looking at it, one must first understand the science behind the body’s reaction. Poison ivy contains a chemical compound called urushiol. When you touch the plant, the urushiol is transferred to your body and absorbed through your skin, where it binds harmlessly to your skin cells. Left to their own devices, your skin cells would simply metabolize the compound, and you’d never even know you’d touched the plant. But if the body’s immune system gets wind of things, all hell breaks loose.

Inside your body, your T-lymphocyte cells are constantly roaming around looking for invaders (high-school science teachers often call them “cop” cells). If there are no T-cells in the vicinity, the urushiol compound will not be discovered and no rash will ever develop. But if the chemical is spotted, your T-cells call for military backup of killer T-cells that swarm in, latch on, and release toxic enzymes (this is why it sometimes takes several days before the rash appears – it takes time for the cells to multiply and for reinforcements to appear). The enzymes destroy both the invading compound and your healthy skin cells. The effect is red blistering and an itchy rash.

Now some people’s T-cells, for whatever reason, don’t recognize urushiol. These lucky folks can roll in a patch of poison ivy with immunity…and impunity. If you’ve brushed up against the plant, though, with no ill effect, don’t be so sure you’re one of the lucky ones. Touching poison ivy is like playing Russian roulette – the more contact you have, the greater the chance of its “discovery” in your body. And once you’ve been sensitized, every time you touch the plant, the reaction will happen more quickly. This is why gardeners are often hypersensitive to poison ivy: they’ve been over-exposed, and their T-cells are just waiting to pick a fight.

All parts of the plant can give you a rash. If you burn poison ivy, urushiol can attach to smoke particles, which can land on your skin and infect you; worse, you can inhale the toxin, and it can severely damage your lungs. Washing does remove the oil, but it can also spread it. Air alone can not spread the compound. The liquid in blisters is harmless and will not spread the rash, but try not to scratch, as the bacteria in your fingernails may cause additional skin infections. Folk wisdom suggests that jewelweed sap will ease the rash, but at least two controlled clinical studies have shown that jewelweed is no more effective than a placebo in poison ivy treatment.

While the toxins in poison ivy are remarkably effective in keeping humans away (Leaves of three, let it be! Hairy vine, no friend of mine!), it doesn’t work as well on avian predators. The many species of birds that are fond of the berries are culprits in spreading the plant as they deposit seeds along their autumn flyways.

While I’m quite sure that none of this is good for my personal health, it is a fairly organic part of the publishing process. There’s a chain of custody with each issue of the magazine. The individual parts are born of the writers and photographers who create them – each piece its own being, its own stand alone statement. Then the writers and photographers relinquish control of their work to me and my editorial staff. We modify their work to fit our template, to fit our overall vision, then we re-assemble the individual pieces to create a larger whole – this magazine. The fact that I no longer have any sense of the thing is, in some ways, the point; the magazine’s no longer mine once it’s published, it’s yours. I’ve relinquished control to you, the reader, and it’s your job now to make of it what you will.

In time I’ll go back and rediscover each issue as a reader. Someone will ask me why birch trees are white and I’ll consult Mike Snyder’s autumn Woods WHYS column to remember the answer. Maybe I’ll read something and disagree with it – this has actually happened before – and I’ll try to get some like-minded person to take us to task in a letter to the editor. On good days, though, I’ll read a back issue and simply enjoy it for what it is, a nostalgic feeling that brings me back to the days before I had anything to do with anything, days when I’d sit up in camp and wile an autumn evening away with a pile of Vermont Woodlands.

Before I sign off I would like to highlight one part of the autumn issue that I know, even now, will be a success: the poem, STOVEPIPE. The poet who wrote the poem, Verandah Porche, is a favorite of mine – a sentiment based both on the merit of her work and on the fact that she’s one of the people who taught me to love language in the first place. Like many kids who grew up in the Northeast, I first met Verandah as a grade schooler – she came to our school to show us how words can paint pictures, how they can make you laugh or ache, remember or imagine. How language can stimulate the senses – even touch, as certain words can feel physically pleasurable as they roll of your tongue. Language as song, as prayer, even as math. Look closely at her poem on page 65 and you’ll see it’s an acrostic – a form of poetic geometry. We could have tipped her hand with bold-faced caps, but I liked the idea of leaving it a secret for certain readers to discover. I never asked Verandah her thoughts on this presentation, but there’s a better than average chance that many years ago she’s the one who put this subversive idea into my head in the first place.

My first thought was that the bird had misjudged its attempt at a fish, splashing down instead of plucking the fish out of the water. The bird quickly flew up about 25 feet above the water and began to half fly, half hover in a circle. Before long it made a second, wings folded, headlong dive for the water. But instead of expanding its wings and grasping acrobatically with its talons for the fish, the bird went headfirst into the water.

If you are as ignorant as I was about the osprey’s fishing technique, you might think this particular bird had a technique problem. I imagined it must have given itself a throbbing headache from smacking into the water at full speed diving for a fish. All for nothing.

Later, I learned that this bird was actually doing what it was supposed to do. The osprey is the only raptor that dives into the water with its feet thrust forward on either side of its head. This allows the bird to keep the fish in sight throughout the dive, and the feet hitting the water first cut through the water’s surface and protect the head. Conveniently, the osprey also has closable nostrils to keep out water during impact.

An osprey’s feet are specially designed to help them secure fish. Heavy scales and small, needle-sharp spikes (known as spicules) help them hold on to their catch. The outer talons can rotate forward or backward, much like an opposable thumb, allowing the osprey to align a captured fish parallel to its own body for better aerodynamics in flight. All told, an adult osprey can take off with ease if the fish is less than 25 percent of its 2- to 4-pound body weight.

The osprey I was watching flew up to a branch hanging over the pond and sat patiently watching the pond like a hawk. Which it almost is: the osprey’s taxonomic name, Pandion haliaetus, means ‘sea hawk’ in Greek, and the bird is commonly called a ‘fish hawk.’ The osprey is not a true hawk but rather the only member of the Pandion family group, found on all continents except Antarctica.

The mouth of the Connecticut River at Long Island Sound contains the highest concentration of breeding ospreys along the southern New England coast. In the early 1940s, there were approximately 200 nesting pairs of ospreys at the mouth of the Connecticut. Populations declined steadily to only a few pairs by early 1960s, due to exposure to the pesticide DDT. More recent figures, from 2001, show 47 active nesting pairs in the river’s lower reaches, a notable rebound.

The osprey population in the upper Connecticut River watershed is likewise still recovering from DDT. Only the northern reaches of the river currently have active nesting sites, and field studies have documented no active nesting attempts in the rest of the Vermont/New Hampshire reach of the river. In New Hampshire during the 2004 nesting season, 8 young fledged from 5 active nests. In Vermont, as of 2007, there were 6 recorded nesting sites in the upper reach of the river.

Because the use of DDT has been outlawed in the United States, most of us think that that threat to ospreys is long gone. But osprey are long-distance migrants and are exposed to DDT during their migration and in their wintering areas, where the use of DDT is not forbidden. Most of the osprey found in the Connecticut Valley spend the winter in South America, though a few join the snowbirds in the Florida keys.

Back on the pond, the osprey’s third try was a charm. The bird flew to the center of the pond, suddenly fell out of the sky as though shot, dove straight into the pond head-first, and on reappearing, had a fish tenuously gripped between two talons. It quickly secured the fish with both feet, oriented it straight ahead, and despite the wiggling, held on to the fish and flew off.

I, on the other hand, safe and dry in my canoe, did not land a fish all day.

In energy circles, biomass means burning plants for energy. Here in the Northeast, that means burning wood: cordwood for the stove, pellets for the furnace, or chips for the local school or power plant. Most of this wood comes from our forests, but some comes from building demolition, landscaping debris, and suburban tree pruning. Still more of it could come from trees planted deliberately on agricultural lands.

Advocates for biomass energy in the Northeast see wood as a renewable resource that can be burned cleanly and efficiently while reducing global warming emissions, freeing ourselves from the uncertainty of the global fossil fuel market, and keeping billions of dollars here in the Northeast’s economy. As an added bonus, advocates believe that a robust market for biomass would strengthen land conservation by providing an income stream for forest landowners, allowing them to practice better forestry and resist the temptation to sell out to development. At the end of the day, advocates see cleaner fuel, healthier forests, and a stronger economy.

Biomass skeptics dispute many aspects of this vision. They cite the study commissioned by Massachusetts and conducted by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, which suggested that under some circumstances, burning wood does nothing to combat global warming. Many skeptics also fear the results of a forest-products industry turned loose on the landscape under a biomass gold rush. Wood may be renewable, they argue, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a long track record of using it nonrenewably.

Is it possible to reconcile these two points of view? Is biomass green? If so, is there enough biomass in the Northeast to go around?

Is it green?

The received wisdom is that biomass is an effective weapon in the fight against climate change. When a tree dies, it emits carbon, whether it’s burned or just left to rot on the ground, part of what’s commonly called the biological carbon cycle. Burning wood is considered carbon-friendly, as long as new trees are allowed to grow and offset the carbon that’s released from the trees they’re replacing.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are never carbon-friendly, as burning them introduces additional carbon into the atmosphere that wasn’t part of the biological carbon cycle in the first place. This point of view has been repeatedly emphasized by the Environmental Protection Agency and the United Nations-sponsored International Panel on Climate Change

This received wisdom was stood on its head in May, when the Manomet report, Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study, was glossed by the media under the Associated Press headline: “Study: Wood Worse Polluter Than Coal.” While many aspects of the Manomet report have been less controversial, especially the emphasis on using biomass for thermal energy instead of electricity (to achieve higher efficiencies) and the proposals for tighter harvesting guidelines to ensure sustainability in the woods, the “wood worse than coal” emphasis has been met with incredulity, because it stands the fundamental scientific basis of climate change on its head.

As the report indicates, wood is less energy-dense than fossil fuel, meaning that a chunk of firewood contains less energy than a corresponding chunk of coal, assuming the same number of carbon atoms in both. As a result, more carbon is emitted per BTU or kWh produced.

“People are getting tangled up in this one aspect of carbon that is not key,” says Bill Keeton at the University of Vermont’s Carbon Dynamics Lab. “It’s one big carbon cycle, and the important point is the overall carbon balance: how much is in the atmosphere, how much in the oceans, how much is in marine algae, etc., and how much is being added by fossil fuel.”
Research under way by Keeton and his graduate students suggests that greatly expanded biomass harvests could accelerate the rate at which carbon moves between the forest and the atmosphere, resulting in a net addition of carbon to the atmosphere, sort of the way a juggler ends up with proportionally more balls aloft if he speeds up his hands. But these are small considerations in the face of the problem caused by fossil fuel emissions.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 275 parts per million (ppm) in the preindustrial age to 390 ppm today. Of that rise, the International Panel on Climate Change estimates that only 15–20 percent has come from the biosphere, primarily from converting forests and open lands to human development. The rest of the increase, which is to say 80–85 percent of the problem, comes from the combustion of fossil fuels. The fact that biomass is not purely carbon-neutral under every circumstance only underscores the fact that fossil fuel is 100 percent carbon-additive under all circumstances.

But what about sustainability?

There is a growing awareness among foresters and biologists of the crucial role played by coarse woody debris in the forest: standing snags, fallen logs, and limbs and tops left behind following a logging job. In short, just the sort of material that’s easily chipped for biomass.

The Forest Guild, a national association of foresters dedicated to ecological forestry and a partner in the forest-sustainability chapter of the Manomet report, has addressed this question directly in their recently released Forest Biomass Retention and Harvesting Guidelines for the Northeast. Generally speaking, the guidelines recommend avoiding sensitive sites and old-growth stands, leaving a quarter to a third of all slash on site after a biomass harvest, and maintaining a diverse forest structure with plenty of snags and coarse woody debris distributed across the harvested area.

“But it’s very site-specific,” points out Bob Perschel of the Forest Guild, adding, “nothing applies to every acre. Soil types are the basis for our recommendations. Some sites are so sensitive that you don’t want to harvest there at all. At the other end of the spectrum, on the rich-soil sites, the science shows that if you do leave a certain percentage of the tops and slash, you’re going to be okay.”

There’s wood in them thar hills. Or is there?

Given that biomass can be green, how much of it might there be in the Northeast? Is there enough biomass to go around, or will we have to denude our hillsides in order to forestall climate change?

The answer to these questions is not straightforward, because we already value our forests for many reasons beyond their capacity to produce biomass.

In theory, our Northeast forests produce roughly 55 million green tons of new growth every year, or an average of one ton (or half a cord) per acre per year on each of our 55 million forested acres. If we burned all of that annual growth – the interest, not the principal – for heating, we would produce roughly 1.40 quadrillion BTUs per year, or enough energy to heat two-thirds of all the houses and businesses in New England and New York.

In reality, only Maine cuts anywhere near its annual tree growth each year: roughly 98 percent, according to the Maine Forest Service. The other Northeast states’ percentages of use are 76 for New York, 50 for Vermont, 42 for New Hampshire, 30 for Connecticut, 30 for Rhode Island, and 25 for Massachusetts. And of the acres that are harvested, the majority of the tonnage goes to sawlogs and pulpwood, not biomass energy. In the four Northern Forest states (northern New England and New York), about 25 percent of the harvest these days goes to firewood and chips. Assuming the same percentage for the southern New England states, we are presently consuming about 8 million green tons of wood each year for biomass energy in New England and New York, or about 15 percent of the total annual tree growth.

What do these numbers mean in context? Heating a typical home requires four to five cords of wood per year, which is the equivalent of 8–10 tons of green biomass. A school requires between 200 and 1,000 tons per year, depending on size. Electricity-generating plants use about 10,000 tons per year per rated megawatt at full capacity. The Pinetree station in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, at 17 MW, uses 180,000 tons per year; the 50-MW Schiller station in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, uses 500,000 tons per year at full capacity. How much wood is there in a chip truck headed for one of these plants? Between 20 and 40 tons, or enough to heat several houses for a year or fire Pinetree-Fitchburg for an hour and a half.

But though we are surrounded by forest, not all of it is available for use. Brett Butler, of the U.S. Forest Service’s Family Forest Research Center, points out that, by and large, the constraints on biomass harvesting in the Northeast are less physical (steep slopes, wet soils) than they are social (zoning regulations, landowner intentions.) “It’s really landowner attitudes that have a huge, huge impact on availability,” says Butler. “You can tell a procurement forester that there’s wood out there, and they’ll tell you, ‘Sure, it may be out there, but I can’t get to it.’”

Butler’s research focuses on forestland owned by private, nonindustrial, unincorporated owners, which, according to Butler’s analysis of Forest Inventory Analysis data, accounts for 55 percent of all the wood growing in the Northeast. (The public owns 25 percent of all the wood, and corporations own the remaining 20 percent.) If you discount physical factors, like trees growing on slopes steeper than 50 percent, on wet soils, on poorly productive sites, or in small stands, you reduce your wood availability from these private lands by about 8 percent. If you discount social factors, such as wood unlikely to be harvested because it’s growing on parcels less than 20 acres in size, more than a mile from an existing road, closer than 100 feet to a water body, or in heavily populated areas, you remove another 10 percent. But that still leaves you with more than 80 percent available, until you factor in the most important variable of all, the “harvesting likelihood index”, which is the attitude of landowners toward forest management. This knocks out more than half of what’s left, leaving, in Butler’s equation, about 38 percent still in play.

The harvesting likelihood index is derived from answers that landowners provide on the National Woodland Owner Survey (conducted by the Forest Service) to three questions: “have you harvested wood in the past?”, “do you plan to harvest wood in the future?”, and “is timber harvesting important to you?”. “If a landowner answers yes to all three, we count that wood as most likely available,” explains Butler. “If no to all three, there’s still a chance, but it’s relatively unlikely to be harvested.”

Butler adds that his research focuses entirely on the supply of wood and not the demand. “This is a snapshot of landowner attitudes today. If prices change, attitudes could, too. I think about my house. Is it for sale? No. But if someone offers me two million? Well, here are the keys.” Predicting future biomass supply turns out to be more of a sociological exercise than a silvicultural one. If the overwhelming majority of private forestland owners were to come to view biomass production favorably, the supply of biomass would double.

Seeing the forest beyond the trees

A recent report by the newly formed Biomass Thermal Energy Council (BTEC), Heating the Northeast with Renewable Biomass: A Vision for 2025, finds that 25 percent of the Northeast’s heating needs could be met by biomass in the year 2025 without the need for new technology or a radical increase in forest harvesting. Currently, about 4 percent of the region’s heat is so produced.

Of the 55 million green tons of annual growth in our forests, the BTEC report estimates that 17 million are currently in no-cut reserves or otherwise unsuitable for harvesting, 15 million are going to pulp and paper, and 8 million are going to sawlogs. That leaves 15 million green tons available for biomass.

But the report also looks at the relatively underutilized agricultural lands of the region and sees a larger resource: farmers growing dedicated energy crops like willow on these marginal fields and pastures could produce more than 23 million green tons of biomass per year by 2025, assuming that 25 percent of such lands were utilized. That’s more biomass than would come from the forest. Adding this sum to the 15 million tons available from the forest, and cutting the combined total in half to be on the safe side, yields 19 million tons of biomass per year, or enough to produce 25 percent of the region’s heat.

“The agricultural resource is still pretty theoretical at this point,” says Charlie Niebling, chair of the BTEC and general manager of New England Wood Pellet in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. “But you look 15 years down the road, and you have to think that the agro-energy piece is going to be important, especially in New York State.” Willow grown on farm fields is part of a much larger potential biomass resource than just what comes from the forest, including wood construction debris, shipping pallets, and suburban yard waste, among others. From a carbon-neutrality perspective, burning these fuels is doubly effective because they displace fossil fuel emissions and utilize carbon that was headed for the atmosphere already.

As in Brett Butler’s research, the supply numbers presented by Niebling and others in Heating the Northeast are heavily dependent on social factors. Pulpwood, for example, is assumed to consume about as much annual growth in 2025 as it does now. But what if the paper industry continues to decline as it has over the past decade? Moving pulpwood into the energy column would triple the forest-based supply estimated in the report. “Our goal is to create a picture of what could happen,” says Niebling, “and see if we can generate some enthusiasm. We think people will be more optimistic and confident, especially in the private sector, as they start to picture how it could work out.”

If this vision were to be accomplished, the gains would be more than environmental. Some $4.5 billion that is presently being sent out of the region each year to purchase fossil fuel for heat would remain in the local economy, and 140,000 new jobs would be created.

Generating heat, not light

It’s this combination of environmental, economic, and social benefits that is driving the enthusiasm for biomass in the Northeast. Though Heating the Northeast was prepared by pro-biomass advocacy groups like the Maine Pellet Fuels Association and the New York Biomass Energy Alliance, the general concept of seeing biomass as a solution to multiple problems has wide backing. A series of listening sessions was held in Vermont this past summer to gauge public interest in biomass energy. The list of sponsoring organizations is not the usual cast of pro-harvest characters: the Sierra Club, the Vermont Natural Resources Council, the Forest Guild, the Biomass Energy Resource Center, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. While the groups collectively were not calling for specific targets, they were unanimous in agreeing that expanded use of biomass should be explored.

Andrea Colnes of the Biomass Energy Resource Center, one of the sponsoring organizations, put it this way. “We have a very large, resilient forest that is mostly in management and largely unfragmented. Along with this abundant resource, we have a significant thermal load, and we use a disproportionate amount of the nation’s home heating oil. Bringing these two factors together is very favorable for biomass use here in the Northeast.”

Though much of the recent flap over biomass in Massachusetts has focused on proposals to burn biomass to generate electricity, the real potential for biomass, many proponents feel, is to burn it for heat. Or, even better, for heat and power combined. That’s because burning biomass, whether in a home boiler or on a commercial scale, produces heat nearly as efficiently as any fossil fuel option, between 70 and 80 percent.

That’s not true in a stand-alone electricity plant, where biomass efficiencies are roughly 20–25 percent compared with up to 35 percent for fossil fuels. “We have a limited supply of wood in the Northeast,” says Colnes, “so it makes sense to use it as efficiently as possible. And that means using it for heat.”

How might that work? The ideal scenario is a combined heat and power facility, sometimes referred to as a cogeneration plant, in which biomass is burned to simultaneously generate electricity and provide heat to nearby buildings or communities. Small towns, large commercial facilities, and college campuses are likely locations for such facilities. Middlebury College, in Vermont, presently generates about a fifth of its electricity and heat through such a biomass-fired facility. Many other institutions across the region also use cogeneration, though most are currently fired with fossil fuel.

But cogeneration has limited applicability. For one thing, most people in the rural Northeast live in individual houses spread too far apart across the landscape to be efficiently heated from a central facility. For another, siting new cogeneration plants in existing downtowns is sure to face tough zoning and public-relations battles. But pellet-burning stoves or furnaces in individual houses is an easier sell.

“It all comes down to scale and efficiency,” says Niebling. “We need to right-size this technology to the nature of our communities. So far, our policy has been all about subsidizing big [power plants], but I’m encouraged that this is changing and that we’re really starting to talk about making decisions that are right for the scale of our homes and communities.”

Niebling points to three barriers standing in the way of wider use of biomass for heat: the cost of new boilers and furnaces (“we’re not talking about your grandfather’s creaky woodstove – these are advanced, super-clean wood appliances”), the logistics of fuel distribution (“there’s not the economy of scale yet”), and public policy that favors other renewables (“we need to bring parity to heating compared with electricity and transportation.”)

Someone with first-hand experience with the homeowner scale is Carrol Lucas, owner of Harris Energy in Littleton, New Hampshire. Lucas added pellet delivery to the eight-town region he serves just north of Franconia Notch. “I got tired of calling up my heating oil customers, asking them why they weren’t buying as much oil anymore, and hearing that they’d switched to pellets,” he says. Lucas sold 725 tons last year, the first year he offered pellets alongside heating oil and kerosene. But that’s in comparison to the more than 700,000 gallons of heating oil he also sold.

“You’ve got your dollar-minded people who see that they’re getting more BTUs from pellets than from heating oil. And you have the people who are tired of being held hostage to foreign oil,” says Lucas. Logistically, he finds that selling pellets is no more difficult than selling heating oil and that the main obstacle to wider biomass use is the fluctuating price of oil. “It’s going to take higher oil prices and things like what’s going on in the Gulf of Mexico before more people say, enough.”

A two-fer

Ultimately, where you come out on the biomass question may well depend on where you went in. If you’re inclined at the outset to think that one of the gravest dangers our forests face is being clear-cut, and if you think that the forest products industry is only recently starting to behave itself after decades or centuries of overzealousness, you’re liable to see expanded biomass as just the latest excuse for exploiting our woods. On the other hand, if your primary concern is finding local alternatives to fossil fuels, and if you think that the gravest danger facing our forests is not over-harvesting but rather subdividing to pay the tax bill, then you’re apt to view biomass as something of a silver bullet.

As is so often the case, first-hand experience can be more influential than any number of expert studies. If you’ve ever lived in close proximity to an outdoor wood boiler, you’re likely to have great difficulty imagining biomass as a green technology. If your primary time spent in the woods is in national parks and other no-cut forests, you’re less likely to see the benefits of early successional habitat or the value of timber revenue to a forest landowner. On the other hand, if you yourself own land that’s been successfully logged, or if you’ve participated in the wood-based economy and seen all the ways that it can work well, you might have trouble having patience for those who would rather trade all those immediate benefits for the obvious harm that comes out of, say, an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Every form of energy available to us in the Northeast comes with drawbacks: fossil fuels cause global warming; nuclear power creates toxic waste; hydroelectric requires extensive modification of riparian ecosystems; wind is intermittent and hard to site; solar is intermittent and capital-intensive. Even conservation, number one on most people’s list, is capital-intensive and requires materials (foam, calk, insulation, new appliances) that are not, by and large, made in the Northeast.

“The advantages of biomass are about much more than just carbon,” says Andrea Colnes. “There’s the rural economy piece, the forest management piece, the idea of keeping dollars local. Only biomass gives us the option of creating a closed-loop, local heating economy.”

If a regulatory framework is put in place to mandate clean emissions, require high efficiencies, and ensure sustainable forest management – a big if, certainly, but not one that would require new or theoretical technology – the secondary benefits of biomass are considerable. Biomass is our fuel. It grows here, unaided, in one of the world’s great temperate forests. The money and jobs created by utilizing biomass, therefore, also remain here: billions of dollars annually and hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

And these new monies and new jobs go into the woods, supporting the side of the economy that has a stake in keeping the woods as woods and not in converting them to housing and other development. “Biomass alone won’t stop development,” says Bob Perschel of the Forest Guild, “only good policies will do that. But biomass can provide options and money in support of good management, which helps keep forests as forests.” Far from pitting global warming against deforestation, the thoughtful use of biomass offers a chance to combat climate change and deforestation simultaneously.

Further reading

Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study, by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, can be found at www.manomet.org.

Heating the Northeast with Renewable Biomass: A Vision for 2025, by the Biomass Thermal Energy Council, is available at www.biomassthermal.org.

Forest Biomass Retention and Harvesting Guidelines for the Northeast, by the Forest Guild, is at www.forestguild.org.

A copy of Brett Butler’s Biophysical vs. Social Availability of Woody Biomass is at www.familyforestresearchcenter.org. A final version of his paper is currently in publication.

Northern Forest Biomass Energy Action Plan, from the Biomass Energy Resource Center, can be found at www.biomasscenter.org.

You lift the dripping craft from the water, muscle it to your shoulders, bang the back of the car twice, and then manage to aim for the carrier atop your vehicle. But wait! Hold everything! Have you checked for invasive plants? A leaf of one might be caught in the gunwales or wrapped around a paddle.

Environmental officials in New Hampshire and Vermont have been putting out the message these days that canoeists and kayakers, too, can be vectors in the spread of invasive, nuisance aquatic species. Eurasian watermilfoil, water chestnut, variable-leafed watermilfoil, fanwort, and didymo are among the concerns. There are also invasive animal species – zebra mussels and alewives, for example – to look out for, though they may be less likely to hitch a ride on a canoe.

With the possible exception of didymo, most of these ‘invasives’ are relatively new to our region. Without local endemic predation or other natural controls, they can grow with impunity, monopolizing water space and gobbling nutrients needed by native plants or animals.

Past warnings about invasive, or ‘exotic,’ species have been directed mostly at people who use motorboats. That’s because boat propellers, anchors, fishing lines, and boat trailers can easily snag a problem plant. A sprig or two might then be transported in the next few days to some unaffected body of water, triggering a new infestation.

More recently it was the anglers and water biologists who use felt-soled waders who were given the message. Felt waders are good vectors for didymo, the single-cell alga that has grown in clumps along the bottoms of some of our most popular rivers, smothering habitat for fish and aquatic insects. Also known as ‘rock snot’ because it looks gross, didymo is a turn-off for human swimmers.

Felt-soled waders – harder to clean and slower to dry than rubber waders – can pick up cells of didymo and transplant them to a new spot on a river or to a different river altogether. (A Vermont ban on felt-soled waders goes into affect on April 1, 2011.)

And now it’s the paddlers who are entering the spotlight. “I think more and more there is a realization that everyone has a role to play,” says Leslie Matthews, a scientist with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. She says the appearance of didymo over the past few years has helped put the focus on canoeists and kayakers.

So, what was our friend at the pond to do before driving home?

Amy Smagula, coordinator for New Hampshire’s exotic species program, says he should at least have conducted a careful inspection. Any bit of plant life should have been pulled from the craft. “If it’s green, it may be mean, so take it off,” is her motto.

Ideally, a canoe should be allowed to dry for 48 hours before it’s used again. To kill zebra mussels or their larvae, the canoe should dry for a week. This, of course, would not have worked for our canoeist, because his boat was going out again that evening. To remedy this, he could have scrubbed the canoe and paddles with a water solution containing 10 percent bleach.

Matthews had a special recommendation for cold-weather paddlers: “We definitely encourage that their wetsuits be washed with soap and water and that they be left to dry for a couple of days.” She suggested that paddlers who portage bring along extra footwear for changing before entering new waters.

She acknowledged, though, that paddlers must travel a fine line between what’s ideal and what’s practical. Where to draw that line is now a topic at the Northern Forest Canoe Trail headquarters in Waitsfield, Vermont.

The 740-mile trail, connecting 79 rivers, lakes and ponds along its route from Old Forge, New York to Fort Kent, Maine, runs across northern Vermont and New Hampshire. It could be viewed as a potential corridor for invasive species.

Walter Opuszynski, trail director, says he’s been investing “quite a bit of time” lately trying to form a plan to help paddlers avoid spreading the unwanted plants and animals. The trail organization now offers information about invasive species in its literature and on kiosks at key spots along the trail

“We are trying to craft messages specifically for paddlers,” Opuszynski said. He stressed measures must be effective, but they must also “be things people are willing to do.”

The amount of honey they can make astounds me, as it has for the past 45 years. There’s no getting used to it. In a week they can sometimes completely fill the nine frames that fit in a super – an astonishing feat if you consider that a fully loaded bee carries a drop of nectar that is about the size of the head of a pin.

Nectar is about 80 percent water and honey has less than 20 percent water, so, in the course of making the roughly 40 pounds of honey that fit in a super, the bees have brought in about 160 pounds of nectar and, in the dark stuffy confines of their hive, have evaporated about 120 pounds of water (14.4 gallons). All this in a week.

The construction of a wild bee hive – a pattern that beekeepers imitate – is astonishing as well. Hexagonal cells – and only hexagonal cells – fit together perfectly and bees use them interchangeably to raise new bees, store the pollen that is fed to the larvae, and to store honey. Each cell is tipped upwards at a slight angle, matched to the viscosity of honey, so that their sustenance doesn’t run out before they cap the cell with wax.

I do what I can to help them succeed. I’m the one who nailed all the parts of their hive and the frames together, and fitted each frame with a sheet of wax so the honeycomb would be straight and strong. In the winter a Styrofoam box gets duct taped around them, and a folded piece of hardware cloth across the entrance will keep mice out.

In the fall I’m going to leave them with 60 or so pounds of honey to carry them through the winter. I’ll take all the rest away from them. It will go to friends, into tea, and on to biscuits.

How much honey a hive produces in a year depends on a number of ecological and zoological variables – one factor that doesn’t come into play, however, is bee work ethic. They don’t make 70 pounds or 100 pounds of honey and then call it quits. They make every last drop they can. They don’t go on strike; they don’t work to rule. Instead, they go from one goldenrod floret to the next, as fast as they possibly can, from early morning to dusk.

People like me, with just a few hives, invest a huge amount of time and money into their insects. In economic terms, the bees aren’t getting ripped off.  I try any fad that comes along to reduce the damage done by varroa mites, replace hives and bottom boards that have a bit of rot at the corners, and replace aging queens at $29.00 a shot.

And still, as I stand watching all the traffic around a busy beehive, the unconditional industriousness on my behalf makes me feel immoral, as though I’ve duped and exploited them. Six weeks of flying wears the wings right off a bee, and my little, golden, furry friends perish by the thousands from over work, making honey that will soon be stolen by the bucketful.

But swifts didn’t always roost and nest in chimneys. Hollow trees were their natural habitat, especially trees in which the inside had rotted away following a lightning strike.

Few species have become so completely dependent on human-made structures for their existence. Laura Erickson, science editor at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, says, “Chimney swift populations increased dramatically with the arrival of European settlers and the construction of chimneys. Brick chimneys are ideal for swifts to perch in.”

The first record of swifts nesting in chimneys dates to 1672, but swifts continued nesting in trees as well. In 1840 John James Audubon reported a colony of roughly 9,000 swifts living in a hollow sycamore tree.

Being one of just four species of North American swifts, our native chimney swift is a soot-colored bird that breeds east of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. and southern Canada. Flying by daylight—their 5-inch bodies carried aloft on strong, stiff wings that span 12 inches—chimney swifts migrate northward in spring after wintering in northwestern and north-central South America.

Swifts return when insects emerge en masse in late April. Rapacious predators that can consume one third of their weight each day, swifts circle overhead and devour any insect that’s small enough to eat, including thousands of mosquitoes and other pests that would otherwise bite or sting us or consume our gardens and ornamentals.

These indefatigable birds never land, except to roost at night. When moved by the mating urge, they circle in small groups, ramping up their speed and level of chatter. Consummation lasts but a few seconds while the male raises his wings and makes contact with the female in mid-air.

In northern New England, swifts make their nests in late May, using small twigs that they snap off with their feet while in flight. The swift then transfers each twig to its mouth and uses mucilaginous saliva to glue it into a half-nest that adheres to the chimney wall. Both sexes build the nest. Although sharp claws and bristly tails help them to cling to vertical surfaces, swifts cannot perch on a branch or even stand on a flat surface. Nests are constructed from near the top of a chimney to more than 20 feet down the flu. Occasionally, swifts will nest in cisterns and silos, along barn walls and even in outhouses.

Each tiny nest soon holds 4 to 5 pure-white eggs, which hatch in 18 to 19 days. A month after hatching, the fledglings climb to the top of the chimney and take to the sky. Breeding pairs only raise one brood each year. In early August, swifts congregate in anticipation of the journey south.

That is our favorite time to watch swifts, when their tireless flights teach young birds the secrets of survival and reinforce their ebullient nature. Swifts create one of the greatest spectacles of nature to be seen in our own neighborhoods. At dusk they swirl above the roosting chimney to form a living avian funnel. Each bird circles until just the right moment, when it lifts up its wings, angles its tail, and checks its flight to gently flutter down the flu. (One enormous colony inhabits the chimney at the middle school on South Street in Claremont, New Hampshire.)

Swifts are so fast and facile – veering and darting along paths that are hard to follow –that they have few predators, save the occasional sharp-shinned hawk or other agile bird of prey.

Although a late-spring chill can occasionally wipe out the swift’s essential insect food for a time, people pose a far greater threat. When a fire is built in a chimney with a nest, the heat and smoke can wipe out an entire colony of hundreds or thousands of birds.

Modern chimneys can also be a problem, as Cornell’s Laura Erickson observes. “Populations of chimney swifts have declined throughout their range as metal-lined chimneys have replaced their brick counterparts. There’s nothing to hang onto inside a metal-lined chimney. Even new brick chimneys have liners that chimney swifts can’t hang on to.”

If you have a masonry chimney, you can manage the flu to make it safe for swifts. Clean the chimney after the wood-burning season, keep the top open from late April to early September so swifts can gain access, and don’t light fires when they’re around. If you’re really motivated, you can obtain plans for building a swift nesting tower at: www.chimneyswifts.org.

“Pigeons are very interesting birds,” I respond, trying to change her mind. “On a level or climbing flight, pigeons have been known to out-fly and out-maneuver the peregrine falcon. What’s more, they drink with their bills down, sucking up the water. Most birds must tip their heads with every sip to allow the water to run down their throats. And, unlike most birds, they come in a variety of colors and patterns.”

I hoped the barrage of fascinating facts would bring her around. “Did you know that pigeons feed their nestlings regurgitated ‘pigeon milk’, a liquid formed from cells sloughed off in the adult’s crop?” No luck. Marsha was unmoved.

So why do we hate pigeons?

Perhaps it is because they remind us so much of ourselves. Pigeons are messy and noisy and they gather in groups on city streets and parks. Just like us. Yet we respond by calling them pests, vermin, filthy – rats with wings. (By the way, the phrase “rats with wings” was coined by the character “Sandy”, played by Woody Allen in the 1980 movie “Stardust Memories.”)

Historically, the pigeon was not a common wild bird. Its “natural” habitat is cliff faces overlooking the ocean, not a common habitat. Pigeons didn’t become common until we built our cities and towns. Our buildings with their window ledges and rooftops and parking lots are their new “natural” habitat.

Ironically, many of the birds we love to hate are here in the New World because we brought them here. Pigeons came to America with the French in the early 1600s. Throughout the 1700s, the colonists raised them for food.

The house sparrow (a.k.a. English sparrow) was given a one-way ticket to America in the 1600s. Someone thought they would help control grain pests. Instead they became one, preferring seeds over bugs.

The European starling was brought here by Eugene Schieffelin, a New York drug wholesaler, who thought it would be really cool to have all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare flying around in American skies. In King Henry IV, Hotspur refers to the mimicry of the starling and says “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer’ ….” Schieffelin released 60 in Central Park in 1890 and another 40 in 1891. Unlike most of the Shakespearean birds he introduced, the starlings “took.” In a few years, they could be found from coast to coast.

There are plenty of other birds that we love to hate, but the infamous triumvirate is pigeons, house sparrows, and starlings. At least a dozen companies that currently advertise on the internet specialize in getting rid of these birds. The deterrents range from the innocuous, if ineffective, plastic owl, to sticky stuff and needle-like spikes to put on roosting ledges, to sound systems that broadcast distress calls and predator screams, to traps to capture and relocate the birds. When all that doesn’t work, there’s always poison.

About 10 years ago, the University of Vermont (UVM) poisoned birds in large numbers, birds that were fowling UVM’s model farm. Pigeons, starlings, and sparrows rained from the sky onto resident’s lawns and city sidewalks where they convulsed and died – the horrifying scenes sometimes attracting small crowds of children. UVM stopped the very next day.

When it comes to the birds that we love to hate, the crow stands out as another target for our antipathy. In both New Hampshire and Vermont, crows can be hunted during a spring and a fall season. There is no bag limit and hunters can take as many crows as they can carry. Despite us, or perhaps because of us, crows have prevailed. Our farms and towns, complete with fast food restaurants, litter, and garbage dumps, provide them with plenty of food, while our cars serve up a steady supply of roadside carrion.

When it comes to the birds we love to hate, we have rolled out the welcome mat. We provide plenty of food and housing and opportunity. That’s why they love us.

The tree was an apple, a Cox’s Orange Pippin to be exact, and what I was trying to kill was the roundheaded appletree borer, which was doing its best to kill the tree. I knew it was there because I could see the orange, sawdust-like frass at the base of the tree, which showed that the larva was munching away.

In June and July, this insect lays eggs beneath the bark at the base of a tree. When the larvae hatch in two or three weeks, they start eating wood beneath the bark, tunneling up a few inches. They’ll stay in the tree up to three years, and their tunnels diminish the tree’s capacity for nutrient flow and compromise its structural integrity. I’d lost four planted apple trees to the borer 20 years ago when we planted them in the side yard the year we built our house. I don’t want to go through that again. First, the tree started to lose its leaves early. The next spring its foliage was sparse, and the third year, it didn’t leaf out. When I went to remove it, it broke off at its base, a sure sign that it was the work of the borer.

I’ve been to workshops for apple growers, and many of them have not been plagued by the borer. Lucky them. We have hundreds of wild apple trees on our land, most of them concentrated in an old pasture. Through the WHIP program, which pays cost-share funds to landowners to release and prune wild apple trees to benefit wildlife, I have freed 105 trees from competing trees. Some of the removed trees were softwoods, some cherries and soft maples, but many of them were fellow apples. In those cases, I had to choose which one to keep, based on form, fruit, and a little intuition.

Cutting the competing apples made it abundantly clear to me how extensive our borer problem is because nearly every one of the trees I cut showed tunnels in their stumps. The good news was that the wild trees had succeeded in growing more wood around the tunnels and had attained sufficient diameter to overcome the borer’s wounds.

It’s the newly planted stock that is most vulnerable, because the tunnels can constitute a large enough proportion of the trunk that it will snap off at ground level. Go take a look at your young apple trees now. Bring along a knife and a length of wire and be ready to put them to use if you notice orange frass at the base of a tree. Follow the tunnels with the wire and see if you can impale the larva. It’s a cream-colored legless grub that will grow from 1/8 inch on hatching to longer than an inch as it develops. Be willing to cut away the compromised bark that covers the tunnels. Keep looking. Kill the bug. Your tree’s existence depends on you.

For more on the roundheaded appletree borer, go to Cornell’s Integrated Pest Management website. Or read The Apple Grower: A Guide for the Organic Orchardist by Michael Phillips.

Many ecologists find plantations distasteful. Nature thrives on disorder, and so these sterile, planned environments are marked by a lack of plant and animal diversity. Many red pine plantations were planted a bit too claustrophobically back in the day, and the deep shade limits both the health of the trees and the plant life on the forest floor. Over time, fallen pine needles form a deep duff layer, further limiting the ability of other species’ seeds to germinate.

One could also resent the trees based on their lack of value. While well-formed, mature red pine is coveted, overcrowded plantation pine is not. Most wood-savvy landowners, if given a choice, would prefer dense stands of spruce, hemlock, cedar, really any softwood to red pine. If white pine – the King’s pine – evokes stately ship masts and wide plank flooring, red pine evokes telephone poles slathered up in creosote. It’s just not a sexy softwood.

Still, many a humble barn has been built from rough-cut red pine lumber, and ecological limitations aside, there’s something endearing about these stands. They’re often quiet, dark places – maybe not as somber as a hemlock or spruce grove, but still contemplative enough. Poets can point out that the forest looks disarrayed from most angles until you step into a row and the trees suddenly reorganize themselves into perfect lines – a marked burst of clarity in an otherwise haphazard landscape.

How did these plantations come to be in a place where foresters don’t typically plant forests? Sixty two thousand men worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps in Vermont and New Hampshire between 1933 and 1942, and they planted hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of red pine seedlings that became the trees we see today. (Nationwide, CCC crews planted 3 billion trees, though not all red pine). The government further subsidized red pine seedlings throughout the twentieth century as a way of providing hill farmers with a future cash crop that would grow on otherwise played-out soil. Red pine seemed the perfect candidate for this, as it’s fast growing and susceptible to fewer serious enemies than most pine species. (White pine can be bedeviled by white pine weevil and white pine blister rust – neither of which affect red pine.)

In retrospect, the “cash” part of “cash crop” proved a bit optimistic on most sites, and today, many of these plantations are coming down as landowners seek to either improve the value of their timber stock or improve the value of their wildlife habitat (unless they’re managing exclusively for red squirrels).

I’m keeping a small corner of the red pine plantation on my own woodlot intact as a nod to history, and I’m releasing a few pole-quality specimens to flourish, but the rest is scheduled to be aggressively thinned, a thinning that probably won’t generate much, if any, profit. In the meantime, my family and I have been felling, limbing, and peeling some logs to use as cabin poles. This time of year, the bark is relatively easy to remove with a bark spud, as the tree’s cambium is slimy with sap and ooze. When the tree stops growing in autumn, the dry cambium will bond to the wood and stripping the bark will be near impossible.

After the saws stop whining on our woodlot, peeling the cabin logs becomes quiet, meditative work. Despite the summer sun, it’s cool under the heavy forest cover; the fallen pine smells nice. At the end of the day, the stripped logs lie in naked repose, pale and shining upon the forest floor. Light filters through the holes in the canopy above, and it’s easy to imagine the next generation of seedlings that will soon spring forth to seize their own 70-year moment in the sun.

They are close at hand; all you have to do is look down.

At your feet above timberline on New England’s highest mountains are alpine meadows, a botanical realm similar to the vast areas of tundra that normally exist hundreds of miles to the north – in the area of Hudson’s Bay and northern Labrador.

On a recent summer day, Dave Hardy, Field Operations Director for the Green Mountain Club, and two botanists led a group of students to the summit of Mount Mansfield in Vermont for a day of getting acquainted with the plants of the alpine meadows. The students were being trained as summit caretakers, and part of their job will be protecting the alpine plants and helping hikers understand them.

Bob Popp, Vermont state botanist, stood in front of a low-lying, green hummock about a foot across. “This is the quintessential alpine plant in Vermont – diapensia,” he said. “You can see alpine bilberry is competing with it here.”

Sure enough, a closer look showed that small sprigs of bilberry were poking up through the mat of heavy diapensia leaves. But there were also tiny new patches of diapensia nearby – probably young plants seeded by the older ones.

“That’s great to see,” Popp said.

Technically referred to by botanists as alpine flora, diapensia and other small plants that inhabit the harsh world above timberline are remnants of the years following the ice age. When the last glaciers melted away from northern New England, life returned to the ice-scoured landscape, carpeting our region with tundra – a complex of small, low-lying plants adapted to chilly temperatures and frozen ground. Even as New England warmed and trees returned, descendants of those earlier tundra plants remained on the highest mountain tops, where weather conditions still resemble those of the far north.

The largest alpine meadow in New England is the huge expanse of treeless territory above timberline in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. Katahdin in northern Maine also has a large alpine meadow surrounding its summit, and there are smaller alpine meadows on other peaks in the White Mountains, Green Mountains, and Adirondacks.

We normally associate meadows with grass. But what appear to be meadows of waving grass high on the peaks of the Presidentials, Mount Mansfield, and elsewhere are actually stands of Bigelow’s sedge or highland rush. Summit caretaker Annie Bellerose has to keep a sharp eye on one particular sedge meadow near the summit of Mount Mansfield, which she said is so tempting that hikers and tourists regularly decide to go running through it.

“I call it the ‘Sound of Music’ meadow,” she said, laughing.

Her job is to keep people off the delicate sedges and other alpine plants, which can be easily damaged by wandering hikers or dogs.

Like plants everywhere, the plants of the alpine zone group together in communities that are defined by conditions of weather and terrain – diapensia communities, for example, are usually located high up in the most exposed and windswept areas, while snowbank communities, which have a taller and more vulnerable set of plants, are usually located in slight depressions protected by long-lasting snowbanks.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the plants of the alpine meadows is their striking adaptations for surviving in the harsh environment in which they live. The small leaves of Labrador tea, for example, are thick, pliant, and equipped with wooly hairs on their underside – adaptations that protect the leaves and allow them to soak up and retain as much moisture from the atmosphere as possible.

Also, the small size and low-growing shape of many alpine plants helps shield them from wind and weather. Some can even begin the necessary work of growth and photosynthesis at temperatures barely above freezing, much cooler than temperatures required by lowland plants.

Botanists fear that global warming is already changing these high-altitude communities and could eliminate them altogether, as trees and other competing plants move up the mountain’s slopes, aided by warming temperatures.

If that should happen, we would lose not only the large views and fascinating small plants above treeline but also spots of delicate beauty as well. Toward the end of their Mansfield trip, the group of young summit caretakers gathered around a small bog on the summit ridgeline. Bog cranberry happened to be in bloom that day, and the tiny, pink blossoms of the plant were scattered like pink confetti across the dark green moss of the little bog. Above them the white wispy blossoms of cottongrass bobbed and waved in the wind.

It was yet another reminder of how lovely – and how fragile – these high-altitude alpine meadows actually are.

Dartmouth Professor Matthew Ayres and student Lindsay Reynolds were curious about what caused the populations to fluctuate so wildly. There are at least 400 species of butterfly and moth caterpillars in the Hubbard Brook forest, and it wasn’t just a few species that were rising and falling. “We found that the fluctuations happened in synchrony across large geographic areas and many species,” said Ayres, “so there must be a large scale driver causing it.”

So Ayres and Reynolds tested what seemed to be the most likely driver – weather. Perhaps extremely cold winters caused a significant drop in caterpillar abundance the following summer, they hypothesized, or hot summers led to an increase in caterpillar numbers. By comparing historic climate data with the caterpillar abundance data that Holmes collected, the Dartmouth scientists found that cold winters have little effect on caterpillar populations but long warm springs do. In years when temperatures were high for an extended period in the summer, caterpillar populations increased.

The key to this phenomenon is what Ayres calls the phenological race.

“Caterpillar abundance fluctuations are influenced most by those caterpillars that feed early in the season when tree buds are just beginning to break and leaves are expanding,” he explained. “During that time, the leaves have a higher nutritional value to the caterpillars. Temperature affects the development rate of the leaves and the development rate of the caterpillars, and that’s where the phenological race comes in. In warmer years, caterpillars can achieve more of their feeding and development before the leaves expand and tighten up their defenses.”

As the climate continues to warm, Ayres believes that caterpillar populations will increase, but that’s not necessarily bad. From the perspective of the birds, this is a good thing, he said, because they’ll have more food available. “The caterpillars we’re talking about aren’t forest pests; they’re native fauna and a critical link in the structure of the ecosystem. They won’t harm the forest. Some caterpillars are pests and could have ecological and economic impacts, but that’s not the case here.”

Dartmouth postdoctoral fellow Erik Stange is following up on Ayres’ work, trying to determine if caterpillars from particular families or those with common ecologies might be most responsible for the fluctuations. After collecting and sorting 50,000 individual moths, he found that abundance fluctuations occurred across all caterpillar groupings, but those that feed in the spring show the greatest variation. “It’s a communitywide trend in abundance,” Stange said. “Years that are good for some caterpillars are good for many kinds of caterpillars.”

“Each gene is like a line of code in a computer program,” Campbell explained. “Depending on which lines of code are used, the tree can create a different program to respond to environmental stimuli like drought.”

Rather than study drought-responsiveness at a single point in time, as most previous researchers have done, Campbell and student Olivia Wilkins conducted laboratory experiments where they exposed poplars to drought conditions and then examined their genes at four different times of the day and night.

“What was really intriguing was that the suite of programs that is brought to bear to contend with drought in the middle of the day is very different from those brought to bear in the middle of the night,” Campbell said. “Just as the human body reconfigures its metabolism throughout the day in response to our activities, plants must do the same thing. The stress may be constant, but because conditions change during the day, the plant must reconfigure how it responds.”

Previous research had assumed that the genes invoked in response to drought or other stresses continued to work day and night, which may have overemphasized the importance of some genes and totally missed others.

According to Campbell, understanding the genetic response to drought is crucial to helping scientists identify, conserve, and breed trees that are better able to contend with drought.

“Drought is a particularly important issue to address because trees are exposed to multiple cycles of drought over their lifetime,” he said. “Poplars are frequently riparian species, so they are particularly susceptible to fluctuations in water. We know that changes in water availability occur over the lifetime of a tree, and that is going to be exacerbated over time as climate models indicate that increasingly severe droughts will occur in different regions of the world.”

The next step for Campbell is to study genetic drought response in other tree species and to find out how drought response is affected by other stresses.

Erin Baerwald, a doctoral student at the University of Calgary, monitored bat activity and fatalities near wind turbines located across a 200 kilometer stretch of geographically varied terrain in southern Alberta. She used acoustic monitoring devices placed at ground level, 30 meters off the ground, and on top of 67-meter tall turbines. Baerwald said that bat fatalities at wind facilities are a phenomenon that takes place almost exclusively during fall migration. Her study was aimed at determining which species move through her study area at different periods during the fall and whether they are funneled into narrow migratory corridors or migrate in a dispersed way across a broad area.

“There were some areas where there were lots of bats flying through, and other areas where we detected hardly any,” she said, “so it seems that the bats are funneled into particular routes that are related to trees. Almost all of the bats that migrate are tree bats, so if you’re a bat who relies on trees, it makes sense that you follow trees.”

As she expected, very few bats were detected near turbines placed on prairie habitat. In forested regions, Baerwald said that migratory bats appear to follow linear features like ridge tops or river valleys, somewhat like birds do.

The four most abundant species of migratory bats in the U.S. are silver-haired bats, hoary bats, Eastern red bats and Perimyotis (formerly called Eastern pipistrelle). Baerwald detected migratory bats at higher altitudes than the nonmigratory species, which seemed to stay at ground level.

Baerwald is concerned about the impact that increasing numbers of wind turbines will have on migratory bat populations. She said that bat fatalities at wind facilities outnumber bird fatalities by 10 to 1, which is troubling for animals that may live 20-30 years and reproduce very slowly. “The impacts on birds and bats are very different,” she said. “If you’re a small bird that reproduces quickly, your population can rebound quickly. But bats will have a much harder time recovering.”

The biggest surprise she found was how the different bat species responded to weather conditions. According to Baerwald, smaller bat species are more likely to suspend migration during windy conditions than larger bats. “That means that we can’t lump all bats together when we think about mitigation strategies. We may need to do different things for different species,” she said.

But are the field guides right? Could you actually be looking at a butterfly species unknown to science? Even the leading butterfly experts don’t know for sure.

For years, nobody took a close look at azures, perhaps because they are so common throughout the northeastern U.S. Even just a few decades ago, the Northeast was thought to have just one species of azure butterfly. Sure, it was a species that didn’t seem to follow the same rules as other butterfly species – more on this in a moment – but the classification seemed to get the job done.

“The first descriptions of azures in this country were just a mess,” says butterfly expert Harry Pavulaan.

Pavulaan is a cartographer who lives and works in the Washington, D.C., area. He has been pursuing butterflies as a hobby since he was a child, and his interests have grown in sophistication through the years. Butterflies for him are “a passion-driven avocation.”

Pavulaan was trying to put together a comprehensive list of the butterflies of Rhode Island (where he was living at the time), when he noticed, as a cartographer might, that azure butterflies varied between different locations in a way that suggested they belonged to different species rather than being different forms of the same species.

Correspondence with a fellow butterfly enthusiast in Pennsylvania, a medical doctor named David Wright, reinforced the belief of both that there were more species of azures in the Northeast than just the two species that were by then widely accepted: a spring azure and a summer azure.

So the two set to work trying to figure out what some of those species might be.

Pavulaan says that the key factors in teasing out butterfly species, particularly among the azures, include the flight period, which is the time during which the adults of the species are flying around looking for love so that they can continue the species.

Another clue is the host plants. Many butterflies have a single plant that they rely on for at least one stage of their lifecycle. Often it is the only plant the caterpillar can eat, so the adult butterfly will do its best to only lay its eggs on that plant. Sometimes a butterfly species will rely on any of several plant species, or an entire family of plants, and sometimes, but not often, just about any plant will do.

In Vermont, when Kent McFarland, director of the Vermont Butterfly Survey, tried to sort out the hundreds of azure butterfly records – photos, descriptions, and butterfly specimens – sent in by Survey volunteers, he turned to Pavulaan and Wright for help.

Pavulaan and Wright pored over the Vermont azure specimens and compared them to their own records, observations, and theories. They suggest that there are three species of azure butterflies in Vermont, although they say there may be as many as five. There are likely similar species of azures in New Hampshire.

The big three begin with the northern azure, a Canadian species whose range dips down into Vermont and whose flight time is in early spring. Then there is the cherry gall azure, which flies in mid-May. Finally, there is the summer azure, whose flight in Vermont, according to the volunteers of the Vermont Butterfly Survey, hits one peak in early July and another in early August.

The double peak hints to Pavulaan that another species is lurking within this species designation. “The one that flies in late June into early July, we’re not sure what it is. It may be undescribed.” That is, it may be a species new to science that has not been described in the scientific literature.

If these are two species, you can’t really tell them apart by looking at them. Pavulaan would like more information on the host plants used by the two flights of summer azures in Vermont. McFarland would like some DNA samples. Both agree that it will take several years and more funding to get a clear answer on whether there are two species of azures that fly in Vermont and New Hampshire in the summer. Where that time and money will come from, they have no idea.

But we humans are inquisitive; we strive not only to survive in our environment, but to understand it. These two experts believe that some day the mystery will be solved. It just may not be some day soon.

Before joining the team at Northern Woodlands, I served as Executive Director at NorthWoods Stewardship Center, a non-profit conservation organization in northern Vermont. A common refrain heard around the NorthWood’s office was that Vermont is like the country used to be, the Northeast Kingdom is like Vermont used to be, and the northeast corner of the Kingdom is like the Northeast Kingdom used to be.

Regardless of the validity of such comparisons, that corner of Vermont does contain some authentically beautiful country. If the Kingdom’s rich concentration of un-fragmented forestland – under various ownerships – were colored green on the state map, it would rival far better known protected tracts in the northern forest region. The near-boreal habitat adds another interesting dimension, with the likes of black-backed woodpeckers, spruce grouse, gray jays, and good numbers of moose and bear.

The area is also distinctive in its concentration of mountain hiking trails.  NorthWoods and author Luke O’Brien just published a hiking guide to these trails entitled Northeast Kingdom Mountain Trail Guide. Besides maps, the guide contains brief histories of the area and its fire towers, as well as other tidbits of interest that add depth to the hiking experience.  While I was only peripherally involved in this guide while with NorthWoods, to see the book in hand is cause for some personal celebration and this blatant plug.

Beyond the text and maps that guide the hiker from point A to B, the grounding in Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)  history and land ownership transitions reinforce the significant changes that forested landscapes have undergone over the decades, despite present appearances that may suggest little has changed over time.  Ironically, calls to establish a new iteration of the CCC model under present economic conditions can be heard from various voices.  How different would a 21st century CCC be from a 20th century one?

Sometimes a hike is just a hike – simple physical exercise in the great outdoors.  NorthWoods’ new guidebook can support that endeavor.  But it can also provide rich context to your journey through this neck of the northern forest.

But while CCD focused scientists and the public on the threat to honeybees, a non-native species originally imported from Europe in the 17th century, some native bees appear to be in serious trouble, too. These natives are often highly specialized and efficient foragers that are important pollinators for tomatoes, cucumber, squash, berries, and fruit orchards. Across the United States, these native pollinators annually contribute an estimated $3 billion worth of crop pollination.

In the late 1990’s, bee biologists started to notice a decline in the abundance and distribution of several bumblebee species, and in the Northeast, there appeared to be a sudden, range-wide decline in numbers. Leif Richardson, a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, was concerned.

Because there was no data on bumblebee populations in the region, Richardson visited the insect collections at the University of Vermont and other institutions to examine past records of bumblebee abundance. Richardson found that students had commonly collected one species, the rusty-patched bumblebee, in the 1960s and 1970s but that, despite searching for them, no rusty-patched specimen has been found in Vermont in recent years. What was among the most common bumblebee species of fields, farms, and gardens is just about completely gone.

Because the rusty-patched bumblebee disappeared, so did the Ashton cuckoo bumblebee. Cuckoo bumblebees are antisocial bees that parasitize other bumblebee colonies. They infiltrate a rival queen’s colony, enslave the workers, and use them to feed the cuckoo’s young. The Ashton cuckoo specializes in parasitizing the nests of rusty-patched bumblebees. As the host disappears, so goes the parasite.

Bumblebees are excellent pollinators of greenhouse-grown tomatoes and other plants, and this may be where some of the trouble began. In order to increase crop production, especially in greenhouse-grown tomatoes that don’t benefit from wind for natural pollination, farmers release common Eastern bumblebees into their greenhouses. As it happens in these days of global trade, many of these native American bees are actually hatched and raised in Europe before being exported back home. While in Europe, some of the queens were infected by intestinal parasites common to native European bumblebees, and those parasites came to North America on the homeward journey.

Some of the imported and infected bumblebees escaped from the greenhouses where they were working and came into contact with wild bumblebees populations, transmitting the parasites to them. In 2006, Sheila Colla, a doctoral student at York University in Toronto, and colleagues captured native bumblebees at varying distance from commercial greenhouses where bumblebees were being used. They found that native bees captured close to these greenhouses were much more likely to be infected with introduced parasites than those captured far away.

The common Eastern bumblebee is a host that isn’t affected by these parasites. It can, however, carry them and pass them onto other bumblebees. Short-tongued bumblebees, such as rusty-patched and yellow-banded bumblebees, appear to be especially sensitive to these introduced parasites, and this may explain the decline in wild populations.

Introduced parasites are not the only problem facing our native bumblebees. Habitat loss and land fragmentation, planting of monocultures, and urbanization are taking their toll on pollinator populations of all kinds. Some widely used pesticides, particularly the neonicotinoids, may be as big a threat to bumblebees as they are to honeybees in colony collapse disorder.

The Xerces Society, one of the leading insect conservation groups in North America, has placed the rusty-patched bumblebee, the yellow-banded bumblebee, and two western species, the western bumblebee and Franklin’s bumblebee, on its red list of most-threatened insects. Franklin’s, confined to just southern Oregon and northern California, has not been found since 2004 and might be extinct. The rusty-patched bumblebee might not be far behind.

Though there is some hope. In Vermont last year, Richardson found a rise in yellow-banded bumblebee populations, and this year, the bees appear to buzzing around again. No one knows why they might be recovering, but at least the trend is good.

Another place you can find Adelaide’s work is in the halls of the New York State Museum, in Albany, New York. Tyrol was recently selected for the museum’s biennial Focus on Nature exhibition – she’s one of 73 artists from 13 different countries who were given the honor. What’s more, her painting of a whirligig beetle won a prestigious Jury Award – an award denoting outstanding achievement.

We can vouch that Tyrol researches her subjects exhaustively. In the course of her work for Northern Woodlands, she has made many visits to the state entomologist and spent hours examining minute insects under the microscope. One time she gratefully accepted delivery of a live wood frog so that she could see its details for herself. We’re pleased that the whirligig has won this award. As is typical of her work, it’s both artistically daring and scientifically precise.

The Focus on Nature exhibition runs through October 31. The New York State Museum is located on Madison Avenue in Albany, New York. Call (518) 474-5877, or visit www.nysm.nysed.gov for more information.

More than a month old? Didn’t it used to be more than a year old? What’s the deal?

Back in the proverbial good old days, when gas was leaded and two-cycle engines exhaled blue flames, experts recommended shaking up your gas can every now and then to keep the two-cycle oil well mixed. Keeping the same gas for years on end was frowned upon, but in my memory, at least, it was commonly done.

In the 1990s, when two-cycle engines became much cleaner, the “old gas” recommendations began to tighten up. I recall six months being the limit, or maybe “a few months.” The theory was not only to keep the two-cycle oil well mixed but also to keep the gasoline itself fresh, since gasoline (unlike crude oil) is a relatively volatile product that degrades over time. The newer, cleaner saws required higher gasoline quality to run properly. Some dealers started recommending buying the highest-octane fuel for sale at the pump, while others recommended 89 octane because the higher grade did too much cleansing.

The new development is ethanol, which is now routinely mixed with gasoline to help meet air emissions standards and reduce dependence on foreign crude. The ethanol can become separated from the gasoline and two-cycle oil over time, adding to the need to keep things well mixed. Ethanol is also a higher-performance fuel than gasoline, potentially requiring that saws be tuned differently, a vexing problem since ethanol blends at the pump vary with the season and region of the country. Finally, ethanol is hydrophilic, meaning that it tends to absorb moisture from the atmosphere over time, further degrading the quality of the fuel and gumming up the works.

While everyone seems to agree on the problem, few agree on the solution. My saw doctor recommended turning the saw upside down and draining out all the fuel between uses. My chipper-rental guy said to leave the fuel in there but add fuel stabilizer. A well-informed friend of mine pointed out that most fuel stabilizers are not designed to work with ethanol. A tour of the web revealed the usual contradictory information: the most elaborate advice, from Stihl USA, was to drain the fuel after every use, idle the carburetor dry, drizzle two cycle oil into the piston after removing the spark plug, and store the saw in a heated, low humidity environment. The simplest advice was to do nothing, on the theory that new saws are designed to run on ethanol blends.

While waiting for the smoke to clear, my approach is going to be this. Mix up only small amounts of fuel outside of firewood season, shake it up before each use, and dispose of older fuel by running it through the lawn mower. (The mower is a four-cycle engine that doesn’t have a catalytic converter: opinion varies on the effects of running two-cycle oil through a vehicle’s catalytic converter.) Pour old fuel out of the saw between uses (figuring out some way to do this without spilling gasoline all over the garage) but don’t run the carburetor dry since my saws are stored in the garage and moisture might creep in if the saw’s seals dry out. Meanwhile, use only two-cycle oil that’s been designed for use with ethanol blends and monitor progress on the fuel stabilizer front.

I do hope that someday there’s a decent chainsaw on the market that doesn’t run on gas. Or ethanol. Or whatever it now is.

Perhaps the most compelling moments of the film involve Donna Massie, the woman who first reported the beetle in August 2008. She’s not an entomologist, not a naturephile, just a regular person living in a regular house on a regular suburban street. Her husband had a beetle crawling on him in the backyard one day after work, and Massie took it upon herself to surf the web and find out what it was. She was laughed at at first when she told her husband she was calling the government; that is, until USDA-APHIS representative Patty Douglas showed up and confirmed the identification. Douglas remembers that she knew in five seconds that everything in her professional life was about to change. The same can be said for everyone living in the quarantine zone.

The film lurches in tone – swinging from ominous to hopeful at fairly regular intervals. This is to be expected, as the battle is still unfolding. The people of Worcester have done remarkable work removing infested trees (26,293 to date), instituting tree-planting programs to re-shade their barren streets, spreading the word. (While some people find war metaphors distasteful when applied to nature, they’re very hard to resist here; through this lens we’re all Muscovites watching our fellow Russians raze their crops to slow Napoleon’s advancing armies.) But all of this good work is tempered by the fact that the extent of the infestation is still not known and the beetle is by no means eradicated. Word on the ground has it that there are roadside piles of firewood just north of the quarantine zone, culled from ice storm-damaged maples, with handpainted signs proclaiming “free firewood.”

The film ends on hope, though, as it ought to. The fact is we still have a shot at containing this bug. For however voracious it is, it’s not inconspicuous, and it’s very slow moving. A nice touch in the film is the tour of Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood. ALB was detected and eradicated here. What were clearcut streets in the late nineties are today leafy boulevards. You’d never know what happened.

To get your hands on a free copy of the film, go to www.lurkinginthetrees.org. Share it with your public access television station, your area schools, your bridge club. The spread of invasive insects can feel hopeless at times, but here’s something simple we can all do.

Last year, district foresters began connecting with a powerful ally: Maine’s army of real estate agents, the middle-men and -women for most of the state’s thousands of annual land sales.

Ken Canfield, a forester for one of Maine’s southernmost districts, developed a three-hour class for real estate agents on forestry and forestry law in 2008. In the course, entitled “How Forestry Practices and Laws Can Potentially Affect Your Client,” agents are encouraged to alert landowners and would-be landowners about the resources available through the Maine Forest Service. They are also introduced to the potential tax benefits and restrictions on land enrolled in the Tree Growth Tax Law (Maine’s version of current use tax assessment), a program that taxes forestland on its productive value rather than its fair market value. The class also seeks to spread the word about the state’s 2005 law intended to curb “liquidation harvesting,” the practice of buying timberland, removing the merchantable timber, then quickly selling the barren parcel.

“It is a lot easier to talk to real estate agents than it would be to talk to everyone who might be buying land,” Canfield said.

So far, Canfield has given the course two times in Portland, while two other foresters, Jim Ecker and Steve MacDonald, offered it twice in the Bangor region. Each time, the presentation, which is free of charge, has attracted between 20 and 35 real estate agents, who receive continuing education credits from the Maine Real Estate Commission for participating. Agents must earn a certain number of credits every two years to maintain their state license. The foresters believe that this accreditation component has been key to the program’s draw.

Canfield does not expect real estate agents to recall the intricacies of the state’s “current use” designation or Maine’s liquidation harvesting law after a three-hour course. But he hopes they will be able to let their clients know that these programs and regulations exist and to refer them to the Maine Forest Service for more information.

“The take-home message is call us if you have a question,” Canfield said. That message appears to be sinking in. The real estate agents who attended a course in early March of this year at the Keller Williams Realty office in Portland found it informative, according to Keller Williams agent Doug Greene.

“What it teaches us is, if we are dealing with large parcels of land, if in doubt, check with the Forest Service, and really do our due diligence,” said Greene. “A lot of us really didn’t know much about this.”

Some of the plants growing then resembled giant bottle brushes, reaching 60 feet tall. Others sported 100-foot-tall trunks that were clothed in overlapping, scalelike leaves. Notably absent were flowers: it would be another 200 million years before flowering plants evolved.

Although the dinosaurs are long departed, victims of a bygone natural catastrophe, some of the plants in their landscape stubbornly survived. Their relatives exist today in more modest forms.

Horsetail is one such “prehistoric” plant. About 10 species of horsetails grow in the Northeast; they are often found in wet soils and semiaquatic areas but can be found in sites that are quite dry. The plant has hollow, jointed stems, and some species have threadlike side-branches that are commonly mistaken for leaves. But the leaves of these horsetails are tiny, so they rely on green side branches and a green main stem for photosynthesis.

Horsetails appear almost unchanged from the earliest plants that made the transition from water to land some 400 million years ago. Lacking flowers, a horsetail reproduces by spores from a cone that grows at the tip of its stem. Each spore bears long, ribbonlike extensions that allow it to be dispersed by air currents. If it lands in a damp place, a spore grows into an entirely different and independent plant. This tiny plant, known as a prothallus, can be either male or female. Male prothalli produce sperm that, when washed off the plant by rain, float to find and fertilize the eggs in nearby female prothalli. Once fertilized, eggs develop into the sporeproducing horsetail plants that we commonly see. This two-stage life cycle is called the “alteration of generations.”

As horsetails evolved, they developed a means to stand upright without the support of water. Their hollow stems became reinforced with the mineral silica. Horsetails are scratchy due to this high silica content, and centuries ago, we humans began using them as an abrasive to scour pots and put fine, smooth finishes on pewter and silverware. Nowadays, horsetail silica, finer than any silica powder devised by humans, is used to polish certain medical and dental products.

Another age-old plant is clubmoss. While horsetails can flourish in various locations, clubmosses are more restricted, growing mostly in the cool, shaded environment of the boreal forest. Clubmosses are low plants with creeping, branched stems that hug the ground. Since they resemble miniature evergreen trees, they are commonly known as ground cedar, ground pine, or princess pine. When these plants were in their heyday 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Period, an estimated 50 percent of the world’s vegetation consisted of giant clubmosses. Today their fossil remains make up coal deposits with enormous economic value.

Today’s clubmosses, tiny in comparison to their towering ancestors, have modernday economic value. In some areas, some species are harvested in huge amounts to make Christmas wreaths. Because it can take up to 20 years for clubmosses to complete their reproductive cycle, it’s important to harvest this plant in a sustainable way. Clip mature stems near ground level rather than ripping or tearing them up (this protects rhizomes). Harvest no more than 25 percent of a plant’s “greens” in a season, and then give the area a few years to regenerate before you return.

Like horsetails, the clubmosses we see reproduce via spores rather than by flowers and seeds. The spores are shed from the club-shaped, yellowish cones that arise from their tips or from spore-bearing structures in the axils of the leaves. Although each spore is microscopic, being only one-fortieth of a millimeter across, masses of them are collected for various uses. The spores, also known as “vegetable sulfur,” have high oil content, which makes them extremely flammable when airborne. Early photographers ignited the spores for flash photography, and the spores are still sold today for magic tricks and other theatrical special effects. Clubmoss spores also are used as tracers in certain types of scientific research and as an ingredient in some medicines and cosmetics.

Although horsetails and clubmosses are considered evolutionary relics, they are easy to spot in the Northern Forest. And unlike many inorganic relics, these humble plants have modern-day utility.

This encounter highlighted the differences between a wood turtle and its more familiar reptilian relative in our region, the painted turtle. The wood turtle’s shell is rough and dull brown to yellowish, while the painted turtle has a smooth shell that is olive to black, The bony plates or scutes of the wood turtle’s shell are marked with concentric ridges, or growth rings—which accounts for its scientific name, ‘Glyptemys insculpta,’ or ‘engraved water turtle.’

There are other color differences. The skin on the neck and forelegs of the wood turtle is orange or salmon-colored, whereas the painted turtle sports intricate stripes of scarlet and yellow on black. Wood turtles are also more robust than painted turtles, reaching 9 inches in length. (Another turtle species common in Vermont and New Hampshire, snapping turtles, grow much larger that wood turtles and have long tails bearing three rows of upright, spiky scales reminiscent of a dinosaur. True to their name, they snap!)

The wood turtle crossing my road was moving slowly, but they can move quite fast. They have also proven to be rather intelligent. Wood turtles have been able to memorize and run mazes with the proficiency of laboratory rats, and one account of a wood turtle noted that it knew its way around the house, including where to stop for dinner and where to ask for a swim in the bathtub.  They are astonishingly adept climbers. Steve Parren, a Vermont Fish and Wildlife biologist, once found a wood turtle he had confiscated after its illegal capture climbing halfway up the wire fence of its enclosure—a good three feet off the ground.

Wood turtles distinguish themselves from the painted turtle and the irascible snapper in lifestyle as well as appearance. Painted turtles and snappers are primarily aquatic, coming onto land only to move between bodies of water and lay eggs. By contrast, wood turtles have a distinct yearly cycle that has them spending a good chunk of time on land. After spending the winter hibernating underwater, in burrows under stream and riverbanks, they begin heading for solid ground in May and June. They become terrestrial in summer, foraging in wet meadows, swampy thickets and wooded floodplains. They generally keep to a home territory of 3 to 12 acres while remaining within 2,000 feet of their river or stream.

And that’s their problem.  Roads often follow rivers, so wood turtles too often become traffic fatalities. Their numbers are declining across their entire range in the United States, and roadkill is often the cause. Females are the usual victims as they cross roads to find sandy yet moist places to lay their eggs. Studies have shown that wood turtle populations near roads are almost entirely male, which is hardly a sustainable situation.

Maybe even more threatening to these turtles are the populations of raccoons, foxes and skunks that increase near rural development. In some areas, it’s estimated that more than 85 percent of wood turtle eggs and hatchlings are lost to predation. Female wood turtles produce an average of eight eggs a year, but don’t start reproducing until they’re 14 years old. The turtles’ survival strategy of laying few eggs but living long to ensure reproduction – 40 to 50 years – is no longer working as well as it once did.

Maybe even more threatening to these turtles are the populations of raccoons, foxes and skunks that seem to increase near rural development. These predators eat over 85 percent of the wood turtle eggs and hatchlings. Female wood turtles produce an average of only eight eggs a year, so with this level of predation the chances of successful reproduction in wood turtles become slim.  Compounding the problem is the fact a female wood turtle must live 14 or more years to be of reproductive age. The turtles’ survival strategy of laying few eggs but living long to ensure reproduction – 40 to 50 years – is no longer working.

I had been strongly tempted to drive away with that turtle I had scooped from the road.  She was docile and eyed me with curiosity. Faced with all these hazards, wouldn’t she have been better off in my care?  Unfortunately this sentiment too, is harming wood turtles.  A 20-year study published in 1995 by biologists from Rutgers University found that such well-meaning acts of adoption actually helped wipe out a wood turtle population at a wildlife preserve in New Haven County, Connecticut, after the preserve had been opened to hikers.

Collecting the turtles—which is illegal in New Hampshire and Vermont—had removed them from the crucial breeding population at the Connecticut preserve. With that in mind, I released the turtle to fend for herself.

A few weeks back, the Pinchot Institute, a national conservation organization, issued a press release that began:

Washington DC, June 11, 2010 – “Bioenergy technologies, even biomass electric power compared to natural gas electric, look favorable when biomass waste-wood is compared to fossil fuel alternatives.” Thus concludes a study released this week by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, and by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, which funded the study.

Ten days later, the Biomass Thermal Energy Council released essentially the same press release:

WASHINGTON, June 21, 2010 - The Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study, a recently released report commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (MA DOER) and authored by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, affirms the environmental benefits of using biomass for thermal energy.

What’s surreal is that during this same timeframe, anti-biomass organizations nationwide were using this same 182-page study to claim that biomass is worse for the environment than coal. And unfortunately for those who see biomass as a proactive fuel source, most media outlets seemed to glom on to this later version of events. Google the words “wood worse than coal,” then take a gander at all the news outlets screaming just that in their headlines (and we’re talking ABC news, CBS news, AP, not just Coal Industry News.) I had a different incarnation of the Manomet-says-wood-is-worse-than-coal story come up for the first 49 entries in my search, an unbroken stream of misinformation until chowhound.com broke the string with a lively debate on wood/coal vs. gas barbeque techniques.

To their credit, the Manomet Biomass Study Team has released a more crisply worded statement of their findings. (See it at: http://www.manomet.org/sites/manomet.org/files/Manomet%20Statement%20062110b.pdf ). In this clarification, they state unequivocally that ‘wood worse than coal’ is an inaccurate interpretation of their findings. They reaffirmed the conventional wisdom that while burning wood does emit more green house gasses initially than fossil fuels, these emissions are removed from the atmosphere as harvested forests re-grow.

We’ll see if biomass proponents can use this statement to lure the cat back into the bag.

In the meantime, we’re hard at work on a story that sets the record straight on biomass. Across our region, communities are grappling with how best to harness biomass energy, and we aspire to be a source of information that people can use. The piece will cover biomass basics, and explore some of the frequent questions that seem to be swirling around the debate.

I’d love to know, as we’re working on the piece, what you think, what you wonder. What questions do you have about biomass? What don’t you understand, or conversely, what do you understand that’s not being reported? Thanks for your insight, and stay tuned for this story in the autumn issue.

“Those **@#$&%** moles again,” my thoughts went. But moles do no lasting harm to a lawn despite making an unsightly seasonal mess.

Nevertheless these eruptions invite human attention. When our children were small, we did our mole dance, jumping up and down in an attempt to flatten the dark mounds and ridges thrust above the ground. Our ineffectual efforts never had any effect upon moles off somewhere else in their labyrinthine tunnels.

The number of mounds or surface ridges seen in a yard is no indication of how many moles are present. It may seem as though hundreds are at work, yet one mole can excavate 15 feet an hour and perhaps 35 yards in a day.

Moles are prolific. A female bears four or five young every spring in a deep nesting chamber.

When only a month old the youngsters leave home and forage on their own, so youthful exuberance may contribute to what is abundantly noticeable on lawns in early summer. Eating its own weight every day, a mole engages in a lot of hunting and a lot of excavating.

The hairy-tail mole, one of only two species of moles in Vermont and the one that inhabits our lawns, does not hibernate but lives comfortably through the winter below the frost line at a depth of about four feet. We never see its deep winter tunnels; we are conscious only of its warm-weather surface runways, or foraging tunnels, commonly seen as earthen ridges running across lawns. They are so shallow their roofs eventually collapse of their own fragile nature—or from traffic overhead.

The deeper main passageways used daily as a mole travels to and from surface feeding sites or when visiting its nest burrow tend to be permanent and inhabited by successive generations, while surface tunnels are dug afresh each year.

Excavating the lower system of burrows is not as easy as digging through loose surface soil. Deep earth has been compacted for many years, so excavating tunnels and chambers demands skill and strength. A mole’s front feet are equipped with thick webbing between the toes, a feature that caused Linnaeus over 200 years ago to believe erroneously that this purely terrestrial animal lived in water. (Vermont’s other mole, the semi-aquatic star-nosed mole, is very much at home in water.)

A mole’s shovel-like front legs – with clawed feet—emerge from powerfully muscled shoulders, perfectly suited for excavation. When making a shallow surface tunnel, a mole shoves its way forward, reaching out ahead in a kind of breaststroke. Dirt is pushed to the side, then compacted onto the tunnel walls and ceiling as the little animal pushes against it, rotating in the burrow like a furry cylindrical auger. In deeper passageways a mole turns a tight somersault in the narrow tunnel and pushes dirt to the surface through a few selected openings, depositing it on the surface like a miniature volcano—a molehill.

Maximum mole activity occurs in the morning, especially if rain has softened the soil and earthworms rise to the surface. Moles patrol their tunnels every couple of hours to see what has dropped in for dinner.

It’s the foraging surface tunnels that annoy us, but that’s where food is plentiful. Although larval and adult insects, centipedes, slugs, sowbugs and other invertebrates are abundant, the ubiquitous earthworm is the mole’s main fare. Earthworm populations are high in lawns and fields, so a mole snuffling through the soil may discover one every few inches. When it is found, the mole sniffs excitedly, digs the soil away and immediately devours it head to tail, dirt and all.

Eyes and ears are tiny and seemingly of little importance to a mole, although hearing functions well when needed. At best the degenerate eyes detect only light. But the nose is a keen dual-purpose sensory organ: it sniffs subterranean prey and is highly responsive to touch stimuli. In fact, the olfactory and tactile nose is the mole’s single most important organ for sensing its earthy environment.

You’d think that an animal living its entire life in soil would be dirty. It’s not. A mole’s velvety gray coat is the finest possible fur. It sheds dirt instantly and is smooth and clean. The hair shafts, unlike those of any other mammal, prevent soil from reaching the skin or sticking to the fur, so moles always appear free of dirt.

Despite stomping on molehills and tunnels, it’s a good bet I’ve never done in a single mole. For that I’m glad. We need to accept our hard-working subterranean neighbors and their useful, soil-aerating ways.

Generally speaking, biomass means plants. In the context of renewable energy, biomass means plants that are used as fuel. Though this might include corn or grasses in other parts of the country, here in New Hampshire and Vermont biomass means wood: cordwood for the stove, pellets for the furnace, or chips for the power plant.

As the United States reconsiders its fossil fuel use, biomass is a possible renewable energy source for the twin states. Historically, over the millennia, wood has kept humans warm here, and we have lots of experience in the modern era burning it for heat and electricity. There are enough trees here, and they grow well enough that there’s no need to replant after cutting. Wood can be stored and burned only as needed, an advantage over wind and solar. And wood grown here keeps energy dollars in the local economy.

Although the Northeast already uses lots of biomass compared with other parts of the country, as a fuel resource it accounts for only 4 percent of our region’s total energy production. The rest comes from fossil fuel. According to the Biomass Thermal Energy Council in Washington, DC, this could change: up to 25 percent of our regional heating needs could be met by biomass. (An internet search for “Heating the Northeast with Renewable Energy” will produce the complete report.)

Most of this biomass would come from former agricultural lands that would be planted with fast-growing trees, primarily in New York and Vermont. The remainder would come from existing forests, primarily in Maine and New Hampshire. (The report defines the Northeast as the New England states plus New York.) In total, roughly 13 percent of our forests’ annual growth would need to be burned as biomass to meet this goal.

But some fear that a vigorous market for biomass could once again lead to overharvesting, as occurred here in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a loss not just of wildlife habitat and recreational space but also of the potential for lumber and other forest products. An expanded market for biomass is especially troubling to some given another recent statistic: for the first time since the Civil War, we in the Northeast have started converting more of our forests to other uses—primarily roads, housing and other forms of development—than are naturally re-growing on old farmland.

Another knock on biomass is that burning wood isn’t necessarily clean. Almost everyone can think of a smoldering outdoor boiler polluting the neighborhood with possible carcinogens. A third problem is that wood is not a particularly concentrated fuel source. Nearly half the weight of a green chunk of firewood is either water or the cellulose that will be required to burn off that water. You don’t have to move wood far down the road before the fossil fuel savings start to be lost in clouds of diesel exhaust.

Biomass advocates recognize these concerns and believe they can be addressed through good forest management, the proper siting of new power plants, and clean-burning, gasification technology. There are already a half dozen, large-scale, biomass electricity plants in the twin states, the largest being the McNeil facility in Burlington, VT, and the Schiller facility in Portsmouth, NH, both of which can produce 50 megawatts. As for the issue of sustainability, a recent feasibility study conducted by the Biomass Energy Resource Center indicates that an estimated 3.5 million green tons of wood are consumed annually by pulp mills, biomass power plants, seasonal chip-heating systems, and wood-heated homes in Vermont and nearby counties in New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. By comparison, the timberland in the same study area regenerates about 25 million tons of net growth each year.

Even more efficient than large power plants would be to burn biomass in relatively small facilities, sited close to their sustainably managed ‘wood sheds,’ providing both heat and electricity through a process called cogeneration. Such plants would generate electricity for a town, village, or school campus while heating nearby buildings and houses with the leftover steam. Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, and the University of New Hampshire are three of more than 100 schools in the U.S. already using energy from cogeneration—though none burns exclusively wood. (Dartmouth could burn wood but is presently burning oil, and Middlebury burns 20 percent wood.) Two dozen secondary schools in Vermont already burn biomass for heat, though not for electricity.

So that’s the state of the debate. Biomass has great potential, but it’s not without pitfalls. Much rides on the outcome, and that’s because while the details of biomass are being sorted out, there’s another statistic to bear in mind. The seven states of the Northeast burn 5 billion gallons of home heating oil each winter, making our region, per capita, one of the largest consumers of home heating oil on the face of the planet.

In at least one case, our questions have been answered.

Many readers have contacted us in the last few weeks to ask about white pine needle damage. Around here, many white pines looked, in late May, like Tamaracks in November; as I write this, brown, dead needles are blowing off the trees around the office, leaving them looking pretty thin and scrawny.

Turns out the above average precipitation we had in May and June of 2009 is playing a role in the brown needles we’re observing in 2010. In Vermont, the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation reports that at least two different needlecast diseases have been identified on symptomatic pines. One is the Brown Spot Needle Blight, caused by Scirrhia acicola. The other is white pine needlecast, caused by Canavirgella banfieldii. Both of these fungal diseases were enabled by last spring’s wet weather, when ideal conditions allowed fungal spores to infect the interior needles of the trees.

Of course scientists, being scientists, are never content to blame any malady on just one source. Many suspect that the late frosts we had this spring – frosts that in most areas are going down as the worst on record – have also played a role in the needle damage. The early warmth, followed by the record cold, combined with the fungus, created a perfect storm. Oh, and by the way, the pine leaf adelgid – an insect pest – has also been reported as being more common than usual in certain areas.

Similar white pine needle damage has been reported throughout our readership area. The majority of calls to the Maine Forest Service this week involved questions about shedding white pines. The New Hampshire Division of Forest & Lands reports that on many sites, fungal outbreaks have been bad for the past three years, which makes this year’s dramatic damage troubling.

The bottom line is that if your brown pines are growing on a good site, and they’re otherwise healthy, they should be fine. They will shed their dead needles but their new shoots should grow normally. Mortality on lower branches may accelerate, but by July, the trees should be green, even while they look thinner than normal.

If the needles on your new shoots are still brown in July, you don’t have healthy trees. Foresters indicate that it’s certainly possible that this event could cause mortality among the weaker trees in a stand.

How about 5-year-olds and their affinity for adventure? An inspired flat-footed leap into a chocolate-colored puddle is an experience to be treasured. It’s beyond sublime to land happily into such murky water.

If little people love puddles, so do much littler critters. A puddle is a universe for small creatures, but often it’s difficult finding the inhabitants—even when their lives are in full bloom. To see what’s present, you will often need a microscope.

Obviously there are bacteria. And there are larger one-celled protozoa now active after a long winter’s shut-down inside their resistant cysts. The mud also harbors both amoebas and busy ciliates that are smaller than the familiar paramecia remembered from school days.

As the season continues warming, a tinge of green appears at a puddle’s margin, signifying a bloom of photosynthetic flagellates much smaller than euglena, another traditional lab specimen. We come across rotifers, tiny multi-celled creatures just awakened from their encapsulated over-wintering state. A wriggling hair-spring roundworm—a nematode—writhes in and out of the flocculent carpeting on a puddle floor.

These little animals may not have an easy time in flooded roads saturated with contaminants; the most sensitive creatures don’t make it in those puddles.

In New Hampshire and Vermont, though, there are many one-time logging roads that now are no more than muddy tracks relatively free of contaminants. Each spring I inspect the edge of our lower meadow where logging occurred years ago. A skidder sank to its hubs in saturated soil back then, leaving two long, deep depressions that fill with groundwater.

Looking down, I see the slow-motion gyrations of gordian worms, slender threadlike creatures several inches long. Because they ball up into confusing tangles, they were named after the puzzling Gordian Knot slashed by Alexander the Great. Why do they gather in this skidder puddle? And what are these gyrations?

Their stiff and deliberate writhings are an aquatic mating dance performed only in water. The fertilized eggs of the gordian worm eventually hatch into microscopic larvae, each equipped with a spiny proboscis that it uses to penetrate the tough cuticle of a grasshopper, cricket or beetle that arrives at the puddle to drink. As parasites the larvae wind up deep in an insect’s circulatory system, where they develop into adults that will later emerge and drop free only when their host is near water, thus completing a life cycle.

With their wings slowly unfolding and closing in quiet rhythms, flocks of skippers and other butterflies crowd a puddle, each uncoiling its proboscis into the water to slake its thirst and supplement its diet with the minerals that occur naturally in the shallow, still water.

Dauber wasps are at the puddle too, rolling up pellets of mud that they’ll use to construct cylindrical nests under eaves or in a hollow tree. Earlier this spring the robin stopped there to gather mud to build its cup nest, which it strengthens with interwoven grass and twigs. Footprints of tiger beetles are seen at the soft edge of the puddle, where they probably came to find prey.

Puddles with mossy edges are likely to harbor microscopic tardigrades (water bears). When desiccation threatens, the tardigrade shrivels up inside its skin, which serves as a protective envelope. Later—sometimes after several years of suspended animation—a tardigrade rejuvenates, returning to active life.

Different kinds of puddles invite exploration by humans. On Wheeler Mountain, near my home in St. Johnsbury, Vt., I once sat on a rock dome, with a field microscope in hand, to examine water from a shallow foot-long puddle cradled in the granite. Hundreds of a single species of rotifer were swimming through my magnified circular field. The mountaintop puddle lasted only a few days before drying up and leaving only a powdery deposit on the bottom. Countless rotifer cysts wound up lying in that dust, and there were no other signs of life. I scraped up these cysts, took them home, dumped them into a container of spring water, and watched them spring back to life.

Where do mountain puddle rotifers come from? Where might they go? When evaporation and drying-up threaten, rotifers form a cyst wall to protect against whatever the world throws at them. A breeze comes along, and the tiny cysts are whirled aloft to travel vast distances, perhaps even settling down in Germany or Japan.

Why inspect puddles? Understanding more about our world, even a muddy speck, is always fun if not instructive. Consider a mud puddle, and marvel at our own tiny place in the universe.

Landowners should remember that the dollar amount here indicates what is being paid for logs that have been felled, limbed, skidded, bucked, and delivered to a mill or buyer. The cost of logging and trucking need to be subtracted from these figures to arrive at the price paid to the landowner. Because every job is different, these costs vary widely.

Negotiating a fair price requires an understanding of markets and job conditions. It’s recommended that landowners without this knowledge use a forester as an agent. A forester’s fee will add to the cost, but their representation will often result in a higher payment for the timber.

These data are compiled from interviews with suppliers and buyers and from the most recent print and on-line versions of the Sawlog Bulletin, and are used by permission. For more information on the Sawlog Bulletin, call 603-444-2549 or go to sawlogbulletin.org. Please note that many of these prices were reported three months prior to our publication date, and current prices could be higher or lower.

High End vs. Low End

The obvious fact that hardwood prices have tanked since 2005 obscures the less obvious one that it’s really only the high-end woods that have tumbled. In constant 2001 dollars, the highend woods (cherry, red oak, sugar maple) have dropped 43 percent since the summer of 2001, while the low-end hardwoods (yellow birch, white birch, red maple, white ash) are down only 11 percent. Solid-cherry bedsteads and oak-floored living rooms are less in demand when the mortgage payment itself is called into question.

The prudent landowner might be tempted to shift management focus away from the risky returns of the high end for the greater predictability of the low end. The problem with this conclusion, besides the ecological reality that you can’t exactly choose the composition of tree species growing on your land, is that it’s often the occasional “golden maple” (see our mill receipt article on page 24) that makes a job worthwhile. Birch and ash and soft maple may cover their costs, but oak and cherry ice the cake.

Still, for those landowners growing birch and ash and soft maple, it’s nice to know that the cake is holding its value.

But there is another side to Hishiki’s work that deserves attention. In a sister painting, entitled Monarch Butterfly Type B Metamorphosis, Hishiki introduces fanciful elements into an otherwise rational, realistic environment, thus proving that she’s also adept at the aesthetic style called “magic realism.”

In art, recognizable truth appeals to us, and we readily accept it; so much so that a “magic” element can sometimes be slipped in undercover, marauding as truth. By blending reality with hypothesis, the magic realist intends to direct us towards a deeper understanding of life. In Monarch Butterfly Type B Metamorphosis, Hishiki faithfully follows the well-established format of scientific illustration she knows so well. But something is new here: within this butterfly’s life cycle, she has embedded a fantastic narrative of her own. The image she presents us with follows the unique and mysterious plant-formed transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly. Utilizing the familiar, Asuka Hishiki convincingly seduces our imagination to take flight.

Asuka Hishiki’s work will be a part of two exhibitions this summer: Focus on Nature XI at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York, through October 31st, and “Botanica” at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey, through September 12th. She may be reached through her website: www.greenasas.com.