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The Bobolink: Emily Dickinson’s Rowdy of the Meadow

Bobolink
A territorial male bobolink calling from a perch near the field station at Allens Pond Wildlife Sanctuary. Photo by Amelia Tripp.
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –
Emily Dickinson

A bobolink circled down from his airy pulpit on shivering wings and burst forth with an overflowing cascade of joyful notes, as if in celebration of this perfect day. He was preaching to the converted; the sun glowed from a bluebird sky and scintillated off an expanse of prairie grasses. In the background were the dunes of Barney’s Joy Beach, and behind them Martha’s Vineyard and Cuttyhunk Island were hull down in a white-flecked sea. Crickets and grasshoppers played their fiddles as butterflies teetered in the cooling sea breeze.

This idyllic place is the centerpiece in the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s crown jewels, Allens Pond Wildlife Sanctuary in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. This particular grassland – among several found in the sanctuary – does not have a formal name and is known only as the “Warm-season Grassland.” But, these 55 acres are one of Mass Audubon’s most important holdings in southern New England. This meadow is an oasis in a green desert of intensively managed hayfields, and an avian Noah’s Ark, one of a few holding the future of grassland birds in the area.

While standing in this verdant meadow, it is hard to believe that 20 years ago this field was an ecological disaster. It was a muddy, chemically drenched wasteland of corn stubble, ragweed, and alien plant species, and home to invasive birds such as European starlings and house sparrows. Now, this lush meadow is a haven for two very special native grassland birds: savannah sparrows and bobolinks. And during the winter, eastern meadowlarks flock to this field. How did this transformation take place, and why is it so significant?

Female bobolink
A female bobolink in a field managed for grassland nesting birds in partnership with The Bobolink Project in Whiting, Vermont. Photo by Allan Strong.

A Short History of Grasslands

In the 18th and 19th centuries, New England was covered with rural pastures and meadows teeming with grassland birds such as meadowlarks, bobolinks, savannah sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, and even upland sandpipers. There is abundant historical evidence that grasslands and grassland birds were common in coastal New England; early settlers and explorers such as Samuel de Champlain, Giovanni da Verrazano, and John Smith described large, open savannahs along the coast. Sandplains, beaver meadows, burned-over areas, and floodplains provided grasslands farther inland.

Ninety-four percent of all tall grass prairies in North America has been destroyed since European colonization, mostly for agricultural purposes. Although the Northeast does not have natural prairies, grasslands are among its most endangered habitats. Not surprisingly, grassland birds have, according to the Massachusetts Audubon Society, shown the steepest, most consistent, and widespread decline of any group of North American birds.

The bobolink is the emblematic bird of our eastern grasslands. For centuries, bobolinks have been an integral part of the rural mosaic in New England and New York, celebrated by writers including Henry David Thoreau, John James Audubon, John Burroughs, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Especially Emily Dickinson. She mentioned the bobolink 12 times in her poetry, and nicknamed the species “Rowdy of the Meadow” because of its rambunctious antics.

Annual North American Breeding Bird Surveys have shown a consistent decline in bobolink numbers in the last few decades in all the northeastern states. Bobolinks experienced a 5.01 percent annual drop from 1980 to 2015 for the North Atlantic Forest, a region identified by the USGS as the Adirondacks, most of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and the Maritimes (but excluding the Champlain Valley). From 2015 to 2019, the regional decline slowed down to 1.99 percent per year, with the greatest rate of loss in New Hampshire at 4.80 percent.

Songbirds all across North America are in decline and in many cases the causes are not well understood. However, the primary reasons for the bobolink’s poor nesting success are obvious: loss of the grassland habitat and more aggressive haying schedules on the remaining fields. In southern New England, the remaining open spaces, especially old fields and meadows, are being gobbled up by developers and subdivided into commercial and residential lots. Most of the remaining grasslands are being intensively managed for hay production, at the expense of nesting birds.

Bobolinks arrive from South America in May and start nesting later in the month. They need at least 45 days to nest and successfully fledge their young. In the days before the emphasis on intensively managed hay fields, the first cut of most fields was not until late summer, resulting in a thriving grassland bird population. Now, however, many hayfields are cut in early June, resulting in an almost complete loss of nests, eggs, and nestlings. Although many landowners and farmers want to believe otherwise, bobolinks will not re-nest after a June mowing.

Andrea Jones and Gina Purtell
Andrea Jones and Gina Purtell of Mass Audubon at the restored warm-season grasslands in front of a stand of big bluestem 20 years into the project. Photo by Frederick Thurber.

An Opportunity for Restoration

Addressing the decline of grassland birds is a priority for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and it has become a factor in the management of their holdings and the acquisition of new properties. In 1998, Mass Audubon purchased 200 acres of prime coastal property adjacent to the Allens Pond estuary in South Dartmouth, including 55 acres of fields that were being leased for silage corn.

When the corn contract expired in 2000, Andrea Jones, the Grassland Conservation coordinator at Mass Audubon, decided to try experimenting with “warm-season” grasses. Native grasses such as big bluestem, switchgrass, and Indian grass mature in late summer, unlike the non-native plants typically used in lawns, golf courses, and hayfields, which mature in the late spring or early summer. Warm-season grasses are not strictly necessary for the restoration of grassland species such as bobolinks, but they have many benefits, such as better drought tolerance and climate resilience. The major advantage of warm-season grasses is that they provide much better hay or forage for livestock when harvested in the mid- or late summer.

While Emily Dickinson said that all it takes to make a prairie is a clover, one bee, and “revery,” Mass Audubon needed a bit more to restore the Allens Pond grassland. As a first step, Jones consulted numerous experts, including Calvin Ernst of Ernst Conservation Seed, to develop an optimal mix of warm-season (primarily) grasses and forbs. Big bluestem, switchgrass, deer tongue, and Indian grass were chosen for the drier, upland fields, while freshwater cordgrass, boneset, swamp milkweed, Joe Pye weed, and swamp verbena were chosen for the wetter areas. Timothy, a cool-season grass, was added in some parts of the field as it provides good forage and will shade out weeds in the spring. Prairie wildflower mixes were subsequently planted along the edges to provide food and habitat for butterflies and other pollinators. Of all the native grasses in North America, big bluestem is the marquee species. This is the signature grass of the tallgrass prairie in the Midwest; the turkey foot–shaped inflorescence of this stately grass comes up to shoulder height on a bison.

Over the course of 20 years, hundreds of people – mostly volunteers – were involved in a carefully planned restoration effort led by Gina Purtell, the sanctuary director at Allens Pond, Gene Albanese, grassland ecologist (now senior conservation ecologist), and Lauren Miller-Donnelly, the property manager at Allens Pond. Interns, local volunteers, AmeriCorps workers, and incarcerated people from a nearby minimum-security facility assisted in this effort. They pulled rocks from the ground, cleared brush from stone walls, and carefully regulated mowing and grazing regimes. However, it was the control of invasive plants that dominated the efforts to recover this grassland.

Alien plants such as multiflora rose, cool-weather grasses, phragmites, and brown knapweed were bad enough, but it was the Johnson grass, a pernicious invasive that may have been introduced with the corn seed, that caused the most headaches. Not only does it spread by seed, but Johnson grass can send rhizomes out hundreds of feet in every direction. From 2002 to 2007, the crew at Allens Pond waged an epic war against the Johnson grass; they cut it, ripped it up, applied herbicide, and even covered it with plastic. By 2008, the Johnson grass was finally extirpated. While this was going on, the warm-season grasses were in their “establishment phase.” After a few years, they began to dominate the landscape.

It did not take long for grassland birds to discover the fields. The first nesting pair of savannah sparrows was found in 2002 and the first pair of bobolinks was discovered in 2005. From there the number of breeding birds grew; in 2014, seven pairs of bobolinks were counted in the fields. In 2017, there were 18 pairs. By this time, bobolinks were overflowing the warm-season grassland and colonizing a newly protected adjacent property called Ocean View Farm. A 2021 survey found 33 breeding bobolink females and 77 adult male bobolinks in the warm-season grassland fields and the Ocean View Farm grassland.

Male bobolink
Male bobolink at the edge of the grassland at Allens Pond. Photo by David Jeffrey.

A Mowing Regime that Works for Birds and Farmers

The Allens Pond warm-season field restoration was an experimental project. The most important management tool, by far, was (and continues to be) the mowing schedule. If fields are cut too many times, grassland birds are unable to complete their nesting cycle. If the fields are cut infrequently (that is, every other year or less often), they become overgrown with invasive plants such as multiflora rose and knapweed, which are worthless to both grassland birds and farmers.

For years Mass Audubon has recommended that mowing be delayed until August 15. This mowing regime certainly works for bobolinks and other grassland birds, but it is not popular with farmers because they want multiple hay harvests starting with the green hay in June. In addition, late summer, cool-season hay, unlike warm-season hay, has low nutritional value. This conundrum has been the source of much friction between farmers and conservationists. Could they find a workable middle ground?

One of the most important discoveries from the Allens Pond grasslands work was that local bobolinks can handle light grazing (not haying) in May followed by haying in late July or early August. University of New England research professor Noah Perlut’s team in the Champlain Valley found that bobolinks can tolerate haying in May followed by a pause of 65 days before the next cut, but early haying did not work at Allens Pond. Instead, the Mass Audubon crew came up with an equitable arrangement with an adjacent farm, Round the Bend / Paradox Acres, that allowed early grazing on the fields (before June 1) followed by haying in the late summer. In this way, a beneficial partnership with a local farm created a flourishing grassland habitat for both birds and farmers.

There are other programs in the Northeast that are aimed at restoring grassland nesting birds. The Bobolink Project, a collaboration between Mass Audubon, New Hampshire Audubon, and Audubon Vermont, pays farmers to delay haying until after the nesting period. The Hudson Valley Farm Hub, an agricultural center based out of Hurley, New York, is working with local farmers to balance native birds with farmers’ needs.

A Path to Recovery

In an interesting twist, according to Perlut, bobolink populations are so degraded in their former stronghold in the Tallgrass Prairie in the Midwest that their future will rely on restocking from the northeastern bobolinks, which are genetically similar. “The combination of such long-term population decline in traditional habitat and a simultaneous, though only moderate, degrading of northeastern habitats has resulted in a bobolink population in traditional breeding areas like Illinois that is one-quarter to one-third that of eastern hayfields,” said Perlut. He noted that prospects for bobolinks in the Champlain Valley have somewhat improved largely due to the development and expansion of an early mowing program coupled with the efforts of the Bobolink Project.

While Emily Dickinson’s “Rowdy of the Meadow” is unlikely to again become a common sight, it seems as if the bobolink will be saved from regional extirpation. Thanks to researchers, conservation organizations, volunteers, and many thoughtful private landowners, there is a path to recovery for our grasslands and their obligate nesting birds. Whether this path will be widely adopted is still unclear, but the worst scenario has been averted for now. Mass Audubon’s latest Breeding Bird Atlas discovered that bobolinks, bucking the trend in the Northeast, have actually increased their breeding range in most regions of Massachusetts. Through increased awareness of these grassland management strategies, grassland enthusiasts hope that this trend will spread to other states in the Northeast.

View the accompanying Web Extra: The Bobolink Project

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