A lifelong resident of Keene, New Hampshire, Wendy Ward has held a love and curiosity for the natural world for as long as she remembers. For the past 29 years she’s worked with the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) in New Hampshire’s Cheshire and Sullivan counties, helping owners of working lands tackle challenges and improve both the bottom line and the environment. She also stewards a 52-acre woodlot her great-grandfather purchased more than 100 years ago, and leads birding and wildflower walks for various organizations.
When you’re young – in high school or junior high – you always think, “I’m going to get out of here.” I got married young and I had kids here, and my support system was here – in Keene. I gradually began to realize, especially talking with people who move here from other areas, that it’s so beautiful here. I have no reason to leave. It’s such an idyllic place. It’s just the right balance of forest and wild places as well as community.
I was outside as much as possible when I was a kid. I grew up in a residential area, with those little ¼-acre plots for houses. It wasn’t out in the wilderness. But the neighbors had these towering pine trees in their backyard. We would play in the pine needles and make roads for our Matchbox cars and make believe we were out in the middle of nowhere. We climbed trees. There were wetlands not far from our house where we could catch frogs and play in mud. I was always fascinated with all of the plants and the trees.
My dad was a bird-watcher, and he brought me on bird walks when I was young. I don’t remember not knowing the birds. I remember, of course, identifying other birds as I got older and went out bird watching, but I started learning at a very young age what kind of bird this was, what kind of frog, what kind of snake. I love snakes. I was always catching snakes. My mother and sister didn’t like when I tried to bring them into the house. As I got a little older, I was always walking around with a field guide in my hand. I wanted to know all of the wildflowers and all of the trees, butterflies, dragonflies, bugs, I wanted to know it all. Everything was so interesting.
My dad brought us hiking on Mount Monadnock. He knew it very well. He helped maintain trails there. He’d show us all the cool places around the mountain – the Dutchman’s Bog with its unique plants. He would talk about how the white-throated sparrows on Gap Mountain and Monadnock in those days sang a different song: they sang their song going downhill instead of uphill. He had a very curious mind, and it really just sparked all that curiosity in me when I was young.
After my girls went to school, I was looking for work to do, and one of my friends suggested I go to the Cheshire County Conservation District, where NRCS is based. They were looking for people who had skills beyond agronomy and engineering. I started as a volunteer, and within a few months, they found me a temporary, year-long position as a “biological science technician.” I helped with land surveys. I also would do wildlife site visits with landowners, just technical assistance, nothing with contracts. I’d walk with them for a few hours observing things, offering some suggestions. Within two years, I was hired into a full-time job there, and I’ve been in that office ever since.
At that time, in 1994, I was taking forest land stewardship course with the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. That taught me a lot about basic forestry, forest ecology. It was a terrific background to start. Also at that time, NRCS was starting to do a little bit more with forests. They had traditionally been focused on cropland agronomy, but New Hampshire is mostly forest, not cropland, so there are a lot of places that can use our help. I think I was in the right place at the right time.
Our motto is “helping people help the land.” We’re a federal agency, part of the USDA. People work with us on a voluntary basis. We work with private landowners on their own land – working forestlands and working farmlands – and we help them solve conservation-type problems, what we call “resource concerns.” This could mean a water quality problem, a nutrient management problem with their manure, forest health problems, soil health, wildlife problems, bank erosion – any number of things. We go out and evaluate these things with the landowners, then develop a plan with practices to solve some of these resource concerns. And if the landowner wants to work with us, we develop a contract and can get projects funded through the USDA Farm Bill. With forestry, we have licensed New Hampshire foresters who write a forest management plan for a landowner, then we work in tandem with them to implement practices that can qualify for the funding.
I love being able to go out one-on-one with landowners. You hear their story about the land and what they’ve been doing with the land, what they want to do with it, their history of the land. It’s really satisfying if I’m able to come up with a solution for their problems that they didn’t really see. Sometimes it’s just planting the seed. Sometimes people aren’t ready to hear what I may offer. But many times, a few years later they are ready. I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen many projects from beginning to end. It’s nice to get a chance to see how well things are going. It just makes you feel like, one by one, forest by forest or person by person, you’ve helped make your area, your community a better place, both for the people and for the environment.
That work, along with the initial Forest Society courses and working so much with the foresters in this area and the UNH Extension foresters, has helped me to have a really good handle on how to manage the family woodlot. I became the sole owner of the woodlot about 5 years ago. I manage it for timber and wildlife. I’ve done two shelterwoods to try to get some regeneration coming along. I’ve been doing a songbird breeding bird survey. I did a baseline and I’ve been doing that every June since to see the changes, and I have seen changes. I’ve had an increase in eastern wood peewees, blue-headed vireos, while still keeping good habitat for scarlet tanagers, ovenbirds, and others. I am following the Foresters for the Birds protocols. We don’t have that program in New Hampshire, but Maine and Vermont each have one, and you can kind of figure out in between.
For any type of working lands, it’s about finding a balance. I’m usually trying to find ways to advocate for wildlife. But in this work, I fully understand the operational and fiscal needs of working lands. If you’re a farmer, you’ve got to get that hay off at a certain time, and trying to negotiate something with grassland birds can be really tricky, because waiting to mow means the hay quality will go downhill. With forests, now that the northern long-eared bat is a federally endangered species, working with NRCS, landowners cannot cut in the months of June and July. That can be challenging in some ways. But that is also helpful for our migratory breeding birds. If forestland owners work with us, they get some financial incentive to offset the cost for doing forest health and timber stand improvement work.
I think for the forests, a big challenge is our changing climate. We are having these extreme storms, whether they’re ice events, which are breaking off the tops and snapping trees, or the extreme rain and then wind events. You go out and do a weed and thin or a crop tree release, and then you get one of these events and a lot of your trees are now toppled. We need to figure out how to do it in a way that they build up a sturdy root base so that they have more wind resistance.
Our forests are changing and our species are changing, too. With sugar maples, for instance, things are getting warmer, and we’re worried that the sugar maples are not going to be in the same place that they used to be. We have outbreaks of invasive insects – emerald ash borer, hemlock wooly adelgid. There are so many challenges. Regeneration is tough, too – the deer browse it or American beech and invasive plants suppress it.
I think there’s real hope in the future – and I’m an optimist – that if we have enough ash trees regenerating in the forest, maybe by the time they’re of an age that emerald ash borer will affect them, maybe they’re going to be OK. Maybe something will be figured out, either by the trees or by us by that time. I know some foresters – myself included – are trying to interplant just a few species that, with some of the climate change models, are projected to do better. I already have red oak on the property, but I’m planting in some seedlings. I’m planting in some white oak, maybe some of the hickories, the yellow poplar, the tulip tree.
I think more people who have woodlots are becoming aware of these issues. The more education the foresters and our UNH Extension people give, and the more people care about it – whether they want a working forest or forever wild – they’re learning and they’re protecting the land and are trying to make wise decisions. There’s no one answer that’s going to solve our problems.
We also do educational programs. Cheshire County Conservation District, which is our local partner, and the Windham County Natural Resources Conservation District in Vermont have paired up to do a Birding on the Farm series. About four times a year, in different seasons, we do a trip to someone’s farm and we walk around and talk both about operational leads and the habitat that the farmers provide, and we identify birds. It’s a lot of fun. It’s not just “What is this bird?” but also demonstrating that without the farmers, we wouldn’t have these landscapes. Most farmers want to protect and help any wildlife they can. Our spring event this year was May 10.
It’s so hard to pick a favorite plant or tree or bird. So many times, it’s because it’s attached to a special memory – like anything in life. When I hear a hermit thrush or a Blackburnian warbler, I think of my dad, because he had lost the upper range of his hearing, and he would ask me, “Are the Blackburnians singing, Wendy?” There’s a little forest flower – I call them bird on the wing – fringed polygala. When I was young, I took a little woodland path to school, and there was a patch of those flowers that bloomed there near the end of the school year. Seeing those brings me back to my childhood, because it just seemed magical, coming across those bright pink flowers in the middle of the woods.
If you’re really connected with the outdoors, you’re always observing. Your ears are always on, your eyes are always on. We could be outside talking, but one ear is listening to that winter wren over there. Be curious. Always be listening and observing.