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Protectors of Pine Oak Woods · Current
Issues · Clove Lakes Cleanup |
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November Cleanup at Clove Lakes Park Forest Restoration 173 - Nov. 20, 2010 Rather than a location in the Greenbelt, Clove Lakes Park was the site of Protectors 173rd Forest Restoration. We began to assemble just before 10:00 a.m. and were pleasantly surprised to find two Parks employees, Barbara Trees, and Adie (hope I’ve got her name right), a summer employee, waiting for us in a Green DPR pickup truck. Barbara, a former Protectors member, is the new NYCDPR contact person for Clove Lakes Park, and had come to acquaint herself with us and guide us to those areas needing attention. One of our board members, Lisa Pilarella, brought along her three daughters and Jasmine, one of their classmates, and Barbara was kind enough to demonstrate to them removal of vines and roots and how to recognize just what should be removed (just as we do in our Greenbelt restorations, the rule is “if you don’t recognize it as unwanted, leave it alone”). The weather was almost perfect for such a task; the sky was clear, sun shining brightly, and temperatures were just brisk enough to encourage keeping busy to keep warm. The soil was the only thing not co-operating; it was dry and hard enough that most small roots tended to break before they came loose from the earth. The girls, however, weren’t discouraged and seemed to make it a personal goal to get the roots and all. Given an opportunity to use our smaller weed wrench they went to town and managed to root out all of the smaller Japanese Holly (Ilex crenata) and Winged Euonymus (Euonymus alatus) that they encountered, including several that I thought would be much too large for that small version of the tool to handle. However, there remained lots of Japanese Holly vigorously sprouting from large cut stumps, and those we’ll have to bring loppers on our next visit. The Department of Parks had applied herbicide to four of the most degraded areas nearby, and replanted them with thousands of native trees and shrubs. Asian vines and Porcelain-berry have been quick to re-colonize these plots, endangering the survival of those new plants, and volunteers were needed to periodically police the newly planted areas. Earlier this summer about a half-dozen Protectors took advantage of a three-part training session given at Clove Lakes by Katerli Bounds of the Parks Natural Resources Group, following which they were given trowels and pruners, leather gloves and an invasive species handbook. I think our restorers felt responsible after being given the swag, since everyone agreed that we should schedule a session at Clove Lakes in the fall. Barbara, I think, was disappointed to find out that we apply most of our effort in the Greenbelt, but I assured her that we would be back for another session next year. Everyone had other commitments following the restoration, so Judy Thurmond gave Sarah-David and myself a ride back to High Rock Park so that we could restore our tools and gloves to the shed. On the way I discovered that Sarah-David is still removing debris from the area surrounding the bike trail by the model airplane field in La Tourette. (What might the Greenbelt be like if there were a hundred like her helping Parks keep the woods tidy!) Once divest of the tools, we decided to spend the remaining part of the afternoon on the eastern side of the Greenbelt at Reed’s Basket Willow Swamp. Reed’s Basket Willow Swamp is an outlier of the Greenbelt south of Ocean Terrace and almost adjacent to John Deere Park. The Yellow Trail enters it from Circle Road to the west after traversing the neighborhood of Todt Hill, but the park might be more easily approached from the south by Richmond Road and Spring Street - at least it might be easier to find parking there. The S74 or S76 at Spring Street is probably the closest access by public transportation, but it’s a long uphill walk to the entrance of the park. Another alternative might be to park and enter from Ocean Terrace. If you’ve lately come on any of Protectors’ tri-yearly ten mile hikes, you’ve probably come by way of Ocean Terrace - going in the other direction you should pass by Reed’s Basket Willow Swamp. I, however, haven’t tried entering that way. The park comprises a rim of heavily wooded hills surrounding three ponds, and acquires its name from the largest pond at its north end. There in the early 1800's John Read grew and harvested Purple Willow (Salix purpurea), a flexible European shrub, to weave into baskets - and no, I don’t know why the park’s name isn’t spelled the same way. I’m told those willows are now long gone, but it might be fun to circle that pond to find out for sure. (The official park website seems to imply that the bark of the willow was used, but I believe it was the stripped and cleaned willow stems that were used to weave baskets.) Road-building, housing development and pipeline laying have altered the hydrology there, and considerable erosion has occurred in the ravine leading to the lower swamp, so much that some years ago the Yellow Trail in Reed’s was rerouted to avoid a highly eroded, steep and somewhat dangerous rocky ascent to an entrance on Ocean Terrace. Despite the closeness of the surrounding urban environment, Reed’s remains for me a somewhat magical place. I still recall arriving just after dawn some years ago, and flushing seven herons from the lowest of the swamps - White Egrets and Black-capped Night Herons I believe; I remember their number more than which ones they were. I think they surprised me as much as I did them! The steep hills, studded with debris from glacial till, have the usual beech-hickory-tulip-oak mix found on Staten Island, but the majority are varieties of oak which provided us with a rich palette of reds and browns on this late fall date. We chose to walk along the eastern slope avoiding a suspicious gathering of teenagers on the west side and occupied ourselves with identifying which of those oaks we could without a field guide. Oaks hybridize readily, and as with almost all trees, their leaves show great variation, sometimes having different leaf shapes even on the same tree, and sometimes on the same branch. This being late fall, many of the leaves had fallen, leaving us with bark patterns and tree shape to go by, although we could assume that if most of the leaves under a tree were alike they probably came from that tree. Some trees were easy; White Oak (Quercus alba) has a very typical chunky bark pattern, easy to identify again once recognized, and Pin Oak’s (Quercus palustris) spindly, down-turned habit of branching is a dead give-away. But other oaks were more of a problem. We identified Scarlet Oak (Quercus coccinea) by the deep, almost semi-circular leaf notches between the veins of its leaves, and hazarded a guess at Red Oak (Quercus rubra) by the “ski-trail” pattern of smooth and rough bark on the upper trunk, but then gave up further attempts. The Audubon guide with its pictures of trunks and tree bark would have been very helpful. We contented ourselves with recognizing the two major groups into which oaks are divided: red or white. The white oak group has leaves with rounded lobes whose veins don’t project whatsoever beyond the margins of the leaf; their generally sweet acorns develop and mature in the same year they are produced. The black oak group has leaves with usually pointed lobes whose veins project as tiny spikes or bristles beyond the margins of the leaf. The acorns of this group contain more tannins than the acorns of the white oaks, and are generally bitter; these young acorns remain on the trees over winter and mature and fall in their second year. It’s said that the white oaks are at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to reproduction since squirrels and other mammals, given a choice, prefer to eat the sweet acorns of the white oaks first. Woodworkers have different concerns than we woodland enthusiasts; for them the important differences are grain patterns and the workability and durability of the wood. They recognize that white oak is more rot resistant than red oak because white oaks tend to deposit more rot-resistant materials in their conductive tissues than do red oaks, and that the grain of red oak is more open than that of white. They say that one can blow through the end-grain of a piece of white oak as if the pores in the wood were tiny straws running end to end, whereas trying to blow through the end-grain of red oak is like, well..., like trying to blow though a piece of wood! Small pieces of glacial till, many of them chunks of serpentinite, Staten Island’s bedrock, protruded from the soil. There were other stones carried down by glaciers from the north, and we thought that had one of our board members, Alan Benimoff, been with us, we could have gotten a mini-geology lesson and a “rocky” travelogue. In the relatively recent past - geologically speaking - great ice sheets had descended on North America at least four times, and at least two of them covered over New York City. The last of these (called the Wisconsin glaciation after the state that is thought to mark its southernmost extent) is said to have covered the rocky spine of Staten Island to a depth of 1000 feet. If you can picture it, that’s just an amazing image: ice standing as high as an eighty story building. Further north the sheet was even thicker; in the Finger Lakes region it stood almost two miles thick. When that ice melted some 18,000 years ago it left behind hills of debris that it had bull-dozed down from the north, and the melt-water raised the level of the sea world-wide. Paradoxically, the current rise in sea level on our coast caused by global warming is a little offset because the continental crust here is still rebounding from the great weight of ice it bore during this last glaciation. We looked around at rocks which must have been some of this till, and I noticed a rounded, blackened stone about the size of a bowling ball in the gully that drains into the lowest of the ponds. Plastered on the upper surface of the stone was something that had the appearance of a bunch of male birch catkins, but that wasn’t very likely since there seemed to be no branch attached to them and it was now a whole season after the blooming of birches. I stepped into the gully and flicked a few into my hand, knowing full well that I might be collecting a handful of bird poo. A hand lens revealed that these were constructed things: sand and flecks of other minerals cemented together to form tiny, narrow, tubes open on one end. These were the shelters of the larvae of caddisflies, moth-like insects having scaly, hairy wings and long, forward pointing antennae which are common around streams in the summer. Their immature forms live under water and construct these shelters by weaving silken bags to which they attach their chosen building material. They then prowl the bottoms of streams feeding on organic debris, scraping up algae or capturing whatever the current brings to them. As they grow, shedding their exoskeletons as they become larger, they abandon their old small shelters and construct new, larger homes. In mid-summer one can sometimes spy these creatures moving about the stream bed if the stream is clear and clean enough. The most conspicuous of these build their shelters out of small twigs and leaf stems and are spotted easily enough because they seem to be attached to the bottom of the stream where the current whisks other debris away. They don’t like polluted waters, and their presence is an indication of a relatively clean stream. In fact, limnologists have ranked the different species of caddisflies according to the purity of their environments and use their presence or absence to evaluate levels of pollution. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen great numbers of caddisflies in our streams; urbanization treads a bit too heavily on the streams here. The larvae that inhabited the shelters we found must some time earlier have pupated or died, but when they were active they would have been found beneath the water gripping the underside of that stone with pincers at the end of their abdomens. To find them then I would have had to wade in the water and flip the stone over. This stone must have been dislodged from a higher, wetter place and tumbled to where it was found, its blackened, previously underwater surface now exposed to our view. Because the afternoon was getting late (and the sky had become overcast) we ended the day without actually visiting Reed’s Swamp. During our short walk we didn’t spy all that much to comment upon, so having a day off, I decided to return to a different area of Staten Island on the following Wednesday. That involved a slightly longer journey to Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve and Sharrott’s Shoreline. I entered Clay Pit at the back of the new Target store off of Veteran’s Road West where several roads and paths give access to brushy fields and thickets crisscrossed by horse-trails in the park. It is an area that I rarely visit, so I thought to find something of novelty. Most of the leaves had fallen in this somewhat barren fall landscape, making for a palette of greys and browns, but I did note some goldenrod and a few straggly, narrow-leaved asters still blooming on slopes that faced the sun. Surprisingly a Common Buckeye butterfly rose from the path in front of me - an uncommon site given the coldness of the day and lateness of the year. Entering the thickets I soon came across a seasonal scene that is sure to become all too common on Staten Island. At a crossing in front of me were two white-tail bucks testing each other out, and just around the corner out of easy sight was at least one doe. Rutting season must not have been too far advanced, for the contest of the males seemed rather half-hearted. By the time I had pulled out my camera and changed to a long lens, they had both noticed my presence and went their separate ways. Had their hormones been further engaged I’m sure that I could have gotten all the pictures I wanted without them giving me the least notice; as it was I got only one with the wide-angle lens already on my camera. (All told, in less than an hour I saw three bucks in that area, and no doubt there were several more.) Although I didn’t expect them, horses were on the trails, so I didn’t stay, pausing only to pass along to two riders a large beaded, leather-thonged feather I had found on my way in. As luck would have it, the second rider exclaimed, “That’s mine! I lost it yesterday!” It was a very nice looking feather - hand painted the rider said - and I’m glad it got back to its owner. On the way back toward Target I turned to follow an overgrown roadway carved through the trees toward an exit onto Arthur Kill Road. I stopped to eat lunch on a convenient stone, and then went on my way munching an apple (a “York Imperial” my wife had gotten at a farmer’s market - a very crisp and tart heirloom apple, but not one I’d like in large doses) when I spotted a groundhog grazing just 18 feet ahead in middle of the road. I paused to snap a photo while it nibbled away. It was thin, had patchy grey fur with russet tones below, and moved with some difficulty, favoring its right hind leg. It would, I thought, probably not survive the coming winter since it was obviously under-nourished and unfit to dig. It could probably make do using old burrows of previous years, but even so its lack of body fat didn’t bode well for it. At this time of year I would expect these rodents - ground squirrels actually - to be well fleshed out with a substantial layer of fat in order to hibernate through the winter months. (My old guides say that by this time of year groundhogs [Marmota monax] should have retreated to their burrows and begun hibernation. In their dens they hibernate truly; their body temperature falls drastically and their breathing slows almost to a stop. This rodent was one of two I saw within the hour I was there, both active, and their activity in late November is probably further evidence that our climate is warming.) I had about a third of my apple left, and after a few moments threw it toward the groundhog with an underhand toss. The apple landed only 3 feet away, but the animal took no notice whatsoever. To add to its other difficulties, the groundhog couldn’t see well and seemed to be somewhat deaf. I quietly moved forward to my apple and picked it up, just three feet away from the rodent. Finally it became aware that there was something amiss, and stood and sniffed the air. We both stood motionless for some minutes, waiting the situation out, but uncharacteristically the groundhog gave way first, and returned to selecting his plant of choice. I carefully pitched the apple again, this time to just a foot from its nose, and again it didn’t notice. It moved forward to clip another stem, and munch, and then moved forward again. Then, just 3 inches from the apple, the old nose worked; a sniff in this direction and a sniff in that, and the groundhog finally found the apple and began to consume it. I gave it several minutes to feast, and then tried to pass by quietly, but there the road was narrow and I couldn’t prevent my shadow from falling across it. Incredibly near-sighted that it might be, the groundhog couldn’t ignore the suddenly looming darkness. I continued down the road, and from some distance paused to look back to see if it had fled. It had moved, but only about 2 feet away from its feast, and I hoped that it would come back to the apple when it had reassured itself that it was once again alone. DfR 11-26-10 Photos: Jasmine Beloy: Expressing Victory over the Winged Euonymus! |
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