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Protectors of Pine Oak Woods · Current
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Greenbelt Forest Restoration and Walk through Sharrotts
Shorelands By
Don Recklies, Naturalist Forest Restoration Workshop #178 April 16, 2011 Weather forecasts were cautiously optimistic for Protectors’ 178th Forest Restoration Workshop. An intense storm front was moving in from the west but we expected only a chance of light rain in the morning, and that’s how it worked out. A decision had been made that we would not attempt further to remove Aralia elata, the Asian cousin of our spiny Devil’s Walking Stick, so our group, six in number, instead took pruners and loppers to a nearby vine infested area to the side of the Blue Trail where we spent our session cutting woody vines from trees and saplings. Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), and Chinese Wisteria (Wisteria sinensis) were all common there, many growing close to the stream where a consistent water supply allowed lush growth and enabled many vines to climb high into the tops of nearby trees. We proceeded to cut as many as we could, first at the base of the vine and then as high up as we could reach, unwrapping and pulling the cut pieces down so that they would not become a scaffold by which new growth could climb back up the trees. The Honeysuckle and Bittersweet, although unwanted, are common in very many areas of the Greenbelt, but Wisteria is less often found. The Asian Wisterias are ornamental escapees, and can frequently be found around the remnants of old foundations where they originally decorated and shaded doorways and porches with a thick curtain of green, compound leaves and large pendants of blue and white blossoms in the spring. There is an American Wisteria (Wisteria frutescens), but because it blooms less luxuriously than these Asian imports it was not often planted as a landscaping ornament. It is a much better behaved vine and, unlike it’s Asian relative, blooms later in the season, but the Wisteria here was the Chinese Wisteria with large, some-what lumpy, flattened, tear-drop shaped, velvety seedpods. A look around to see if we could find a human source for this vine revealed a stone-lined depression close to the stream and beside it a single, short brick pillar that was once probably a gatepost. The wisteria we cut will continue to regrow from its roots until the roots are exhausted, and we will have to return to this area for many years to cut back the new growth. It’s said to be a very difficult plant to remove without using herbicides; I have read of one nature preserve that has been cutting back wisteria for some 20 years, and only now is seeing some headway! This seems to be one of those troublesome plants that might be profitably attacked with herbicide, especially those herbicides that can be painted on cut stems so that surrounding vegetation is little affected. With some luck regrowth of the vine will be retarded when the trees leaf out, but Asian Wisteria is known to tolerate partial shade so we haven’t seen the last of it.
Soon it will be blooming in various places around the Greenbelt. If you find it in flower and look at the individual blossoms you will see that the flowers are very like those of garden peas and beans, and indeed they all belong to the same plant family. Their blossoms are irregular and have five petals: a large petal at the top which has been called the banner, smaller petals to each side which mirror each other called the wings, and two petals at the base which are fused together at the tip so that they look somewhat like the hull of a boat and are called the keel. This pattern of petals is typical of many legumes, and you can recognize the similarities if you look closely at pea and bean flowers, also clover and birdsfoot trefoil, etc. Like peas, the seeds develop in pods and are scattered when the drying pods twist violently as they split along their edges. Like most legumes, Wisteria is capable of nitrogen fixation which gives it an advantage when it grows in poor soil. Nitrogen fixing is the process where nitrogen gas in the air is converted to nitrogen compounds in the soil that can dissolve and be utilized by plants. All plants require nitrogen, but can’t make use of it in its gaseous form. Legume roots often have small swellings that house bacteria able to convert gaseous nitrogen into chemical compounds more usable by the plant, so some farmers practice crop rotation where they periodically plant a crop of legumes such as alfalfa in their fields to serve as a hay crop for forage and to renew the nitrogen compounds in the soil so that they can use fewer expensive fertilizers. Wisteria shares the nitrogen fixing characteristic, however, this particular “super-power” probably isn’t very necessary for survival in the Greenbelt.
I returned the day following our Restoration Workshop to take another look at the Aralia elata site which had been our original target. Thinking back just a few years, I can’t recall seeing Aralia in this particular area. Now there are thousands of sprouts. I lined off a random plot 10' feet on a side (in an area that had neither fewer or more plants than the areas surrounding) and counted the elata within: 57 plants in just 100 square feet, most of them about 2' to 3' tall. This area had burned only a few years ago, and I wondered if Aralia was especially tolerant of soil and runoff from the serpentinite outcrops on the hill above, and thereby had an advantage over other plants trying to recolonize there. On the east side of the trail opposite the Aralia infestation was an area that had burned a year or so previously to the elata site burn, and here Sweetgum has thickly grown up, but no elata at all. I supposed that at the time of the older burn there were no nearby mature elata to contribute seeds and compete with other plants could colonize that niche, but these few years later there are nearby elata that furnish seed and colonize there. Since the sky was completely overcast and rain was on the way, we chose to dispense with the after-restoration walk; instead a few of us drove to Sharrotts shorelands area on the west shore to look at what the DEC has been doing on the sandspit there. You may recall that Protectors (along with NYC Audubon and the Trust for Public Land) has advocated conservation of that shoreline, much of which is held by real-estate trusts and a few individual owners, and that two years ago the New York State DEC acquired possession of two small parcels along the waterfront between Androvette Street and Sharrotts Road. This used to be one of the sites where John Witte pursued maritime salvage operations (not to be confused with his much larger and later “boneyard” further north behind the abandoned Blazing Star Cemetery), and the remnants of derelict barges, small ships, and an old ferry could be seen beached just offshore. The DEC must have considered those an attractive nuisance or other public danger because once the property was in their hands they moved swiftly to have the wreckage removed, along with the carcasses of old cars and trucks that were sprinkled on shore.
I understood that this wreckage was to be removed by companies that would bid to salvage the recovered metal, and was impressed that the DEC could engineer a major step in remediating the site in this way at little public expense, but there soon followed a worldwide collapse of scrap metal prices and I had doubt that we would ever see that part of the Kill cleared in our lifetimes. To be honest, I preferred the wreckage; it was especially picturesque at low tide, and added character to the place. I didn’t care so much for the abandoned cars, however - one kind of debris I saw as picturesque, the other as an eyesore. Furthermore the eyesore was considerable; in 2007, before the property was transferred to the DEC, I had counted the abandoned cars I could find in that small area, and the total was 63 (this number included all the derelict cars between Androvette and Ellis Road, not just those on the old Witte property). I couldn’t image that the value of the scrap would exceed the cost of bringing in cranes and cutting equipment and barging or trucking the scrap out. None-the-less, within a year spray-painted numbers appeared on all the scattered fragments of abandoned vehicles, then backhoes and other equipment appeared on the sandy road that ran through the property and those unsightly wrecks began to vanish. The next spring a barge with crane and hydraulic cutters was moored at the end of the spit, and day by day chewed up the skeletons of the derelict barges at the edge of the beach and piled the scrap in a heap on the sand spit to be trucked or barged away. The old ferry further out in the water disappeared, and must have been removed the same way. Now the ribs of moldering wooden vessels still protrude from the water at very low tides, a testament to the industry that used to flourish there, but the hulls of iron and steel are gone. Now the mountain of scrap on the spit and the old cars are gone as well, and it appears that an attempt is being made to remove the remaining scattered trash. We walked past rows of filled, heavy-duty trash-bags waiting pickup and a stack of old tires that had been gathered from along the shore. Most of the long plastic bags of oil wicking that had been left on the site after the last oil spill in the Kill have also been removed, although a few still remain close to Androvette, and other debris has been pulled together. Lots of trashy bits and pieces still remain scattered about, but you can see that the work is in progress. Summer’s growth will hide what trash remains, but perhaps by fall the site will appear clean when the grasses and herbs again die back. We walked close to the Kill across the DEC parcels and continued a short distance beyond to where we could see Tappan’s Creek flowing into the Kill through a small meadow of Saltmarsh Hay (Spartina patens), then we returned along the upper border of the DEC property. This property is somewhat difficult of access; within the last three years a row of warehouses has been built at the top of the slope which limits entrance from that direction so that the site can be accessed only through private property at the end of Sharrotts Road, through the marsh, or through another private parcel at the end of Androvette. DEC ownership and the efforts of local land-owners to limit access have made this area more secure than it formerly was; it no longer serves as an auto dump site and a racetrack for ATVs and motorcycles, and the fragile, sandy “roads” through the property that had been eroded to 20 or 30 feet wide by joyriders are starting to narrow again. If the motorcycles and ATVs can continue to be excluded and if further development along the shore can be contained, there is a chance that such wildlife as the tiny box turtle we encountered there on a Protectors’ walk a few years ago will survive. All depends on continued isolation and on what human activities are permitted there. The isolation is both good and bad; it limits the wear and tear on that fragile environment, but also can provide a haven for bad behavior. Back at the spit we had noticed that someone had burned as a bonfire some of the stacked tires and some of the wooden debris. I doubt that those fire-makers would give a thought to the turtles, or to the herons that used to stalk the watery wrecks, or even to those people who just want to get away from suburbia for a little quiet stroll along by the waterfront. Protectors, however, does. DfR 04-24-2011 |
©2004 PPOW