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Protectors of Pine Oak Woods · Current
Issues · Latourette Bike Path |
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Cleanup at Latourette Bike Trail Forest Restoration #182, Saturday, August 20, 2011 August 20th marked the 182nd
consecutive Forest Restoration Workshop for Protectors, and for this session
we returned to the bike path below the LaTourette golf course. We totaled six participants, but in a
rather disjointed way since almost everyone had little time to contribute and
much else to do that day. Volunteers
would appear on the path, help for a while, and then move on voicing a regret
that they couldn’t stay longer. (It
was actually rather thoughtful that they would make an effort to come out for
a short period, thereby making a statement that they thought the activity was
a good thing to support, even on a day when they were pressed for time.) Passers-by, joggers and walkers, wondered
what we were up to and would sometimes stop to chat; a few, mostly other Protectors, were used to us, and for them it was an
opportunity to “catch up.” We spent most of our time cutting and unwrapping wooding
vines from trees and saplings adjacent to the trail. In many places the south side of the bike
path is so burdened with invasive vines that removal would be a sisyphean task (Sisypheus was a
legendary Greek king who, in punishment for his pride and treachery, was
condemned by the king of the gods to roll a heavy boulder to the top of a
steep hill, only to have it slip from his grasp and roll to the bottom just
before he completed the task), so we concentrated only on trees and shrubs
that were immediately adjacent.
Further along the path toward the model airplane field, we pulled out Paulownia
seedlings that were springing up through the crushed stone of the pathway. Paulownia (Paulownia tomentosa) is an alien tree that bears handsome white and pink blossoms in the
spring, and was much favored by landscapers because of its fast growth. In fact one of its principal inducements is
that it is said that in a mere 15 years a homeowner could grow a 25 foot tall
tree! It is quick to spring up in disturbed
areas and seems to be seeding well on the edges of the bike path where
vegetation that hangs over the crushed stone provides protecting shade and
conserves moisture. I recall visiting
Mariner’s Marsh several years ago when the adjacent rail yard was being
expanded, and I could see dozens and dozens of very distinctive 4 and 5 foot
tall Paulownia seedlings springing up from piles of soil in the recently
graded switchyard. Just last month I
was at the Seaport Museum at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia, where I learned
that Paulownia frequently sprouted along the docks and rail lines because the
dry seed pods were used in the orient for packing delicate goods - a kind of
organic, antique packing peanut - and were often discarded or spilled by the
wayside at the destination. The heavy rain several days ago
caused some extensive damage to the bike path. When the path was installed, the designers
tried to protect the structure from erosion by hard surfacing the steep areas and by
installing a series of drains under the path in wet areas to channel water
coming down the hillside under the “roadway.”
One such “culverted” area was in the
neighborhood of the Hessian Spring where water used to puddle on the old road
through much of the summer. The drains
installed there, however, may have been insufficient or improperly placed
since from the beginning some of the water from the spring on wet days would
flow down the path toward its entrance at St. Andrews’ Church making ruts in
the crushed stone top layer. Lately
these drains may have become partially clogged by silt and become more
inefficient. The record rainfall in
the week before our session was far too much for the drains to handle; the
rush of water over the roadway has washed away much of the crushed stone
cover of the path and exposed the layer of landscape cloth covering the
foundation of large gravel that lies beneath the path. (There is erosion as well on the steep
sections toward the model airplane field, but by no means as bad as it is
close to St. Andrews. As I write this
report hurricane Irene is passing NYC, and I imagine that the bad erosion
caused by the earlier storm is now much worse.) On our way to our randomly chosen
work area we observed an iridescent blue butterfly repeatedly landing on the
gravel of the path. It was already a
warm morning, and the butterfly didn’t seem to favor sunlit portions of the
path over shaded places, so it probably wasn’t landing to soak up heat. I wondered if it was trying to lap up
minerals from the stone that it would later need to reproduce
successfully. Many male butterflies do
this and deliver those minerals to the female in a package with their
sperm. (Entomologists refer to this
mineral gathering as “puddling”, from the instances
when many butterflies are seen congregating around puddles. Unlike what you might assume, they are
usually not slaking their thirst, but are gathering to drink mineral laden
water and the dirtier the edge of the puddle the better.) The color of the butterfly on the
path was suggestive of a Spicebush Swallowtail, but its rear wings lacked the
“swallow tail” extensions. I’m not any
kind of a lepidoperist, but a dim memory stirred
and I said I thought it might be a White Admiral, a name that was immediately
derided as being totally inappropriate to the butterfly’s appearance. Once home I looked at Rick Cech’s beautiful Butterflies of the East Coast and saw
that the White Admiral has a broad white stripe close to the outer margin of
its wings, which our butterfly lacked, and that our butterfly, called a
Red-spotted Purple, was illustrated on the facing page. I was happy to read further that both of
these very different appearing butterflies were actually the same species (Limenitis artemis). These different color variations are called
‘morphs,” and as it happens the white-banded variety occurs in the north, and
the iridescent purple, red-spotted variety occurs to the south. Staten Island is in the area where both
morphs of the butterfly overlap, so we see both, and
both types often mate producing hybrids of intermediate appearance. The Red-spotted Purple morph is supposed to
derive protection from birds by appearing like the Pipevine
Swallowtail - a butterfly of very similar appearance to the Spicebush
Swallowtail - which is common along the slopes of the Hudson River. The Pipevine
Swallowtail is distasteful to birds because of the toxic alkaloids its
caterpillars accumulate from eating the leaves of the Dutchman’s Pipe
vine. Supposedly birds that once
encounter this bitter mouthful are not inclined to sample other butterflies
similar in appearance, but I wonder if this mimicry is very effective. There are lots of Spicebush Swallowtails and
Red-spotted Purples out there, and not so many Pipevine
Swallowtails. How many birds are
likely to encounter the distasteful one and learn a lesson to leave the
others alone? No matter; our
particular butterfly had escaped the birds.
It must have had a great need for whatever it was lapping from the
gravel because an hour after we began stripping vines from the trees late
volunteers still commented about seeing the butterfly on the path. Following our session we returned
to St. Andrews by way of the Blue Trail at the edge of the golf course. On the way to the Blue Trail we saw beside
the bike path a vine with cascades of panicled,
white flowers. The maple-like leaves
were familiar and resembled those of the Wild Cucumber, but the narrow, white
twisted petals were reminiscent of Virgin’s Bower or other Clematis. My Peterson field guide didn’t seem to be
of much help, but the closest illustration was that of a Wild Cucumber, and
we knew those had grown along the old road before the bike trail took its
place. The 6-petaled flowers and
maple-like leaves differentiated it from the 5-petaled look-alike
Bur-cucumber, and a later close look at photos of the blossoms revealed that
petals that had appeared twisted and narrow were just wilted. In the background of the photo were fresher
blossoms that were just like those illustrated in Peterson’s
Wildflowers. On our way up the hill
from the t-junction of the bike path we noted
several areas that were both in need of attention and small enough for us to
accomplish something useful, so we resolved to move to that part of the trail
itself for our later visits to LaTourette.
Further along, portions of the top of the trail close to the course
were just too burdened with invasive vines for us to even “make a dent”, and
we chose to pass on those sections.
Closer to St. Andrews we entered the area of the hillside that had
burned last autumn. Now it is all
verdant and casually walking through, you would not have known there had been
a fire unless you noticed a few charred branches rising above the green. That hillside hasn’t taken long at all to
grow back. On that part of the trail were
several very dense patches of first year rosettes of Common Mullein, a plant
that will become tall, green, living candelabras next year with green budded
spikes of bright yellow flowers in the place of candles. These thick patches of this opportunistic
alien plant should be quite imposing by the end of next summer, the stands of
tall, yellow, close-growing candles catching the eye of whomever
hikes the trail. The mulleins are
aliens and, if there is a source of seed, quick to grow where the soil has
been disturbed. Some, such as the PCA
Alien Plant Working Group, consider it to be an invasive alien that is
especially damaging to natural meadows, but others believe they rarely
continue to grow in one place in such great numbers that they become
invasive. The yellow flowers mature
into brown, globular seed capsules containing hundreds of tiny seeds that
will be shaken out by winter winds and tracked along the trail where some few
of them will find another hospitable place to sprout. After the Mulleins have grown for a few
seasons in a particular spot the soil must become exhausted of some necessary
nutrient; their numbers become fewer and they cease to add their picturesque
spots of color to the landscape. Only
time will tell if the carpet of Common Mullein just below the ridge of the
driving range will continue to spread or eventually exhaust itself. Unhappily, elsewhere in the burned
area Japanese Honeysuckle has returned with a vengeance and literally carpets
the earth close to the ridge. The
honeysuckle is so prolific and the seeds so easily spread by birds feeding on
the berries in autumn, that the soil bank almost everywhere contains seeds
waiting for their moment in the sun.
Once ground is disturbed, the seeds quickest to sprout can get an edge
on other plants, and one characteristic of invasive plants is that their
seeds are usually very quick off the mark.
This poses quite a problem for those who manage our parklands. Between Moses Mountain and Seaview the serpentine barrens used to suffer wildfires
every few years and these fires served to suppress the growth of shrubs and
other plants whose decaying remains would eventually cover the magnesium rich
earth of the barrens with soil more accommodating to ordinary plants. Where shrubs did spring up, they were
usually Sumac and Grey Birch, Poplar and Sweetgum. Lately, however, the alien Devils’ Walking
Stick (Aralia elata) has become established
nearby, and birds have so deposited seeds on the hillside that after the last
fire a virtual mono-culture of that invasive alien has sprung up in place of
the native plants we would have expected.
If the NYCDPR ever develops a plan to manage what is left of these
barrens, dealing with opportunistic alien plants will be a major issue. After our return to St. Andrews a few
of us made an excursion to one of Staten Island’s more recent bluebelts, the Mill Creek Bluebelt
north of Amboy Road opposite North Mt. Loretto
State Forest. (It’s hard to become
accustomed to referring to northen Mt Loretto as a “State Forest” since that term automatically
invokes visions of thousand acre preserves in the Catskills and Adirondacks,
but it is now controlled by the State DEC so we do now have our own, albeit
smaller, “State Forest” right here on Staten Island!). The Staten Island Bluebelts
are public lands designed to handle the local flow of storm water, impounding
it and slowly letting it flow into local wetlands, thereby reducing the need
for large, expensive storm sewers. The
Mill Creek Bluebelt was finished a year or so ago,
and like all the recent Bluebelts has been designed
to accomplish the multiple functions of draining storm water and conserving
wetland habitats. As such they
frequently have no trails, but are sometimes accessible through their access
roads, or have been provided with viewing areas accessible from nearby
roadways. From Amboy road, where two signs
identify the bluebelt and explain its function, a
narrow section of grid-like, water-permeable pavers makes a transition to a
short, coarse graveled roadway leading for a short distance into the woods
and ending at a berm overlooking a collection pond created by the New York
City DEP to the east and the Mill Creek wetlands to the west. The road is bordered by flowers and shrubs
planted by the DEC and chosen to survive in that environment; many were in
full bloom. Prominent were the yellow
and orange blossoms of Sneezeweed and Coreopsis, and the smaller, compound
flowers of Hawkweeds, all interspersed with white sprinkles of eupatoriums, the Bonesets and Thoroughoworts. Occasionally flourishes of other colors
attracted the eye: a dainty fork of Blue Vervain,
deep purple of spiny thistles and the pink of Saltmarsh Fleabane. Across the pond larger white splotches were
the blossoms of Mallows, while close by the dam itself were clusters of vivid
red Cardinal Flowers. The family of
Mallards inhabiting the pond last week were no longer in evidence, and the
only notable things flying by the pond were insects: dragonflies hawking insects
attracted by the flowers and clear-winged “hummingbird” moths, members of the
Sphinx Moth family, hovering - like hummingbirds - to gather nectar from the
blossoms beside the dam. This was a
pleasant place to visit, and would have make a good “jumping off place” for a
hike through the woodlands of Mt. Loretto, but we
couldn’t tarry since we needed to return the gloves and tools to the shed at
High Rock. Although not part of the
Restoration Workshops, I thought I’d mention that on the following day Chuck
Perry arranged a collaboration with the Greenbelt
Nature Center to do a program for kids titled “Magnifying Nature.” Jessica Kratz and
the Nature Center staff pulled together and set out on tables at the Center a
number of hands-on nature exhibits requiring a “close look,” including a small
microscope with a battery-powered illumination to look at what might be found
in a container of pond water with an eye-dropper. Everything was rather free-form and
non-structured so that the kids could wander around and look at whatever
caught their fancy; with the microscope the kids could look at various
protozoans, small crustaceans and insect larvae wriggling about under the
lens. Paul Lederer,
entomologist and SI Museum Research Associate, brought a selection of mounted
insect specimens and a binocular microscope from the Staten Island Institute
so that the kids could get a close view of insect eyes and wings. By my estimate only about a dozen kids
showed up, but they seemed to have a good time and a few finished the outing
by defying the threatening weather with a short walk over part of the nature
trail. All of them took home a dual
power hand lens that Chuck had purchased (for Protectors) and provided with
short cords so that they could be hung around the neck. It made for a pleasant, rewarding
afternoon, and I hope that the staff of the Nature Center thinks it
worthwhile enough to do again next year. And lastly, September 17th
we will meet at the fishing pier close to the intersection of Sharrott Avenue and Hylan
Boulevard to take part in the 26th International Coastal Cleanup Day. We will not meet at our usual 10:00 am
start time, but instead at 9:00, and will work cleaning the beach til 12:00; I hope to see you there. ALSO the very next Saturday, September 24th,
Protectors is partnering with The Outdoor Channel for a session of invasive
plant removal at William H. Pouch Boy Scout Camp where your help would be
appreciated pointing out the vines and plants to remove (and you can pull
them out, too). That project is
scheduled to begin at 8:00 (orientation and announcements, etc.), with work
to begin at 9:00. The flyer for the
event is posted on our web site, www.siprotectors.org and more information at http://outdoorchannel.com/Conservation/Corps/Events/CampPouch.aspx. Even though it’s early in the morning I
hope to see you there, too. DfR 09-04-11 . |
©2004 PPOW