27 Comments

1. Chris Fastie says:
   July 2, 2010 at 10:24 pm

   I returned from a two week trip this morning to find my vegetable garden was in excellent shape. Even by flashlight at 1:00 AM when I arrived, everything looked huge, so I knew there had been plenty of rain. I was surprised later in the day to find a moose track in a sandy area. A good sized moose had walked a few feet from the garden and had done no noticeable damage. On closer inspection I found a couple of fennel stalks grazed off, but so far no other evidence of possible moose damage. This is very lucky, as the entire garden is just a snack for a big moose. I hope it hated the fennel and won’t come back.

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2. Perry says:
   June 28, 2010 at 8:54 pm

   Our nuisance black bear has returned today, Monday June 28th…after cleaning up all the birdseed last week and sprinkling the area with a confection of black pepper corns, chili powder, red pepper flakes, etc…..well my wife saw BooBoo running off today….doesn’t like the spice?….I’m not sure but his visits have become far too regular….I have lined up a paint ball gun from a friend of my sons (suggestion of forest Hammond…and a great one I think)….and I am going to purchase an air horn….if I happen to be here when he visits again I will give him a blast of both and see if he still feels he was an invited guest….

   Any thoughts from out there in Salisbury-land?

   Perry

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   1. jandrews says:
      July 13, 2010 at 8:36 pm

      Perry, our bear or another one stole honey from John Beatties hives again recently. This prompted a call to our local warden asking about using some bear dogs to scare the bear away from the area. The warden said that the dogs had not been very effective. He did say putting bacon grease on the electric fence around the hives might entice the bear to lick the wire and get a shock in a more sensitive area. Short of fences though, after removing all food supplies, that leaves us with the paint ball guns as the remaining suggestion. Let us know if you try it and what happens.

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3. Chris Fastie says:
   June 5, 2010 at 3:48 pm

   I went newting this morning. Soon after the rain stopped, I walked a mile-long loop up the hill from my house and east of Upper Plains Road. I counted 26 red efts along the route, wandering around the woods as they do this time of year when it’s damp enough. They are easy to see because their color is about as close to international orange as nature allows. If I saw all of them in a five-foot wide strip along the path, there were about 26,000 efts per square mile in the woods, or 40 per acre, all of them walking around. That is not so impressive compared to published estimates of 4,000 red-backed salamanders per acre in the same type of forest. Watch where you step.

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4. Chris Fastie says:
   May 11, 2010 at 10:17 am

   Jim Andrews was away last weekend, and returned to his house on Smead Road to find that somebody had been eating his porridge. Jim said “On our return home we found the metal poles that held the finch feeder and the suet cage bent 90 degrees, the suet cage missing, our bird seed containers all tipped over, a large pile of scat in the backyard full of sunflower seeds, and a message on the phone from our neighbor Eleanor Littlefield warning us that a bear was in the neighborhood.” A bear has been reported recently by a few people between Route 7 and Lake Dunmore, including another case of trying to eat bird feeders on Smead Road.

   Jim happened to have a motion activated camera that he had been using around snake dens, so he set it up on Sunday night on his wood pile. Sure enough, a bear that was just the right size came to visit at 10:29 PM and got his photo taken. Jim had the camera set up on Monday night as well, and captured some other visitors.

   This bear has now made a strong association between humans and food. That can be a dangerous condition in a black bear, and at the very least can drive the bear to do a lot of property damage. The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department recommends bringing in bird feeders between April and October, and especially this time of year securing garbage, pet food, and other edibles so bears can’t get to them easily.

   Click photos to enlarge them.

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5. Chris Fastie says:
   April 26, 2010 at 11:22 pm

   Wetland protection is old news. The ecological importance of wetland environments has been accepted for a long time, and wetlands have been classified, mapped, and provided legal protection for decades. Every New England state has an online database that can map the margins of every wetland and display a report of the vegetation there. But vernal pools have not been invited to this party. They are too small and temporary to map from aerial photographs, so have been mostly left out of the official wetland conservation movement. Until now.

   Vernal pools are small, shallow water bodies that usually dry up each summer. Many of them are in the woods and some are mostly covered by overhanging trees. They are the only places where many woodland populations of frogs and salamanders can lay their eggs and reproduce, and they also support dozens of species of invertebrate animals that would otherwise be absent from these forests. The eggs and larvae of some frogs and salamanders have no defense against predation by fish, so can only survive where fish cannot — in small pools that dry up and have no permanent connection to streams or lakes. Vernal pools can also be the only water bodies in large forest tracts, and allow small birds, small mammals, and reptiles and amphibians to move through these otherwise dry environments. The biomass of amphibians and invertebrates produced each year by some vernal pools exceeds that of all the birds and mammals produced in the entire surrounding forest. The ecological significance of vernal pools is well understood; the current challenge is to learn where they all are.

   To meet this challenge, two private organizations created the Vermont Vernal Pool Mapping Project. In 2009, the Vermont Center for Ecosystem Studies and Arrowwood Environmental started to train volunteers to find, identify, and describe vernal pools and populate an online database with the results. This year, the project is focusing on central Vermont, including Salisbury. Two members of the Salisbury Conservation Commission attended a training session at the Ripton Elementary School today to learn how to contribute to this effort. Heidi Willis and I are now Trained Citizen Scientists, and we are not afraid to use our new credentials.

   The conservation commission will be considering how to incorporate this project into its long list of activities.

   Photo: In this pool by the Ripton school we found wood frog and spotted salamander eggs, wood frog tadpoles, and fingernail clams. April 25, 2010. Click to enlarge.

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