Saving the Future

“I’m convinced that something has to be done to keep cows out of the stream,” David Heverly told me. And so he had enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, which is better known by its acronym CREP. A federal program authorized and funded under the current Farm Bill, it is administered by the Farm Service Agency in the United States Department of Agriculture with technical assistance from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

But the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and its many private conservation partners, as well as our own Game Commission, also contribute to this program, and keeping cows out of streams is one of their major goals. Instead of forested buffers along many of our streams, especially in the valleys, the banks are bare and broken down by watering cattle.

Yet there is a better way, as Heverly has discovered. At no cost to him, Heverly’s stream was fenced, a cattle crossing was constructed over it, and native trees and shrubs were planted on either side of it. By choosing CREP Conservation Practice 22 (CP22), which creates a riparian forest buffer, Heverly has protected 1600 feet of an unnamed tributary of the Bald Eagle Creek from erosion and pollution. All of this fencing and planting had been done in 2005, and already green ash trees were sticking out of his three-foot-tall, plastic grow tubes.

That was back in mid-May of last year when I joined a tour led by Frank Rohrer, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s stream buffer specialist for Centre County, and Daina Beckstrand, a wildlife habitat biologist for USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, although Beckstrand’s salary, travel and vehicle expenses are paid for by the Game Commission in an agreement with the NRCS, according to Michael Pruss, the PGC’s Private Lands Biologist. Rohrer’s employer, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, is another CREP partner, along with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever and a host of others, that helps guide landowners through the CREP enrollment process and phases of the project.

CREP first started in Pennsylvania back in 2000, when it was available only in 20 counties in the lower Susquehanna and Potomac River basins, where the excessive nutrients and sediment from agricultural runoff directly impact the Chesapeake Bay. Once CREP reached its goal of 9,000 acres of riparian buffers in those counties, they extended the program in 2003 into the 23 counties in the Upper Susquehanna whose watersheds also impact the Chesapeake Bay. A year later CREP moved into the 16 counties in western Pennsylvania in the Ohio River Basin.

Frank Rohrer likes to say that “Trout grow on trees.”

But the waters of Centre County, like the waters of my own Blair County, are part of the Susquehanna River Basin and thus impact the Chesapeake Bay as well as our local waterways. Whenever we drive from our home along back country roads to State College, we cringe at the sight of so many unbuffered banks and muddy streams filled with cattle. So I was pleased to meet a farmer like Heverly who cared about protecting a precious resource on his land, and, by doing so, was also improving his cattle’s health by keeping them clean and dry.

Rohrer showed me a copy of Heverly’s plan, and it was clear that although the initial work had been done by contractors, it was up to Heverly to make sure at least 70 percent of the trees and shrubs survived. And during the life of the contract–15 years–Heverly is not allowed to harvest any trees or shrubs.

His riparian buffer also has three zones. The one closest to the stream contains only trees, the second zone has a mixture of trees and shrubs, and the third zone is composed of grasses. All tree seedlings had to be protected from deer-browsing by tree tubes buried deeply enough to prevent rodent and heat damage and covered on top by bird nets to keep songbirds from flying down into the tubes and dying.

Altogether, 290 trees and shrubs grow on Heverly’s 2.3 buffered acres including winterberry holly, gray and silky dogwood, shagbark hickory, black cherry, green ash, pin, white, and swamp white oaks, sycamore, and flowering crabapples. While the choice of species is left up to the landowner, with help from specialists such as Rohrer and Beckstrand, they must be native, they must be good species for the site, and less than 20% can be evergreens. Hardwoods are preferred, especially along the stream, because they add more nutrients, in the form of fallen leaves and other detritus, to the stream, which in turn feed the aquatic invertebrates. Eventually, the food chain reaches the fish.

As Rohrer likes to say, “Trout grow on trees.”

Signing up for CP22 makes economical sense as well. David Wise, of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, says that “Forested buffer projects boost income in two ways. First are one-time incentive payments based on the cost of the project, and second are annual rental payments of $67-$200 an acre. In typical projects, these combine to produce profits of $2000 to $3000 an acre over the life of the project.” In other words, not only are landowners reimbursed for the initial cost of CP22, but they make a substantial profit for keeping the forested riparian buffer on their land throughout the life of the contract (10-15 years).

After the contract runs out, they are free to do whatever they like with the land, but the hope is that, like Heverly, landowners will be pleased with their growing forest and shaded stream, and it will remain a permanent part of their overall property. After all, the CREP program wants to improve marginal farmland on highly-erodible slopes and stream banks, which is summed up in Pennsylvania’s slogan, “Farm the best, CREP the rest!”

The rest of Heverly’s 16-acre property is a cattle pasture that attracts singing bobolinks and swooping barn swallows as we discovered that day. It also provides ideal foraging habitat for the eastern bluebirds that breed in the nest boxes he has provided for them.

CP22 is one of 13 conservation practices in CREP, and one of the most popular. Another is CP1, the establishment of permanent introduced grasses and legumes on erodible cropland and CP2, the establishment of permanent native grasses, and we saw excellent examples of both on the 203-acre property of Robb and Lea Ann Kimble. Robb, accompanied by his six-year-old daughter Kayla, proudly showed off their 42 acres of warm and cool season grasses and legumes.

“We did it for habitat,” he told us, and Kimble planted 13 acres in warm season grasses–big and little bluestem and Indiangrass–and 22 acres in cool season grasses and legumes back in 2004. A year later, he wrote a “Field Note” for Quality Whitetails, illustrated with a photograph of him standing in his field with Kayla on his shoulders.

“I am 5′11,” he wrote, “and with my daughter on my shoulders the grass is as high as her head. As we had hoped it [their planting of grasses] has been well received by a broad range of wildlife. We have had the pleasure of viewing red foxes, bobcats, turkeys, many rare songbirds, and, of course, the magnificent whitetail.”

Because such CREP acres are not mowed during the nesting season, not only are nesting birds more successful, but the larger CREP fields support both more species and more obligate grassland species such as eastern meadowlarks, American kestrels, grasshopper, vesper and Savannah sparrows, bobolinks, dickcissels, mallards, and ring-necked pheasants than do similar-sized hayfields, according to recent studies by Margaret Brittingham, Kevin Wentworth, and Andy Wilson of Penn State. American kestrels and eastern meadowlarks were particularly successful on CREP fields.

In our mid-May visit to the Kimble farm, the warm season grasses had barely germinated, but their dried, shoulder-high, winter remains were impressive. Unlike cool season grasses, which begin growing in March and April, warm season grasses grow during June, July, and August. These native bunch grasses grow tall and put down deep roots that help to prevent soil erosion. They also remain standing throughout the winter and provide food as well as shelter for wildlife.

Perhaps his grandfather said it best when he told Walizer, “No man owns the land; you are only the caretaker for your generation. The goal is to leave the land better than you found it.”

The last place we visited was the property of Libby and Jim Walizer. I knew Jim from his work in the Pennsylvania Forest Stewardship program and had been eager to see his beautiful, 250-acre farm, once primarily planted in corn and soybeans, now mostly devoted to a variety of conservation practices, including both CP22, CP1 and CP2.

Walizer is a wiry, energetic man in his mid-seventies who I think of as the experimenter. “I’m in the conservation business,” he told us, as he showed off his 22-acres of warm season switchgrass and wildflower mixture including blooming wild lupines that attract bobwhite quail. He and his family, who did all of the work, also planted another 21 acres not only with wildflowers and switchgrass but also little and big bluestem and Indiangrass back in 2004. After an accidental burn of those acres, Walizer told us that “Indiangrass beat out the bluestem.” That was the first year after the burn, but last year the other grasses also rebounded, according to Rohrer.

At the same time Walizer also planted cool season grasses in 14 field acres that border the warm season fields. His planting makes both conservation and economical sense. If he had rented out the acres to other farmers for growing standard crops, he would have received $50 an acre per year. From CREP he receives $112 an acre.

But as I looked across the road from Walizer’s farmhouse and saw rows of new homes, I realized that by selling his land to developers he could have made millions and retired to Florida with his wife. Instead, he remains on his land, an active farmer who still raises some beef cattle, but who is mostly interested in “giving this area back to nature instead of farming it fencerow to fencerow,” as he said when he and his wife were chosen Northeastern Regional Tree Farmers of the Year in 2006.

After we admired his warm season grasses and especially his lupines, we visited a portion of his forest, specifically his 5.8 acres of CP22 along Little Fishing Creek at the base of Nittany Mountain. There he and his family had planted tulip poplar, sugar maple, black locust, red oak and a tall variety of Chinese chestnut (as closely-related to our extirpated native American chestnut as possible), as well as the shrubs silky dogwood and silky willow.

Dissatisfied with the standard tree tubes, which he had used in his tree farm before his planting of a riparian forest buffer, he had been experimenting with a variety of different sizes and shapes for several years. Finally, he had developed his TIP System (Tree Incubation and Protection System). As an article he wrote in Pennsylvania Forests magazine explains, it “uses a plastic tube 16 inches high along with a 4-foot high plastic fence with 2-inch grids…The 16-inch tube protects the tree from sprays, rabbits, and rodents and still maintains the greenhouse effect [of the standard tubes]. The fencing protects the tree from deer browse, gives the tree wind stability, and eliminates excessive heat around the tree. The cost is less than $2.00 per shelter. There have been no birds in our tubes and I have found only six wasp nests in 600 tubes checked.” Altogether, he and his family built 1000 TIP System shelters, and he proudly showed them off to us.

Walizer, ever the rapid-talking raconteur, kept us entertained with story after story of his experiences in conservation practices over many years, including those in the CREP program. But perhaps his grandfather said it best when he told Walizer, “No man owns the land; you are only the caretaker for your generation. The goal is to leave the land better than you found it.”

No doubt, Heverly, Kimble, and all the other landowners participating in the CREP program throughout Pennsylvania would agree.
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For more information on the CREP program, call toll-free 1-800-941-CREP (2737) and you will hear a recording that will explain the program and direct you to your local CREP coordinator. You can also visit your local U.S. Farm Service Agency office in your county Agriculture Service Center. Information on the Pennsylvania CREP program is here.

Illustrations: “Brook Trout,” by Bob Hines (courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s free image library); photo of tree grow tubes above a badly eroded streambank by Kelly Donaldson of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (used by permission). For more photos (including one of me), see the CBF’s own account of the outing here.

Life at a Vernal Pond

It was not the year to observe our vernal ponds. But how was I to know that? After two years of more precipitation than usual, all the depressions on top of Sapsucker Ridge beneath the oak and black cherry forest had filled with water.

In late March, I counted four ponds. Three of them were clustered near each other. First were two old small ponds that had merged and formed a larger, figure-eight-shaped pond 30 feet long and eight feet wide. This pond was closely followed by a second small pond that was barely six feet in diameter. The last of the cluster, once a small pond, had become the largest of all–40 feet in diameter.

The fourth pond, farther along the ridge, had been the only reliable one over the years and had supported, until a couple dry years, a population of breeding wood frogs. That pond, though, now completely hemmed in by fallen debris from the ice storm, had become the second largest pond at 60 feet long by 15 feet wide.

Vernal ponds, also called “depression ponds,” “temporary ponds,” or “vernal pools,” are ponds of water that are mostly less than 120 feet wide and four feet deep and are created by snow melt and spring rains. Often these ponds dry up in mid-to-late summer or early autumn, which prevents permanent residency by fish. Without such predators, the larvae of some salamander and frog species can thrive.

Once the ice had melted from our ponds, I spent many hours watching not only the activity in them but the wildlife around their perimeters. On the last day of March, as I sat near the largest pond, I heard a rustle in the leaves nearby. Hen turkeys waded through the far end of the pond. A few looked over at me, but I didn’t move. They continued filing past, and altogether I counted 17. On the rise above the pond, and following well behind like an outcast, a tom turkey, sporting a medium-sized beard, silently fanned his tail while keeping a respectable distance. The hens foraged as they moved off through the forest and never seemed to notice him.

On April Fool’s Day, I heard the quacking calls of wood frogs from the oldest pond. I crept up quietly to glimpse them calling and swimming, but I wanted a better view of the action. I crossed to the other side of the pond and the frogs dove to the bottom. Making myself an elevated seat atop two fallen cherry trees wedged against a live chestnut oak, I sat motionless for half an hour, but the male frogs didn’t call. A few froggy heads did appear above the water and fixed their unblinking eyes on me.

Although the frogs provided little entertainment, other creatures did. A pileated woodpecker’s maniacal cry outdid the “pee-wee” song of a black-capped chickadee and calling golden-crowned kinglets and an eastern phoebe made themselves heard above the roar of Interstate 99 traffic at the base of the ridge. The next several days winter returned for what we hoped was its final blast. Terrific winds, cold, rain, and snow sent the wood frogs down into the pond muck, and on the fourth of April, a skim of snow still encircled the vernal ponds while a mica-thin, translucent layer of ice covered the larger ponds. Golden-crowned kinglets and black-capped chickadees foraged around the oldest pond as I sat there. Tufted titmice and a singing winter wren poked around in the tangled mass of ice-felled trees, and live trees creaked and groaned in the blessed wind that drowned out the traffic din below.

A cap of white crowned all the mountains, but the valleys were brown. A hairy woodpecker called, and I heard a singing golden-crowned kinglet. Then kinglets and chickadees landed and foraged on a witch hazel sapling three feet from my head, the kinglets fluttering down around me like animated butterflies. A chickadee bathed in a strip of open water near the edge of the pond. Once I heard a singing brown creeper, and then I watched one hitching its jerky way up a series of nearby tree trunks even as sodden snow plopped down from the tree branches.

Two days later, it was warm again. The largest vernal pond also held about 10 calling, swimming wood frogs, while the oldest pond contained 20 or more and four wood frog egg masses.

By the tenth of April, even the two smallest vernal ponds held large clumps of wood frog egg masses. But all the ponds were shrinking in the spring warmth, and on April 12, I was shocked to find the oldest pond dried up. Only four large gelatinous blobs containing both wood frog eggs and tiny, just-hatched black tadpoles lay in the mud.

The two small ponds had some water, but their egg masses were gone. Turkey droppings around the ponds’ edges made me suspect that turkeys had made a meal of the eggs.

The largest pond still held plenty of water, although it too was retracting. Several egg masses bobbed in its two-foot-deep middle. A sprightly breeze masked the interstate noise, and the brilliant, but drying sun blazed down from a deep blue sky.

Day by day I kept my vigil beside the remaining vernal pond. Soon I was sitting at the base of a large black cherry tree that had previously been surrounded by water. Water striders skated over the pond’s surface, and a dead white moth floated in the water. Looking closely, I spotted a few wriggling mosquito larvae. Wood frog eggs were hatching, and some tadpoles had already swum off. Another egg mass lay marooned on the dried shore. A few eggs wriggled in it, so I threw it back into the pond.

No rain fell throughout most of April and into May, as I watched the incredible shrinking pond. The wood frog tadpoles swimming in the water were losing their race against time. In early May I surprised a mother bear and her three small cubs near the pond. The cubs bounded away, up and over Sapsucker Ridge while the sow paused to watch me. Three days later the vernal pond was as large as a small car and three piles of fresh bear scat surrounded it. The wood frogs had lost their gamble, but their eggs and tadpoles had fed turkeys, bears, and probably other wildlife as well.

Not all vernal ponds met the fate that mine did last spring. Some of those on State Gamelands 176 are much larger, and one April afternoon my husband Bruce, son Dave, and I met Jim Julian there. Julian, a Penn State graduate student in ecology, has been studying vernal ponds, and he gave us a tour of one of them. Many wood frog egg masses bobbed in the water, but a few male wood frogs still hid under the leafy detritus waiting for females to appear. I even found two pink dead females, one of which had been chewed on probably by a raccoon, Julian said.

But, unlike our ponds, the gameland’s pond also supported spotted salamanders. One of three mole salamander species that depends on vernal ponds to breed in, they live mostly underground in holes or burrows dug by other creatures and only appear above ground in breeding season. Spotted salamanders are black with yellow spots and lay both clear and opaque egg masses, the latter resembling giant cotton balls.

According to Tim Maret, a biology professor at Shippensburg University who has been studying vernal ponds in Michaux State Forest, wood frog tadpoles eat spotted salamander eggs, and salamander larvae of the same or different species eat each other. As a result, less than one percent of salamanders and frogs hatched in vernal ponds survive to leave them, even if the ponds don’t shrivel up, as mine did, before summer.

Vernal ponds vary in the creatures they support. Another mole salamander, the Jefferson, comes and mates at a pond on a rainy night in late winter. Having previously visited the pond in November and then burrowed into the ground nearby, it will even migrate to the pond over snow, hence its nickname “snow walker.”

The third mole salamander species, the marbled, mates on a vernal pond’s dry land in mid-September. The female marbled salamander lays her eggs under rocks, logs, or in the leaf litter to keep them moist, and she stays with them until the pond fills up in late autumn or early winter. Under the ice-covered pond, marbled salamander eggs hatch and their larvae eat leaves and leaf fungus as well as fairy shrimp, which are inch-long crustaceans that swim upside down through the water. Nicknamed “sea monkeys,” the shrimp drop their eggs into sediment where they remain dormant for months or even years until the pond refills.

Many other species, such as red-spotted newts, pickerel and leopard frogs, spotted turtles, and spring peepers use vernal ponds, but if the ponds don’t contain mole salamanders, wood frogs, and/or fairy shrimp they are not true vernal ponds.

Even though most people are not aware of vernal ponds because they are temporary, many are incredibly old. Several on South Mountain in southcentral Pennsylvania are 15,000 to 21,000 years old, and another pond, near Lewisburg, is 13,800 years old according to pollen analyses of core borings.

Unfortunately, federal wetland regulatory programs don’t protect vernal ponds because they have no direct connection to navigable water. They are built on, bulldozed, or paved over, and developers sometimes use the depressons as storm water ponds. Then runoff from roads and parking lots flow into them, bringing pollution.

Even without direct destruction, vernal ponds can be ruined by logging. Julian says that it is essential to keep forested areas around vernal ponds intact because trees shade the water, reduce evaporation, and control silt runoff, which can suffocate eggs, into the ponds. Instead of the recommended 100-foot buffer zone, he says it should be closer to 500 feet because ponds with wider buffers usually have more species. The salamanders and frogs that visit the pond also need relatively cool, moist, shady conditions nearby to live the rest of their lives.

Wood frogs and salamanders will seek out new ponds if they must, but they are homebodies. Julian told us about one study of 350 marked adult wood frogs, which live up to seven years, that found they all returned to the same ponds year after year. In another study of those hatched in a single pond, he says, 82% came back to breed in their natal pond. Julian also mentioned that a study of spotted salamanders, which can live up to 20 years, found that they returned to their home pond even after it was paved over.

Applying pesticides and herbicides near vernal ponds is another threat to the creatures that live and breed in them. Roundup has a particularly bad effect on them, Julian says, and there are warnings on the label that landowners should read and heed if they care about preserving the vernal ponds on their property.

Acid rain is also hurting vernal ponds, according to Tim Maret. Some ponds he has been sampling have a pH of 4. While spotted salamanders and wood frogs can tolerate such acidity, the rare Jefferson salamanders die if the pH. reaches 4.5 (7 represents neutrality and lower numbers indicate increasing acidity).

Vernal ponds are now on the radar screen of many knowledgeable people. While Tim Maret and graduate student Joe Wilson are documenting the abundance and survival of amphibians in vernal ponds in Michaux State Forest as part of a Wild Resource Conservation Fund project, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has received a State Wildlife Grant to find and research seasonal ponds in Pennsylvania, a project that involves a partnership with academic scientists, nonprofit organizations, state and federal agencies and public volunteers. Ongoing studies of these ponds are also being done through the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program by biologists with the WPC and The Nature Conservancy.

With all this work perhaps vernal ponds will gain the understanding and protection they need to survive both on public and private lands. I hope so, because despite my disappointment last year, I’m once again watching my vernal ponds. For me there is no better way to celebrate the return of spring.

Dragonflying

“Dragonflying is good for jaded birdwatchers. It presents new challenges,” Cynthia Berger told me as we watched darting dragonflies at Whipple Dam State Park one sunny day in late July. Berger is the author of Dragonflies, an excellent new book designed for beginning dragonfly-watchers.

These “glittering aerial acrobats,” Berger writes in her book, are similar to birds in several ways. Like birds, dragonflies are strong flyers and have distinctive and often colorful bodies. Many defend territory, guard mates, and are excellent aerial predators. The female and male of a species are frequently different in appearance, as different as male and female black-throated blue warblers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, or indigo buntings, and, like those birds, the males are the flashier. Several dragonfly species migrate south in the fall and north in the spring. They also can be watched through binoculars, although close-focusing binoculars, designed for both butterfly- and dragonfly-watching, are better than birdwatching binoculars as I discovered when I used Berger’s on our Whipple Dam outing. Finally, dragonfly-watchers, like butterfly-watchers and birdwatchers, can make original discoveries about species’ distribution and behavior.

Dragonfly-watching has really taken off in this century with the publication of two user-friendly, dragonfly field guides: Sidney Dunkle’s Dragonflies Through Binoculars (2000) and Beginner’s Guide to Dragonflies by Nikula, Sones, Donald and Lillian Stokes (2002).

Dunkle is an odonatist or odonatologist–someone who studies dragonflies–and earlier wrote two excellent guides to the dragonflies and damselflies of Florida. Back in 1978, Dunkle, along with Dennis R. Paulson and under the auspices of the Dragonfly Society of the Americas, dreamed up most of the common English names for all 425 North American dragonflies and damselflies. This made dragonfly-watching more accessible to nonscientists. Many names are site specific such as swamp darner, Ozark clubtail, and Pacific spiketail. Others refer to the dragonfly’s color–roseate skimmer, azure darner, coppery emerald, cinnamon shadowdragon. Then there is my own personal favorite, the species that sent me to the books, the comet darner.

Living on a dry mountaintop, as I do, I wondered why I often saw dragonflies coursing above the grasses of our First and Far fields. With the help of Dunkle’s guide, I identified common green darners, twelve-spotted skimmers, and common whitetails. All are large, showy species easy to see even through my birdwatching binoculars.

But back on August 19, 2003, I was dazzled by a new species. As I walked across First Field toward Big Tree Trail, dozens of huge, flashy dragonflies, which I later identified as comet darners (Anax longipes), zipped around me like miniature helicopters on speed.

“Heavenly Day,” lepidopterist Alexander B. Klots said when he first saw a male comet darner, “isn’t he a beautiful thing on the wing! With that emerald green of the thorax and blood red of the abdomen…” The male comet darner also has a greenish-yellow head and unusually long legs, hence the longipes species name that means “long legs.” Virginia Carpenter, author of Dragonflies and Damselflies of Cape Cod, published back in 1991, calls the comet darner “easily our most spectacular dragonfly…a fleet, powerful insect which flies with an easy, fluid grace…bird-like [in]size…and..rarely seen at rest.”

For more than three weeks, male comet darners hawked insects over First Field, and never once did one land while I was watching. Carpenter claims they are so swift that they are hard to catch. And they are fierce predators. She saw one with three dragonflies, half the size of its 3.2 inches, in its grasp. Dunkle wrote that the comet darner’s preferred habitat is borrow pits or semipermanent, usually shallow, grassy ponds without fish. We don’t have those close by, but apparently dragonflies do gather in swarms to feed on abundant prey miles from where you might expect to see them, which explains why I see so many above our fields. Members of a feeding swarm ignore each other and often consist only of males.

While the comet darner swarm only appeared here in 2003, the common green darners (Anax junius) are attracted to First Field every year in late summer. I sit on Alan’s Bench and watch them zip about for hours. Only slightly smaller than comet darners, common green darners have bright green thoraxes and azure blue abdomens adorned with a vertical dark brown stripe. The most widely distributed darner of its genus, it can be found in all 50 states, as well as in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and even Asia. They also like to breed in temporary, fish-less ponds.

Some common green darners migrate; others are residents that remain in ponds as nymphs throughout the winter. Of the 300 dragonfly species in North American, only 16 species from two families–the darners and skimmers–migrate. Usually they fly in air currents high above humans’ sight. Many migrate singly, but sometimes huge swarms migrate. In 1992, more than a million common green darners were counted along Lake Michigan’s shore at Chicago, Berger says. Like birds they follow land forms and seem to know their way instinctively.

Often, hawk watchers report seeing dragonflies too. Late last August, Rudy Keller was counting hawks at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, and he reported on the Pennsylvania butterfly and dragonfly listserv that “dragonflies were constantly moving by North Lookout or passing through binocular fields during my scans for raptors. Local redtails, passing kestrels, and even sharpies were stooping on, capturing and eating them as snacks on the wing all afternoon…” Keller was able to identify black saddlebags and twelve-spotted skimmers, both of which migrate. Merlins also prey on migrating dragonflies. Other bird species that relish dragonflies of all kinds are common nighthawks, swifts, swallows, flycatchers, and purple martins, all birds that catch their prey on the wing, using their mouths as dragonflies do when “hawking” food.

Dragonflies can fly for hours nonstop, averaging 25 to 35 miles an hour when they are migrating, and they travel thousands of miles. “Dragonflies,” Berger writes, “can take off backward, launch vertically like a helicopter, hover motionless for more than a minute, execute an unbanked turn, make a series of dazzling zigzag maneuvers, and stop on a dime.”

They also have eyes that wrap around their heads so they can see in almost every direction at the same time. Their color vision is better than ours–they can see four or five to our three primary colors, including ultraviolet light. Because of their superior eyesight, they only use their eyes to find prey. They eat flying insects including other dragonflies and need at least ten to fifteen percent of their body weight in food every day.

The insect order to which both dragonflies and damselflies belong–Odonata–means “toothed ones,” which refers to their sharply serrated lower jaw that they use to grab their prey. While dragonflies are big and stocky with wings that spread out flat when they are perched, damselflies are little and dainty and fold their wings over their backs when they are perched. The ebony jewelwings or black-winged damselflies (Calopteryx maculata) sit on vegetation overhanging our stream bed looking, as Virginia Carpenter observed, “like so many little black bows tied gaily to the tips of branches.”

During my time at Whipple Dam State Park with Cynthia Berger, we saw three species of damselflies–familiar bluets along the side of the lake, eastern forktails, which Berger says are monogamous, over the water, and ebony jewelwings at the edge of the outlet stream in the shaded forest.

“I always think they’re fun to see,” Berger commented as a couple chased back and forth. Both were males because of their black wings and striking, dark, metallic green bodies. Females have a white stigma (a blood-filled blister at the tip of each wing) on each brownish wing and dull, bronze-colored bodies.

Male ebony jewelwings defend territory for as long as a week from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon and mate with numerous females over that time period. After a fluttering courtship display, a male ebony jewelwing grabs a female at the top edge of her thorax with four claspers from the tip of his abdomen. Then they fly in tandem, the male leading and dragging the female along until they can form what is called a “copulation wheel.” She grasps the tip of his abdomen with her legs and folds her abdomen up under her thorax, pushing the tip of her abdomen against his genitalia. Dragonflies do this while flying; damselflies while on secluded perches.

To my delight, Berger and I spotted a pair mating on the leaves of a hickory sapling beside the stream. The “wheel,” though, looked more like a Valentine heart. We also saw another male open his wings and then clap them shut. Berger says that both sexes may do “wing-clapping” to signal their location, to cool their bodies on a warm day, or to improve the intake of oxygen.

We didn’t stay to watch the female lay her eggs on floating or submerged water plants while the male guarded her and tried to court other females at the same time. I was content to have seen the three damselfly species and three dragonfly species–twelve-spotted skimmers, common whitetails, and widow skimmers. But Berger was disappointed.

“Oh, it was so much better the last time I was here,” she told me.

Spoken like a true birdwatcher!

Cynthia Berger’s Dragonflies is published by Stackpole Books and not only covers the life history of dragonflies and damselflies, but tells readers how they can attract them to their backyards. The book is beautifully illustrated in color and includes paintings and species accounts of the most common dragonflies and damselflies. Its comprehensive Resource section should help anybody interested in becoming a dragonfly-watcher.

The Biodiversity of Lake Pleasant

On a bright, breezy day in early June we paddled a canoe around Lake Pleasant, one of eight glacial lakes in northwestern Pennsylvania.  Despite its prosaic name, the 64-acre lake in eastern Erie County has more natural diversity along its shoreline, in its surrounding wetlands, and in the lake itself than any other lake in the region.

A spring-fed lake no more than 45 feet deep, it was formed approximately 16,000 years ago by the same receding Wisconsin glacier that gouged out lakes in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania.  Instead of being acidic like the Pocono lakes, Lake Pleasant is alkaline and thus is buffered from the effects of acid rain.  Because alkaline conditions are rare in Pennsylvania lakes and wetlands, Lake Pleasant supports an unusual number of Pennsylvania threatened, rare, and endangered plants.

The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy (WPC) owns 350 acres around the lake, which it calls the Lake Pleasant Conservation Area.  This area includes most of the lake’s shoreline, numerous wetlands, two large reclaimed sand and gravel mines, and their Northwest Field Station.  Biologist Todd Sampsell, who runs the station and is Director of WPC’s Northwest Conservation Programs, was leading eight of us on a tour of this pristine lake.

We learned that back in 1993, after its initial purchase of 206 acres, the WPC began its long-term goal of creating educational and recreational opportunities for neighboring communities and visitors while preserving and even improving the natural qualities of the property.  Eventually, through purchases, easements, and cooperative landowners, they want to provide “bridges” or “wildlife corridors” to State Game Lands #161 west of the property and SGL#155 east of Lake Pleasant, Sampsell told us as he unveiled the WPC’s Master Site Plan.  Drawn up with input from local citizens, conservation groups, state agencies, and educators, it is an innovative plan that includes an elaborate trail system, boardwalks, and study areas.

Shayne Hoachlander, Land Management Group Supervisor for Erie and Crawford counties, is as enthusiastic about this plan as Sampsell.  “The key is that 155 and 161 can help buffer a unique watershed,” Hoachlander says, “and connecting them into a large unit helps move us toward a landscape level approach to management.”

Recreational opportunities, in the form of fishing and boating, have always existed at Lake Pleasant, but no gas or electric motorboats have ever been permitted.  Because motorboat propellers churn the water, cutting the leaves and stems of aquatic plants, produce waves that stir up shallow lake bottoms and dislodge plant roots, and leak oil and gas into the water, the absence of motorboats is one reason why aquatic plant diversity has persisted.  Another is because the lake’s unusually clear water allows the sun to penetrate at least 20 feet, which encourages the growth of healthy native aquatic plants.

The marshes surrounding Lake Pleasant include rare fens at its southwestern end that were created by alkaline groundwater seeps.  Fens too have unique plant communities.  During our June boat trip, Sampsell talked about the plants and wildlife living in and around the lake and about the threats to the lake’s purity. Lake Pleasant Road runs right beside the eastern edge of the lake and “delivers heavy metals, road salts and other contaminants to the lake, resulting in reduced plant growth and increased pollution loads,” Sampsell said.  He also worries that “additional nutrients from human sources such as septic systems, agriculture or lawn fertilizers may cause water quality to deteriorate.”Only one boat of anglers was on the lake during our visit so it was hard to envision the throngs of trout fishers who arrive in April after Lake Pleasant is stocked by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.  The commission has been stocking the lake with trout since 1952 and holds a lease from the previous owner of WPC property for public access on the lake’s eastern shore.  Parking and pull-off areas have almost destroyed riparian habitat there and the contrast between the road side of the lake and the remaining shoreline is stark, so the WPC hopes to design more lake-friendly access areas.

Largemouth bass, yellow perch, northern pike, and blue gill also draw fishers to Lake Pleasant, but two fish species of interest to biologists–the blackchin shiner and Iowa darter–are Pennsylvania endangered. A third endangered fish, the warmouth, used to be in the lake but hasn’t been seen lately.

Lake Pleasant also attracts a wide variety of bird species.  Students of Penn State’s Behrend College recently documented 56 including the wetland-dependent American bittern, American coot, bald eagle, common snipe, green and great blue herons, common loon, common moorhen, canvasback, bufflehead, blue and green-winged teals, double-crested cormorant, osprey, pied-billed grebe, ring-necked duck, sora, ring-billed gull and wood duck.  During our visit tree swallows swooped over the water and red-winged blackbirds “okaleed” in the marshes.  As we canoed up the outlet stream we had a good view of a yellow warbler, purple martins, and cedar waxwings.

Other lake-dependent wildlife are beavers and snapping turtles.  But the most famous animal at Lake Pleasant is extinct.  In 1991 George Moon, a local scuba diver, surfaced with a woolly mammoth shoulder blade.  Subsequent dives recovered the nearly complete skeleton of a 15-year-old male woolly mammoth sporting nine-and-half-foot-long tusks.  Researchers found scratch marks on the bones which had been weighted down with rocks.  They hypothesized that the woolly mammoth, subsequently named “Moon Mammoth,” had been killed by prehistoric humans 12,000 or more years ago and stored in the water over winter.

After telling us the mammoth tale, Sampsell brought us back to the present by having us peer into the water and observe the natural layers of plant vegetation.  He also spoke about Lake Pleasant’s rostrum of 23 plant species of special concern including Beck’s water-marigold which blooms in August. That’s why my husband Bruce and I returned one hot, sunny day in late August to canoe the lake with WPC botanist Steve Grund and his assistant Sara Ernst.  Grund and James K. Bissell of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History have been compiling a complete flora of the eight glacial lakes and their surrounding wetlands in northwestern Pennsylvania that is financed by a grant from the Wild Resource Conservation Fund.As we canoed around the lake, Grund pointed out a bewildering array of both common and uncommon aquatic plants.  He was particularly pleased with the presence of northern water-milfoil (Myriophyllum sibiricum), a Pennsylvania endangered species that has been extirpated from all the other northwestern lakes because of the invasive exotic Eurasian milfoil which “grows very fast, branches near the surface of the water, and can produce a canopy at the top of the lake that shades out the native species below,” Grund said.  It also breeds with northern water-milfoil.  Since Eurasian milfoil hitchhikes on motorboat propellers, the ban at Lake Pleasant has probably kept it out of the lake.

Northern water-milfoil is just one of a host of endangered, threatened, and rare submerged plants living in Lake Pleasant.  These plants may send up flowers to be wind-pollinated, such as the five species of rare, threatened, and endangered pondweeds–Fries, grassy, Illinois, red-head and flat-stem–but their leaves are usually underwater.  Grund showed us one common pondweed, the big leaf (Potamogeton amplifolius) as well as the flat-stem (P. zosteriformis) and red-head (P. richardsonii), and then confessed that identifying pondweeds “drive botanists nuts, especially if they’re not blooming,” since they all have similar, long, slender leaves.

Another submerged plant, the Pennsylvania rare white water crowfoot (Ranunculus aquatilis var. diffusus), is heterophyllous, meaning that it produces two kinds of leaves on the same plant.  In the case of white water crowfoot, it has simple floating leaf blades and dissected submerged ones.  Its fragrant flowers open at, barely above, or beneath the water.

Beck’s water-marigold (Megalodonta beckii) is also heterophyllous, producing large whorls of threadlike leaves on stems underwater and simple, oval leaves above water.  Its yellow, sunflower-like blossoms barely break the surface even though they are pollinated by flying insects.  I spotted the first flower.  Then suddenly we were in the Beck’s water-marigold zone and saw several dozen in bloom.

Coontail (Ceratophyllum demersum), which is not a rare plant, was not particularly impressive and looked to me like a bunch of small, ratty tails floating beneath the water.  But among aquatic botanists it is famous because of its unique method of pollination.  Its inconspicuous flowers grow underwater.  The male flowers release their stamens when they are mature and they rise to the surface of the water.  There they release their pollen, which sifts down through the water and may land on a female flower.  Luckily for waterfowl, which relish coontail fruits and shoot fragments, this “hit-or-miss” method of reproduction is less common than its simpler reproductive strategy, that of breaking off its brittle stems to produce new plants.Most obvious to us were the many showy plants that float on the surface of the lake such as fragrant white water lily (Nymphaea odorata), yellow cow-lily or spatterdock (Nuphar lutea), and water-shield (Brasenia schreberi), the latter of which has “the best slime on the undersides of its leaves,” Grund commented.  It also produces maroon or dull purple flowers that are wind-pollinated.

The emergent plants, which grow half in and out of water include the common pickerel weed (Pontedaria cordata), arrowhead (Sagittaria ringida), arrow arum (Peltandra virginica), bulrushes of various species and the water-willow, also known as whorled or swamp loosestrife.  Water-willow (Decodon verticillatus) grows along the edges of wetlands in shallow water and produces clusters of attractive purple flowers at the bases of whorled, thin leaves.  But it is best known for its arching stems with enlarged floating tips that often root in the water.

The mixed emergent marginal plant zone includes most of the swampy area surrounding the lake as well as the fens.  The fens, Grund told us, are “the center of biodiversity.”  Three of the threatened sedges–the lesser panicled (Carex diandra), broad-winged (C. alata) and prairie (C. prairea)–live only in the fens.  So too do the endangered rush aster (Aster borealis), marsh bedstraw (Galium labradoricum), and endangered cuckoo-flower (Cardamine pratensis var. palustris), as well as the threatened swamp red currant (Ribes triste). Two other Pennsylvania endangered species, the downy willow-herb (Epilobium strictum) and the swamp smartweed (Polygonum setaceum var. interjectum) live both in the fens and the swamp.

The swamp also shelters the endangered Bebb’s sedge (C. bebbii), cyperus-like sedge (C. pseudocyperus), and highbush-cranberry (Viburnum trilobum). The threatened matted spike-rush (Eleocharis intermedia)lives along the lakeshore.

Two species of special concern, the endangered showy mountain-ash (Sorbus decora), which is found in a nearby upland habitat, and the rare bog goldenrod (Solidago uliginosa), which grows nearly a mile below the lake in the outlet swamp, are not strictly connected to Lake Pleasant and its wetlands.  But, as Grund told us, both are protected in the process of protecting the lake and its surrounding habitat.

The list of Pennsylvania endangered, rare, and threatened plants at Lake Pleasant is a work-in-progress and Grund expects the list to expand.  Last summer they added both the Bebb’s sedge and the highbush-cranberry.  They also subtracted a few species that turned out to be more common than botanists previously thought.

“The closer we look, the more it becomes clear that Lake Pleasant is a very special place,” says Grund.  A place that is in good hands and should become even more special as the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy’s Master Site Plan is implemented over the years to come.