Category Archives: Michigan (including Kalamazoo)

Bicycle Trail Through or To the Ott Biological Preserve: A Decision Near

Following is a slightly revised version of a letter that I sent to members of the Calhoun County Board of Commissioners on 29 April 2011. They will soon (Thursday, 7 April, 7 PM at the County Building, 315 West Green St. in Marshall) be taking an important vote related to whether the Calhoun County Trailways Association will be permitted to run a wide, bituminous bicycle trail through the preserve.

Fringed gentian in fen at Harvey Ott Preserve, Calhoun County. Photo September 1994 by Richard Brewer

I first learned of the Harvey Ott Biological Preserve about 1967 from the study of the preserve’s forests by Tony Catana, then in the Biology Department at Albion College. I have visited the preserve a good many times since, most frequently in the period after the timber cutting regrettably authorized by an earlier Calhoun County Board of Commissioners. In September 1994, I brought my ecology class from Western Michigan University to study the destruction, and over the next several months, directed a detailed study of the logged site by a graduate student. In 1994 and 1995 I sat in on some of the meetings of the ad hoc committee that produced a management plan and policies for the preserve. The plan and policies that were developed weren’t bad. They would make a good starting place for a stricter and more comprehensive document for the future.

My opinion is that a bicycle trail of any sort, let alone a wide asphalt trail, would be harmful to the native plants, animals, and ecosystems of the site. Damage would come from construction and would continue during later use of the trail.

I also believe that such an intrusion is contrary to stated aims for the preserve in every stage of its history and under every owner. This includes ownership by Calhoun County. To finance purchasing the preserve from Albion College, the County applied for a federal Land and Water Conservation Fund grant. Its application stated, “The property was originally purchased by Battle Creek College for a nature-biological study area. The full intent of Calhoun County is to continue with the preservation….” The Site Management Plan prepared by the ad hoc committee in 1994-1995 stated, “It is the intent of Calhoun County to maintain the Preserve as an area for passive, non-destructive, recreational, educational, and aesthetic use.” In the Plan, bicycling (and horseback riding, among other things) is specifically prohibited.

In my opinion the plan brought forth by the Trailways Alliance was not well designed. It’s hard to believe that the group has spent eight years planning and promoting the trail without doing environmental due diligence. Not only have no studies of the Ott Preserve been done, but it appears that no studies have been done anywhere along the proposed route. What rare plants or animals or important natural features will be impacted? But also, what contaminated or otherwise dangerous sites would the projected route take hikers through?

I am a supporter of trails. Rail-trail conversions around the nation have nearly always been environmentally and socially beneficial. The same can be said about many other sorts of trails–trails that were thoughtfully routed, carefully designed, and competently executed. I do not consider trails that invade preserved natural areas to be in this category. In fact, designing a trail by poaching on protected public or other conservation lands seems to me a disservice to the citizens of the region– as well as showing a certain lack of initiative. Optimal trail design would include, among other criteria, a route that eliminates or minimizes damage to preserves, parks, and other sensitive areas.

If the choice is between a hard-surfaced trail running through the preserve and no trail, then no trail is the responsible choice without question.

The only compromise I can see that would be respectful of the values of the preserve and meet the clear duty of Calhoun County as stewards of the preserve would be a trail that stopped outside the preserve, perhaps at a bicycle-parking area, also outside the preserve. From the bicycle-parking area, a short foot trail to the preserve boundary could allow access to the foot trails of the preserve. Providing a way to get to the Ott Preserve without the use of a car is one good feature of the Trailways plan and probably worthy of retaining–but only if the preserve itself is absolutely protected.

Additional comments: My impression is that the Calhoun County Board has done a good job of listening. Perhaps they will adopt some sort of compromise position. But there are an infinite number of possible routes between the northwest parking lot of the Ott Preserve and the stoplight on Michigan Avenue (route mentioned in 12.A in the Commission agenda for 7 April 2011). Some of these might be almost totally protective of the Ott and some might be damaging. It would be desirable that the route to be taken should be nailed down and described in any resolution adopted in the April 7 meeting. Also spelled out should be the principles to be followed for any trail section where the precise route can’t be currently stated (for example, no alteration of existing land contours).

These requirements are essential considering that any construction is likely to be some little time away, probably several years. Public memories dim. The trail advocates have fought doggedly for their vision of a 14-foot-wide bicycle path down the middle of the Ott. When construction begins, three or four or five years from now, a strong pull could exist toward dealing with any ambiguities in the statement of route by following the “bicycle-trail-through-the-Ott” game plan familiar to the Trailway Alliance and its allies in county government.

Wide Bike Trail Through the Preserve?: Speak Out to Save the Ott

Take Action on the Proposed Trail Through the Harvey Ott Biological Preserve

Main esker trail, looking down toward bridge, Harvey Ott Biological Preserve. Photo February 2011 Richard Brewer

The Calhoun County Commissioners will be the ones voting on the trail. They may give more weight to messages from their constituents; nevertheless, it will be of value to them to know if the threat to the Ott Preserve is a matter of concern to conservationists and nature lovers elsewhere.

Most of the information that follows is from the Say “No” to Pavement: Protect Ott Biological Preserve organization and was supplied by Sophia DiPietro. Comments in italics are mine. Besides earlier posts at this website, information on the proposed trail through the preserve and its drawbacks are most readily accessible at the Facebook page Say “No” to Pavement: Protect Ott Biological Preserve, especially the Wall and Info sections.

Upcoming Public Meeting–All are invited.

Ott Biological Preserve Proposed “Trailway” Public Forum Thursday, March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) 5:30pm – 8:30pm

County Commission Chambers (3rd floor County Building)
315 W. Green St.
Marshall, MI

The County Building is near the center of Marshall . Green is the main east-west street and the county building is half a block east of Kalamazoo Avenue, the main north south Street. (As a landmark, Schuler’s Restaurant is in the next block east on Green.)

This is one meeting you won’t want to miss! Don’t like the thought of the proposed “smooth-surfaced highway” through Ott Biological Preserve? This is YOUR time to speak up. There will be at least one presentation by the trailway alliance promoting their trail, and at least one presentation advocating for the protection of Ott. There will be a question/answer period and hopefully full opportunity for local citizens to make their voices heard against this trail proposal.

Come prepared! Make some notes as to why you feel Ott should remain free from development! County Commissioners need to hear from you! A regularly scheduled County Commission meeting follows the forum at 7pm

The Commission NEEDS to hear your opposition to trail development in Ott Biological Preserve. Send POLITE letters either snail-mail or email (scroll to bottom for emails group).

Calhoun County Board of Commissioners

Julie Camp (Republican)(re-elected)
8934 5 Mile Road
East Leroy, MI 49051
Fax: (269) 781-0140
juliecamp5@gmail.com

Terris Todd (Democrat) (re-elected)
135 Irving Park Dr.
Battle Creek, MI 49017
todd4calhoun@yahoo.com

Jim Haadsma (D) (re-elected)
146 South Lincoln Boulevard
Battle Creek, MI 49015
jhaadsma@mccroskeylaw.com

Mark Behnke (R)
474 Country Club Drive
Battle Creek, MI 49015
mbehnke@behnkeinc.com

Steve Frisbie (R)
148 Pheasantwood Trail
Battle Creek, MI 49017
sjfriz@gmail.com

Blaine VanSickle (R)
16828 21 Mile Road
Marshall, MI 49068
No email

Art Kale (R) (Chair)
3101 Country Club Way
P.O. Box 672
Albion, MI 49224
arthurkale@gmail.com

Compiled email contacts for pasting into email
(NOTE: Commissioner VanSickle does not have an email address):
arthurkale@gmail.com, sjfriz@gmail.com, mbehnke@behnkeinc.com, jhaadsma@mccroskeylaw.com, todd4calhoun@yahoo.com, juliecamp5@gmail.com

For Calhoun County residents, to find out who your specific county commissioner is, check out the county website for more info: www.calhouncountymi.org/Departments/BoardOfCommissioners/OverviewBOC.htm

Parks/Road Commissioners who have pursued this trailway jointly with the nonprofit Calhoun County Trailway Alliance (and therefore may not be objective to concerns):

Christopher Vreeland
119 North Grand Street
Marshall, MI 49068
Fax: (269) 781-6101
Email: cbv@vreelandlaw.com

Scott Brown
504 Lincoln
Albion, MI 49224
Fax: (269) 781-6101
Email: sbrown@calhouncrc.net

Hugh Coward
546 Sylvan Drive
Battle Creek, MI 49017
Fax: (269) 781-6101
Email: local340ironworker@sbcglobal.net

Eric Tobin
520 S. Avenue C
Athens, MI 49011
Fax: None
Email: orionet@aol.com

Email Group:
cbv@vreelandlaw.com, orionet@aol.com, local340ironworker@sbcglobal.net, sbrown@calhouncrc.net

Trail through the Ott Preserve: Going out of its way to pave the esker

Main Esker Trail, Ott Preserve. Photo February 2011 by Richard Brewer

Last Saturday, I took a walk with about twenty other people at the Harvey Ott Biological Preserve. This is where the Calhoun County Trailway Alliance wants to put a 10-foot wide paved cycling trail. Tom Funke, Director of Conservation for the Michigan Audubon Society, led the excursion. MAS owns about 20 sanctuaries. Tom is a Western Michigan University grad (Biological Sciences and Environmental Studies) who is well acquainted with the Ott Preserve, having spent his immediate post-graduation years in Battle Creek and having been a board member of Friends of the Ott Preserve. The Friends is a non-profit conservation group formed soon after the 1994 timber cutting in Ott but just now being reactivated after a dormant period following several tranquil years at the Preserve. We entered at a parking lot at the south end on land donated by the Sutarek family as an addition to the preserve after the logging. I was glad to get a chance to walk a part of the proposed trail, though exactly where the trail is supposed to go needs to be made clearer, at least to me. If I’m reading the available material correctly, the trail goes out of its way to invade the Ott Preserve, potentially bringing traffic whose interest is not the Preserve but mileage on the Calhoun County or North Country Trail. If things go on as they have been, the public may not get a full picture of the specifications for the trail until trail advocates and associated government agencies have settled everything among themselves. Some comments by the trail advocates seem to suggest–maybe are meant to suggest–that that point may already have been reached. We read comments like “Both of these entities could pull their funding for the project if the approved route… is changed.” and “If we change the plan or encounter significant delays in implementation, we could lose dollars committed to Calhoun County….” It does seem clear that part of the route in the preserve is projected to follow the existing main esker trail. We reached this trail after traveling over other sections of the existing foot path, which included an unpaved dirt section, a Trek boardwalk, and an iron bridge. I’m uncertain what the plans are for these sections of the path. Are they flat enough, smooth enough, wide enough, and with a strong-enough base to be incorporated in the proposed trail?

Width of the Main Esker Trail, Ott Preserve. Photo February 2011 by Richard Brewer

The main esker trail begins not much past the bridge. Currently this foot trail–shown in the first two photos–runs on the side of the esker and is less than five feet wide, or in other words, less than half the width of the proposed paved rail. To the 10-foot paved trail would be added additional 2-foot-wide unpaved right-of-way strips on each side. The resulting 14-foot trail would mean a major remaking of this land. If it actually followed the current trail (which the trail advocates’ literature suggests), a much larger shelf than seen in the photo–three times as wide as shown, maybe more–would have to be cut in the side of the esker. If, instead, the trail followed the top of the esker, a great deal of grading and filling would be needed to produce a flat, level surface for a 14-foot right of way. It seems clear that much more land in the preserve than just a claimed 2 acres (1.7 miles long X 10 feet wide) would be disturbed in the construction. Eskers are interesting land forms. They are formed toward the front of a sheet of glacial ice at a time when the front is just sitting there or wasting away at the end of a glacial advance. Running water carrying rocks, gravel, sand, and silt forms channels through the ice–below it, on top of it, or even as a tunnel within it. The rivers in these narrow. meandering channels deposit the sediments they’re carrying. The result, when the glacier has melted back, are ridges–eskers–of water-sorted, but mostly coarse, material. Aside from damages to the plant cover from construction, the existence and use of such a trail would have continuing harmful effects on the vegetation and wildlife. A broad, paved trail forms a barrier to travel for many small animals, fragmenting their populations. Birds and mammals move away from a trail when people go by, especially noisy people; hence the amount of usable habitat is reduced. Construction and maintenance equipment bring in seeds of invasive plants. Besides these unfortunate biological effects, there are other reasons to be sorry to see the esker whittled away. It’s a specific habitat for organisms, but it’s also a distinctive landform, interesting in itself. An esker is worth protecting. About forty years ago, the city of Portage refurbished Ramona Park on Long Lake in Kalamazoo County. One feature of Ramona Park was the presence of a couple of drumlins. Like eskers, drumlins are glacier-produced hills, but they’re usually small, stream-lined, and symmetrical. Frequently they’re tear-drop-shaped in outline, in which case the pointed ends show the direction the ice sheet was going toward. In fixing up the park, the Portage park department got rid of the drumlins–bull-dozed them flat and used the till to fill in some low spots. I’m not sure whether the Portage politicians and bureaucrats didn’t know that the little hills were drumlins or didn’t care. Possibly they knew very well and flattened them with sincere regret after an environmental assessment and a careful weighing of all economic, environmental, and societal costs and benefits.

An Absence of Drumlins, Ramona Park, Portage. Photo February 2011 by Richard Brewer

Anyway, the drumlins are gone, replaced with playing fields, parking lots, and lawn. I think the citizens of southwest Michigan got skinned.

Preserving landforms–eskers, drumlins, waterfalls, caves, cliffs–is slightly different from preserving ecosystems or flora and fauna, though they go together. But after all, the land is where Homo sapiens has always lived. It’s pretty common for certain unusual landforms to be preserved. Waterfalls, caves, and natural bridges usually get protected, one way or another. There are a few land trusts that specialize in caves, and there could certainly be others that specialize in, say, springs or serpentine soil. But we should recognize that humans have always altered, even damaged, the land they occupy. This includes eskers. Eskers are often associated with swampy or marshy areas, as at Ott, and for as long as humans have lived in the glaciated parts of the world–about 40,000 years for Europe, perhaps 15,000 years in North America–they have probably used eskers, where available, as a dry path. Almost certainly, the local Indians trod the Ott esker, and there’s no reason for us not to do so still. But we ought to tread as lightly as possible, not with bulldozers and asphalt. I expect my ancestors in Europe as well as the Potawatomi here in Michigan walked single file. That’s probably still good enough for us when we’re in a preserve.

Beaver Dam, Ott Preserve. Photo February 2011 by Richard Brewer

Altering our living space is not a uniquely human thing; every organism does it—pigs rooting up spring wildflowers and buffalos enlarging their wallows are just obvious examples. The difference between us and other organisms is that we are, or ought to be, aware of the damage we can do. We can mend our ways rather than wait for destruction and catastrophe to take their toll on us. Instant gratification without considering environmental consequences is behaving like every other member of the animal kingdom. Thought which may lead to prudential restraint is what we do that is human.

The Ott Preserve and Attacks on Perpetuity

Slash in Ott Preserve after timber cut in 1993-4. Photo March 1994 by Richard Brewer

Preserved natural areas are vulnerable. I don’t mean they’re delicate. It’s true that some will need a particular kind of management, such as prescribed fire, and some may not tolerate a lot of human traffic, but good-sized natural areas–a few hundred acres–are often fairly robust. They’re vulnerable not because they’re fragile, but because there are always certain people who look at preserved land and think it’s not utilized. It’s just empty land, a land bank waiting for their higher and better, destructive use.

The vulnerability is complete when the appetite for a quick, cheap, and easy fix is joined with one more factor: The organization charged with defense of the conserved land is not up to the job.

We have seen this vulnerability several times in southwest Michigan. One recent case is the Colony Farm Orchard at Western Michigan University, described in a number of earlier posts at this website. Land bought with tax-payer dollars was given to WMU by the state with the restriction that it be kept as open space for public use. But a little more than 30 years later, in 2009, WMU persuaded the Michigan legislature and governor to strip the restriction from the Orchard. The land is currently open to any kind of development. Though WMU claimed expansion of their BTR park–to create jobs–as their justification, no such restriction remained in the bill signed by then-governor Jennifer Granholm.

Another example is Jean Klock Park on the Lake Michigan shore at Benton Harbor. It’s a particularly sad case. In 1917, John Nellis Klock and his wife Carrie gave the city 90 acres of coastal marsh and sand dunes, including nearly 3000 feet of lake frontage and beach. It was, as far as I can determine, the first Lake Michigan natural land protected for public use.

Given as a memorial to a daughter who died young, the land was meant to be for the benefit of the people of Benton Harbor but especially for the children. The city proved a good steward for nearly 70 years. Then, in 1986, the city tried to add a large part of the park to its Downtown Development Authority. This threat was rebuffed, but another surfaced in 2003 in the form of a proposed luxury housing development. Although this specific proposal also failed, the settlement reached set the stage for a successful attack within two years in the form of the Harbor Shores development which includes a Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course that has subsumed a large area of the park’s best dunes.

The machinations that resulted in the degradation of Jean Klock Park are probably not yet totally revealed, but even so it is difficult to summarize the operation in a few paragraphs. Several people and agencies that might be seen as having protection of the park and its natural features as part of their job or mission, instead acted to undo the protection. Among them were the Benton Harbor city commission, Governor Jennifer Granholm (again), U.S. Representative Fred Upton, Michigan’s Natural Resources Trust Fund board, and the U.S. Park Service. There were, of course, also some conservation heroes fighting the development.

Loss of areas that we have every reason to think of as protected in perpetuity is not restricted to Michigan; attacks are regrettably widespread. A current example is the pristine Izembek National Wildlife Refuge at the end of the Alaska Peninsula in southeastern Alaska. The U.S. Congress provided pork-barrel funding to build a 9-mile road between King Cove and Cold Bay, two villages with a combined population of fewer than 900 people. The road would run through designated wilderness including wetlands that are sites for feeding, nesting, or molting of black brant and Steller’s eider, among other arctic tundra species. Construction is awaiting an environmental impact statement.

The current attempt to put a wide, paved trail through the best parts of the Harvey Ott Preserve in Battle Creek, Michigan, may not be as globally important as a road in a 400,000+ acre refuge containing wetlands of international importance. But otherwise the situation is fairly similar.

The Ott situation is especially unhappy because Ott has been through this before, about 15 years ago. The Calhoun County Commission sold about 300 trees, mostly large oaks, out of the preserve. The catastrophe was not as complete as it could have been, because as the result of heavy citizen opposition, the commission canceled a second clear-cut that would have removed the rest of the upland forest in the preserve.

The 1993-1994 Ott timber sale had no redeeming features. It happened mostly because the Calhoun County Parks Department was broke. On the other hand, a trail for hiking and biking can be a good thing. (Trails and trail conservancies are given a thorough discussion in chapter 13 of Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America.) Certainly the existing foot paths in Ott are, to a point, good things.

One justification I’ve heard for running a trail through Ott is as a connector for the North Country Trail. If a connector is needed, it’s unlikely that a satisfactory route would need to invade the Ott Preserve. I suspect that Ott has been chosen mostly because those pushing the trail see Ott as being unused, empty, not utilized.

I suspect they also see it as free land.

If the best route–avoiding the Ott Preserve except perhaps for a small spur–would involve private land, private land can be acquired by purchase or the right to use the land as a trail can be acquired as an easement.

Sometimes the right thing to do is a little harder than the expedient one.

It’s possible that a new trail for Calhoun County could be a good thing. A new trail through the Ott Preserve wouldn’t be. Ott is utilized. It’s a preserve.

New Attack on the Harvey N. Ott Preserve, Battle Creek, MI

Shrubby cinquefoil, a characteristic fen species. Photo at Vanderbilt Fen October 1988. Copyright Richard Brewer

The Ott Preserve at the east edge of Battle Creek was the subject of an attack several years ago. The 260 acres had been preserved early in the 20th century through joint efforts of local naturalists and John Harvey Kellogg. In 1977, Calhoun County bought the preserve using money from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. Fifteen years later, the 1993 County government, ignorant of what the Ott Preserve was about, agreed to sell 305 large trees, mostly oaks from a southern upland section of the preserve. Battle Creek citizens and conservationists throughout the state protested and the County Commission backed off from a second cut that would have logged the rest of the preserve. There is more about the events of 1993 in Chapter 4 of Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America.

Serious damage had been done, but the oak forests of the upland ridges (eskers in geological terms) were saved and the wetlands that include the unusual type of vegetation referred to as fen were not seriously damaged. Now another 15 years has gone by and a new threat has shown itself. A group has proposed running a wide, paved trail through the preserve. Part of the justification appears to be to provide a link with the North Country trail. Pedestrian trails already exist within the Ott Preserve. Much is still unclear about the current proposal including justification, alternatives, funding for construction, ability to pay for maintenance in the long term, immediate and continuing impact, and acceptability to the citizens of the county and the region.

The following comments on this current threat to the Ott Preserve were prepared by Sophia DiPietro, an advocate for the preserve and member of the Protect Ott Coalition. They were published in slightly different form in the Battle Creek Inquirer Sunday 6 February 2011 with the heading “Ott is natural gem worth preserving.” The Enquirer website includes several useful comments by readers in addition to the article.

Don’t Allow Degradation of the Harvey N. Ott Preserve

By Sophia DiPietro
The nonprofit Calhoun County Trailway Alliance has proposed a nearly $2 million, 14-foot-wide “smooth-surfaced” trail-to-nowhere through the heart of the 100-year-old Ott Biological Preserve, and throughout Calhoun County. The Trailway Alliance says their aim is to “enhance the quality of life and environment for present and future generations.” As an outdoor enthusiast and healthy lifestyle advocate, I am in favor of outdoor recreation; but at the expense of damaging the natural features of Calhoun County’s only preserve? No way!

Ott Biological Preserve is the most biologically diverse and pristine natural area that Calhoun County has. It is a living piece of Michigan’s geologic history. Ott’s unique 10,000 year-old glacially-formed eskers were once the streambeds of ancient rivers. They wind nearly one mile throughout the Preserve. Unlike the existing trail that follows these eskers, the “hard” engineering required to level out inclines, and to cut and dig a “smooth” or paved ten foot-wide trail (with two feet of clearing on each side,) would compromise the esker. In the blink of an eye our rich geologic history will be replaced with the everlasting footprint of heavy machinery. Downslope lies a globally rare prairie fen wetland habitat (fewer than 2000 acres occur in Michigan,) and three spring-fed kettle lakes– former sites of large ice block melts. These sites could receive inputs of sediment via erosion from construction disturbance and from pavement runoff. These vital headwater ecosystems are habitat to state and federally listed threatened plants and animals. They provide us with floodwater control and groundwater supply filtration that enhances our water quality. Ott provides breeding grounds, shelter, and food to mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds. Some may not survive, while adaptable ones may become “nuisances” in adjacent neighborhoods.

Ott’s trails are currently used for hiking, jogging, nature photography, birdwatching, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, quiet reflection and educational studies. Since the first 105 acres were purchased in 1911, the land has been used as an outdoor classroom, especially for advanced college research. The notion that Ott is not used enough is false, and a “preserve” is no place for 10-speed bicycles, skateboards and rollerblades. In fact, any asphalt, gravel, or other “smooth” development of the trails will eliminate cross-country skiing, snow-shoeing and winter hiking in the Preserve, since non-dirt surfaces are not appropriate for these sports. The proposed smooth impermeable surfaces would retain water in puddles, refreeze into ice and create a slip-and-fall danger. This would effectively take the Preserve out of use for the cold months, when many people are even more active in Ott.

Luckily, an alternative route through Ott exists that is more economical, more handicap accessible, and scenic but with fewer negative impacts. Providing an independently conducted environmental evaluation would give this route a green light, the trail would follow an already-cleared Consumers Energy power-line right-of-way along the west boundary of the Preserve, right to East Michigan Avenue. That exit point places you a mere 50 feet from where the Alliance proposes that their trail meet back up with the same exact power lines, right across the street in Kimball Pines! It could incorporate the placement of a currently un-used historic bridge, to cross over a tributary to the Kalamazoo River. The diversity of “edge-loving” species of birds and mammals that inhabit areas between forest and open habitats makes this alternative route rich in wildlife-viewing opportunities. I have bird-watched this route many times, to my heart’s content.

The development of the preserve as currently proposed would have complex and permanent environmental impacts. Much more is involved than just “how wide” the proposed trail development is, or “what surface” is used. Transforming this peaceful nature preserve into an urban park would make Ott into what every other urban park is: paved, loud and with limited nature experience. And let’s face it, in a county that is recovering from one of the worst oil spills in its history, does it really make sense to develop and destroy the one last remaining public wilderness area we have?

The 100-year history of the Ott Biological Preserve rests in the hands of the Calhoun County Commissioners. Make your voice heard at Change.org. But also contact Calhoun County Commissioners directly and attend Commission meetings. To stay informed, join our page at Facebook. Spread the word.

Christmas Bird Counts, Murphysboro to Kalamazoo

Buttonbush swamp in winter, Oshtemo Township. Photo by Richard Brewer

Whatever else Christmas may mean to a birder, it definitely means the Audubon Christmas bird count.

The National Audubon Society sponsors a continent-wide set of local counts to be taken some time around Christmas, specifically on a single day between December 14 and January 5. Local groups of birders count birds in circular areas 15 miles across. What most groups do is divide the circle up into sectors and maybe sub-sectors and assign a party to each. The party may be one person ambling ( or driving) along and censusing birds by himself or herself. Or it may be a small group, but if the group gets above about four, it would be more efficient to break it and the sector up.

A circle of 15-mile diameter doesn’t sound very big, but it is. It amounts to a little more than 175 square miles. A square mile is 640 acres. Except for a few sophisticated urbanites, most of us out here in the part of the US where the grid rules–where the land is laid out in townships, ranges, and sections–most of us have at least a vague idea of what 40 acres looks like. A square mile (640 acres) is one section, which can be divided into quarter sections–each 160 acres–and each quarter-section can be divided into quarters. These are each 40 acres, as in the back forty.

So if a local bird group divides its count circle into 20 slices or chunks, the average size will be between 8 and 9 square miles, or between 5000 and 6000 acres. The average bird club is making a good showing if it has 40 birders out and counting, or in other words, about 2 birders per sector.

The point of all these numbers, if there is one, is that most Christmas bird counts are a bit understaffed.

But that’s not a serious problem. First, the main point of the count is fun, of a sort. It’s fun to get out and brave the elements in the coldest, darkest part of the year. The Christmas count is the birder’s winter solstice festival. And it’s fun to see what birds are around, what birds are braving those conditions along with us. A few bird species have normal body temperatures around the same as humans, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but most of the small birds we count at Christmas have temperatures up around 105-110 degrees. It takes a lot of feeding during the daylight hours, a lot of sunflowers seeds and suet or hibernating insects and fat from a deer carcass, for a chickadee to stay alive for 24 hours in winter.

Christmas Counts do provide data for scientific purposes. They provide a very accurate map of the winter range of the most of the bird species. They provide passable information on abundance of many of the species, expressed as an index value, usually number of birds per party-hour.

But except for a few species, a Christmas count almost never gives us the actual number of birds, Song Sparrows or Black-capped Chickadees or Cedar Waxwings, in our 15-mile circle. On a well-regulated count, it might be possible to arrange things to tally every individual of an uncommon, conspicuous species, especially one of a well-defined habitat. For example if there are only three areas of open water in a count circle and we cover all three, we can probably get a pretty good count for the ducks. A good count for the time when somebody visits the three areas of open water, that is. There’s no guarantee that some ducks from our circle didn’t fly a few miles to a different circle just before we counted.

The first Christmas Count I took was in 1949, when I was a sophomore in high school. Bill Hardy, Kenny Stewart and I took a Murphysboro, Illinois, count on December 27th. Hardy was the instigator. He was the oldest, the best birder, and also more of an organizer than Kenny or me.

Things were more casual then. We just decided to take a count, figured out our circle, took it, typed up the results, and sent them to Audubon Field Notes, which published ours along with the whole batch of counts from around the country. Audubon Field Notes is called American Birds now, and the figures that get sent in on forms go into a database and the published Christmas Count consists mostly of summaries for the different geographic regions. The total number of counts today is well over 2000, mostly in the U.S., but quite a few in Canada, and some in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a few elsewhere.

We took the Murphysboro count a few more times. I can’t remember when we stopped, but eventually Hardy went off to graduate school at Michigan State and a little later I went off to the University of Illinois.

I ought to mention that the Murphysboro count was not the first southern Illinois Christmas bird count. A few years before, William Marberry, a botanist and all-round naturalist on the faculty at Southern Illinois University, had taken a count south of Carbondale and, I think, including Giant City State Park, or part of it. He may have repeated the count another year, but I’d have to get to the library to look at the back issues of Audubon Field Notes to be sure.

I’ve occasionally gone on a couple of counts in a year, but I’ve also missed an occasional year. Ordinarily though, even if I’ll be away from home, I try to get in touch with the organizer of a count near where I’ll be at Christmas time and ask if I can join in. Most groups are happy to have visitors help out. Most of the other places where I’ve helped seem to be in places that are warmer in the winter than Michigan.

Most counts that have been running for a long time have a tradition as to when the count is held. The Kalamazoo count is supposed to be the Saturday after Christmas. When Christmas is on a Saturday, as is the case this year, this means that the count would be held on New Year’s Day. That would seem to be no problem, except that the tradition for the Southern Kalamazoo County Count (SKCC) is that it be held on New Year’s Day.

The SKCC is relatively young, started for the 1975-76 count. It’s odd in that it is a rectangle rather than a circle, hence it doesn’t qualify for the National Audubon database. One advantage of a rectangle is that, here in our gridded landscape, you nearly always know exactly whether a bird is in or out of the count area, depending on which side of the road it’s on. Sometimes you’re not so sure about a bird near the edge of a circular count area. On the other hand, circular count areas are the most compact shape and accordingly have the least amount of edge to worry about.

I understand that in the clash of tradition this year, SKCC won. The Kalamazoo Count is on Sunday, 26 December 2010, rather than on the Saturday after Christmas, 1 January 2011. What would Frank Hinds say, or Theodosia Hadley? Or Charlie Cook, or Helen Burrell, or Bob van Blaricom (Buckeye Bob), or Harold Wiles?

Our Little House in an Unpredictable Habitat

When I taught ecology to biology majors and minors I would occasionally include a question on the final exam something like this: Describe two ways in which the study of ecology could save your life.

I was happy to accept answers at any level of the environment from “If I don’t build my house in chaparral I won’t get burnt up in the next chaparral fire.” to “I’ll cut down on energy usage, hence CO2 emissions, and I and the rest of us won’t get drowned when we’re living in Miami, Charleston, or Wilmington and the sea level rises.”

Some students got it, but a few didn’t. For the latter, perhaps ecology was simply a required course, as remote from real life as a class in theatrical costumes of the 17th century.

Just out is an interesting article by two who get it, Jim Armstrong, a poet, and Kim Chapman, an old friend and former student. Both got a lot of their schooling in Kalamazoo. The article is called What Laura Saw: Making a Little Home on the Extreme Great Plains. The article is about the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder but puts it in an ecological context. Ecology turns out to set the social and economic contexts of the Ingalls’ lives also.

The article appears in the recently published Proceedings of the 21st North American Prairie Conference. The conference was at Winona State University in Minnesota in August 2008.

Western Michigan University was host in 1982 to the Eighth Prairie Conference. Kim Chapman, then a graduate student, served as field trip coordinator, poetry contest chairman, and co-designer of the logo. He was also finishing up his master’s thesis.

What Laura saw around her little house, in Armstrong and Chapman’s words, was “a highly evolved environment, where several thousand years of drought, fire, hail, harsh winters, and intense grazing by ungulates and locusts shaped a responsiveness in plant and animal life that enabled the whole of the environment to persist even as individuals and species disappeared or shifted in abundance and location. That environment was beautiful and hostile by turns and Laura described this in memorable detail.”

The bison and the grasshoppers (the Rocky Mountain locust) were members of this ecosystem. The locust is now extinct and the bison no longer around as a free-roaming species. Still extant because they don’t infringe much on human property rights or economics are most of the bird species whose life histories fit them for flourishing in the years of good rainfall and good growth and pretty much moving out in the droughts. The Yellow-headed Blackbird is an example that I talked about a few months ago.

“The argument threaded through all the books,” Armstrong and Chapman point out, “is that an independent-minded family, pulling together and with a little help from neighbors, could make a living on the Great Plains by their enterprise and hard labor. As the books progress, however, the reader understands that Pa [Charles P. Ingalls] was not able to realize that dream for his family. This tension is what makes the books readable today.”

By 1894, Laura and her husband, Almanzo, had moved to “the well-watered Missouri Ozarks where they lived for the rest of their lives.” And where Laura and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, worked on the Little House books starting in 1930.

The books promote individualism, hard work, and self-sufficiency. These are admirable traits, but were not enough in themselves to bring success in the unpredictable habitat of the Great Plains. Even here in the “well-watered” eastern U.S. and, in fact, in the world as whole, we now live in an environment characterized by unpredictability–largely brought on by our own actions. Other virtues, especially an attention to the whole ecosystem, human, biotic, and abiotic, will have to be added if success is to be ours.

Copies of the Proceedings, which have a lot of other prairie articles besides this one, are available in 2 formats: CD, $ 8.00 per copy or hard copy, $29.50 per copy. The combination CD and hard copy are $35.00. All prices include mailing. Make your check out and send to Bruno Borsari, Ph.D., Department of Biology, 175 West Mark Street, Winona State University, Winona, MN 55987 Phone (507) 457-2822.

Rare Bird in Oshtemo

I became a birder the summer of my freshman year in high school, a bird-watcher a few years later, and an ornithologist a few years after that.

I’d have to find my life list to tell you just when I made my last entry, but I think it was sometime toward the end of my freshman year in college. The summer after that, in 1952, Kenny Stewart and I hitch-hiked to Mexico and saw a good many new birds, quite a few that we could identify and quite a few we couldn’t.

There was no Mexican field guide at the time, and so we depended on George M. Sutton’s new book, Mexican Birds: First Impressions and Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds, and on taking lots of field notes to work with when we got back. Sutton’s book had an appendix that tried to list most of the birds of Mexico; it was helpful, just not helpful enough for Neotropical beginners like Kenny and me.

The first Mexican field guide to appear was Birds of Mexico: A Guide for Field Identification published in 1953– several months after we got back home–by Emmet Reid Blake. Blake was associate curator of birds at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Except for a frontispiece of the Collared Aracari, the book lacked colored illustrations, though about 350 species (or at least their heads) were illustrated with black-and-white drawings. Nevertheless, it was a very useful book and allowed us to identify most of our unknowns. The first Mexican field guide with color illustrations of most species was the Peterson guide by Peterson and Edward L. Chalif. It did not appear until 1973–though it had been promised years before.

In my early days, I enjoyed seeing rare birds, and I still do. I still enjoy birding, and I think this is probably true of most ornithologists. Avian biologists, maybe not so much.

But there are many sorts of rare birds and some are more interesting than others. An ordinary extralimital observation, say some European shorebird or gull that through a series of errors spends a few days on a Michigan beach or a mall parking lot is only mildly interesting; it does not have a lot of biology going for it. Maybe there could be some interest in knowing what physiological aberration caused it to go astray and what the fate of the bird was. A good many of these out-of-place birds are waifs whose life expectancy may be pretty short.

On the other hand, among the shorebirds and gulls, it sometimes happens that a single individual of an out-of-range species turns up at the same place in two or more successive falls, as Philip Chu describes in some of his species accounts in The Birds of Michigan (edited by G. A. McPeek and R. J. Adams, Jr.). The suspicion in such a case is that the same individual bird is making the same mistakes in successive years. That would be interesting. Interesting too is the case (also mentioned by Chu) of one adult Sandwich Tern being seen in June 1986 along Lake Superior in Minnesota, in 1987 at Lake Michigan near Berrien Springs, in Ontario April, May, and June 1988, and in April 1989 at Lake Michigan near Chicago. It’s impossible to know if all the reports were of the same bird, but it’s an intriguing possibility.

Particularly interesting these days would be the first representatives of some southern species to try to nest in Michigan. Someday, as the climate warms, several southern species may become common, but the first recorded nesting pair will be a rarity worth watching for.

Another interesting rarity is the Merlin that nested in Kalamazoo this past summer. Here is a species that seems to be nesting a little farther south than used to be the case, seemingly going against the global warming trend. What’s that about?

The Yellow-headed Blackbird and other Great Plains species that I talked about in an earlier post are also interesting. An occasional individual wanders over to Michigan most summers, but in severe drought years, more come, and some nest.

I got a phone call about a rare bird a few days ago. The caller had seen a remarkable bird in Oshtemo Township, which lies west of the city of Kalamazoo. It was a large bird, mottled reddish with a yellow head and a long tail. The bird was at the edge of a wooded area. I couldn’t think of any local native species or, in fact, any North American species that met those specifications. But I’ve been baffled before when trying to identify a bird based on someone’s description. Because we each have our own frame of reference, a description of what seems like a fabulous species can turn out to be something relatively routine.

Fortunately, the caller had taken photos. Unfortunately, the image of the bird was too small to make out much detail. But it was clearly a reddish bird with a yellow head and a long tail, standing on the ground.

It looked like a pheasant but was not any of the varieties of Ring-necked Pheasant that occur in North America. Of course, Ring-necked Pheasants are not native to North America. In Michigan, they were imported and released many times from the 1880s on by farmers, hunters, sportsmen’s clubs and the Michigan Conservation Department. The species was well established in the state by about 1920. Here in southwest Michigan, it was particularly abundant in the early 1970s but declined sharply after three hard winters late in that decade and has never, or at least not yet, recovered.

This bird was no Ring-necked Pheasant, but it did not take long to identify which pheasant it most likely was–a male Golden Pheasant, Chrysolophus pictus.

Golden Pheasants are native to China, occurring in broad-leaved evergreen forest and bamboo thickets of mountainous regions. The giant panda, in its much reduced current distribution, often occurs in the same habitats as the Golden Pheasant.

The life history of the Golden Pheasant in the wild seems poorly studied. Because it has been widely imported to Europe and the U.S. by game-bird fanciers and aviculturists since the mid 18th century, its reproduction and life in captivity are well known. Releases in some parts of the United Kingdom evidently led to some temporarily self-sustaining populations, but few have persisted.

I haven’t read of any feral populations of Golden Pheasants in the U.S., and I expect that the bird seen in Oshtemo escaped from some local pheasant fancier. Aviculturists have propagated various mutants and hybrids, and the bird in Oshtemo could well have been one of those rather than pure wild-type Chrysolophus pictus.

If I happened to see the Oshtemo Golden Pheasant, I don’t think I’d post it on the Michigan birding list or add it to my life list, if I still kept one. But it would be fun to catch a glimpse of a large red bird with a yellow head the next time I’m driving in the vicinity of Prairie Ridge Elementary School.

The Plenteous Summer

Prairie planting Oshtemo Township August 2010. Photo by Richard Brewer

When I go outside this summer I’m impressed by the amount of greenery. I don’t have data, but it’s the greenest summer–the largest volume of foliage–I remember.

This makes sense. The limiting factors for photosynthesis, Biology 101 tells us, are temperature, light, and carbon dioxide. Translating photosynthesis into plant growth–that is, new biomass–also involves availability of water and soil nutrients, such as nitrogen.

This growing season has been, day after day, one of the most consistently warm years–hot, I’d say–that I remember.

As for sunlight, I doubt that one summer is a lot different from another. Certainly, day length is the same from one year to the next. There may be a few more cloudy hours one year than another, but all in all I suspect that the light this year has been about the same as last year or the one before.

Water, though, I think may have been in better supply than usual. I haven’t tried to check weather station figures, but from my own rain gauge and how often our garden needed water, it seems to me that we’ve had a lot of well-spaced soaking rains.

Nitrogen is sometimes a limiting factor for plants, including several field crops. I don’t know that it was any more or less abundant this year. Nitrogen compounds from agriculture are generally increasing in the environment. For some plants an increase in nitrogen could encourage growth; however, many plants have modest soil nitrogen requirements. Included are many prairie species. For such species, a lot more nitrogen doesn’t increase production.

However, the compound nitrous oxide is increasing in the atmosphere as a result of current agricultural practice. Nitrous oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, so it’s likely that more nitrous oxide is a part of the equation for global climate change in general.

More influential though is the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. As everybody knows, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone steadily up, probably since early in the Industrial Age and certainly since 1958, when the systematic recording of atmospheric carbon dioxide began. Lately, the concentration has been rising about 3% per year. This implies a doubling in about a quarter century, roughly one human generation.

So, maybe high temperatures, lots of rain, and more carbon dioxide than ever made 2010 a banner year. My guess is that the luxuriant growth this year is mostly tied to the warmer summer and the plentiful and effective rainfall. The carbon dioxide level would have only have changed a couple of parts per million from last year.

Poison ivy growing up an oak, Oshtemo Township August 2010. Photo by Richard Brewer

However, increased carbon dioxide is probably the primary agent for a great increase in the growth of some plants in the past decade or more. I’m thinking particularly of the vines, specifically the lianas–vines that can spread across the ground but can also climb trees. Poison ivy, the several species of grapes, and Virginia creeper are native examples of lianas. There are a number of introduced lianas that are invasives in some natural areas. Local examples are Asian bittersweet and European ivy.

A little more than twenty years ago, a friend asked me whether I thought that wild grapes were a serious pest in local forests; specifically, how frequently did they climb into the crown of a tree and kill it by shading its leaves? I had spent a lot of time in beech-maple forests and told him that in my experience such a thing was rare. I went on to say that having a tangle of grapes in the forest canopy had its benefits, among them providing cover for barred and horned owls to hide from crows and blue jays.

No more than five years later my advice would have been different. At least by the mid-1990s, the grapes, Virginia creeper, and poison ivy were creeping up tree trunks in much greater numbers and the trees were suffering. These trends continue.

Lianas are, of course, a prominent life form in the forests of the Tropics, and it’s possible that their success here in recent years is just one more result of global climate change. But temperatures are erratic. The general trend in this part of the world is up, but any given year may be unchanged or even down. Carbon dioxide, by contrast, is a little higher every year. My guess fifteen years ago when I began to notice the increased liana growth was that it was related to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Research in the past few years supports that hypothesis. This link is to a study of poison ivy.

Despite what’s been happening with the lianas, my impression is that most herbs and shrubs within the forest didn’t join in this year’s burst of growth, not the way plants of the edges and the open spaces have. Perhaps this makes sense too. In the forests, the limiting factor for plant growth most of the time is light. Despite our atmosphere’s extra carbon dioxide, despite this year’s good supply of water and the high temperatures, light at ground level within the forest is dim most of the growing season. In the oak woods here, sweet cicely, white avens, tick trefoil didn’t look any more robust than they did last year.

It was just an average year in the woods.

Colony Farm Orchard: Get on the Visitors’ List ASAP

For 33 years, from 1977 to early 2010, the Colony Farm Orchard was protected by a restrictive covenant. By virtue of the terms of the gift to Western Michigan University by the state of Michigan, this land was to be kept as open space for public use.

Now, as can be seen, WMU is telling us the land is restricted again in a different way.

The Colony Farm Orchard's new signs. Photo by Richard Brewer

On 17 July 2010, David Nesius, a conservationist interested in retaining the Colony Farm Orchard as a natural area, noticed activity at the Orchard. Workmen were installing new signs that read Western Michigan University Property RESTRICTED ACCESS By Permission Only.

He spread the word via email about this new restriction on the public’s access to the land.

I was struck by the date on which the restricted access signs were posted. On 16 July 2009, exactly one year ago, Representative Robert Jones introduced House Bill 5207. This was the bill designed to strip the protective covenant from the Orchard land. The timing of the legislation, some of us suspected, was designed to hide the attack on the Orchard as long as possible, occurring as it did when most students were away, many faculty were in libraries or at field sites scattered around the world, and many townspeople were on vacation.

Was the timing of the new signs a re-run of a successful gambit? Maybe. I didn’t learn they’d gone up until I got back from a visit out East, so it kept me in the dark for a week.

On the other hand, the legislators who collaborated in dismantling the conservation covenant on the Orchard might wish that the signs had been delayed until after the August primaries or even the general elections in November. Such a threatening display from WMU may bring back bad memories for some voters.

The Wednesday 21 July Kalamazoo Gazette carried an article by Paula Davis about the new signs. She quoted WMU Associate Vice President for Community Outreach, Bob Miller, as saying that a concern for public safety prompted their installation. “We just want to know who is going to be there and what their plans are. We’re not saying, ‘No Trespassing.’ We’re not saying, ‘Keep out’.”

When asked by reporter Davis how to get permission to be on the property, Miller said that people could “call the university and the university will direct them to the correct office.” The Gazette article concluded with the university switchboard number.

Ladislav R. Hanka, local artist and conservationist, pursued the matter, finally talking with Donna Marks, executive assistant in the office of the Vice President for Advancement and Legislative Affairs. After some discussion, it appeared that an email to Ms Marks (Donna.Marks@wmich.edu) containing one’s name, interest in the Orchard, what he or she would be doing there, when or how often visits might be, and who one’s companions might be would suffice. Probably Ms Marks could provide further information if desired (387-2072).

Obtaining permission to visit the Orchard is highly desirable. Whatever the signs were meant to accomplish, they should not prevent anyone from continuing (or beginning) their bird watching, asparagus picking, snow shoeing, bur oak hugging, plein air painting, or any other other kind of nature, conservation, or environmental activity.

It’s well to remember that the Orchard land is still available for permanent protection. Even though the open space/public use covenant has been removed, WMU is not compelled to expand the BTR park onto this land. It’s a fact that the original language of HB 5207 called for a new restriction that WMU would use the land for BTR Park expansion. But after that language served its purpose as a more-or-less plausible justification for dumping the conservation covenant, the language was dropped, even before the bill left Representative Jones’s House Commerce Committee.

The upshot is that the WMU administration and board have the power to grant continued life to the Orchard, and they will bear the responsibility for any death sentence.

In the meantime, the Orchard land lives and participates in the ecological functioning of Asylum Lake Preserve.