A new Symbol of Vernon the Florida Alligator

The Hermit Thrush has been an official symbol of Vermont since 1941 when naturalists prevailed over legislators who were divided between the crow and blue jay. Naturalists versus politicians, now there is an argument that we can all relate to during election season. While I like the intelligent glossy black crow and alarmist blue jay, the hermit thrush with its strong defense of "home" seems to have been a fine choice for these Green Mountains. Stable in population, these seasonal birds adapt well to a variety of forested lands and woodland edges, nesting low to the ground near sources of water. All of this seems promising for a novice like myself to cross paths with Hermit Thrush; and yet this is the first one that I have seen up close in my many in years of hiking the woods and swamps of Vernon.

Imagine my pause as I stepped onto our deck and spied the brown bird lying beneath our window. Perhaps a Walmart sparrow (European House sparrow) should have fist come to mind; but I wondered if I was looking at brown oak leaves blown over from Jim's collection. I suppose it must have been denial at first glance. What after all, are the chances that such a bird would still be hanging around in Vernon on Halloween day, even if it is just shy of eighty degrees out? 

I can't be sure of why this little bird died; and while I do have my suspicions, I think its important to note that: in addition to natural causes like predation and disease,  building collisions kill more than a billion birds in the U.S. each year.-American Bird Conservancy and outdoor cats kill around 2.4 billion birds- Cats indoors. Habitat loss, climate change, human wildlife conflict and environmental toxins are also contributors to bird mortality. 

Survival by Degrees is an interactive publication by the Audubon Society where readers can explore how climate change will affect the vulnerability of  birds by state as well as Mexico and Canada. This article lists Vermont as having 42 highly vulnerable species, 52 moderately vulnerable, 29 with low vulnerability and 45 stable species. Select your favorite bird and the site takes you to specific information on it. While I should feel a certain measure of comfort that the scrappy adaptive Hermit thrush rates in the least concern category, it doesn't escape my attention that he was on the verge of overstaying his seasonal residency while Vernon achieved record temperatures for October.  

 

A neighbor stopped to chat with me on my walk this afternoon and while we caught up, Esther kept nosing at her hand which held another adaptive species and our state flower, the VT red clover. Peak blooming in VT is in May and June with late September being on the outer edge of its blooming season.

Lorien's find got me to thinking about the purple lilac that Wayne's grandmother divided from her own heritage bush in 1991. We planted it at our first home in Hinsdale and then brought a piece of it to Vernon when we moved here. This spring it bloomed beautifully before losing all of its leaves by August. In late September its leaves started to bud out again. In October, we have had frosts, our first snow flurries, temperatures in the upper 70s and a blooming lilac. 

The trees are mostly bare, with the exception of a sugar maple out back. Red fruit adorns our viburnums, hollies and crabapple; but our hollies are also sporadically blooming along with blackberries, rudbeckia and sedum This just seems odd, but its not the first time in recent years that the seasons seem a bit catawampus.

Unlike more generalist species such as the hermit thrush and red clover, our state tree the sugar maple is a specialist . With Vernon being the south eastern most town in Vermont and "Vermont being among the fastest warming states" and with syrup production being frost driven, Vernon's maple syrup revenue is in jeopardy. Audubon Vermont has published a comprehensive easy to understand explanation of the impact of Climate Change on maples and the maple syrup industry The End Of Maple? 

November 1st with temperatures in the 70s

Today as Wayne and I were traveling through Westminster, we decided to visit the wetlands behind Allen Brothers. Typically when we stop at Allen Brothers, it is to browse their nursery stock searching for bargains on native plants; but the flowers, shrubs and trees are long since depleted in September. 

 Here in the pond on the very outside of their traditional start of brumation, we found another Vermont symbol, the Painted turtle. If turtles basking on logs in November isn't weird enough, a large frog hopped across the dirt road traveling between ponds while a dragonfly rested on my arm. 

In 2019, Iowa State University published research by Biologist Nicole Valenzuela. The article, Climate change could devastate painted Turtles,  notes that,  "Painted turtles undergo temperature -dependent sex determination while developing inside the egg. Eggs exposed to warmer temperatures tend to produce females, while cooler temperatures tend to produce males.

The publication further explains that with wider temperature swings, turtles and other amphibians may experience population collapse due to unbalanced female to male ratios.

November 2nd, with high temperatures in the 50 and lows in the 20s

In addition to my regular Vernon Conservation Commission meetings, I have been attending a lot of other meetings: CT River Conservancy meetings on dam relicensing, Vernon Hazard Mitigation planning, Vermont Environmental law implementation planning for Act 59, Basin 12 / Deerfield Watershed clean water planning, and most recently Reconnecting the Green Mountains: A multi-pronged approach for enabling wildlife movement hosted by VT Conservation Planner Jens Hilke and Biologist for the Vermont Agency of Transportation Jessie Johnson.

With each meeting I attended, the notion kept coming back to me that each of these projects are seemingly operating in isolation  and yet they were assuredly interconnected, the same in a sense as gazing at a brown object on my deck, my brain trying to make sense of it, the mystery of what I am looking at, what brings it to my backyard, how it fits into what I experience and know and then contemplating how it is I was going to interact with it. Is it any wonder I don't seep soundly at night?

I'm not super human or anything, just an overly curious well meaning volunteer who drifts off at meetings like the rest of you. My notes from Hilke and Johnson's meeting reads something like this: connected, connectivity, Bio Finder, movement west to east & south to north, connectivity scale, wildlife movement, climate change, NE pinch point, barrier effect, gene flow restriction, NRI, expand to connect, land use planning, transportation component...

As you can see, I take very detailed self explanatory notes; but my big takeaway is the moving map of points of light showing wildlife migration as they sweep across North America in a wide swath from west and south. These points of light and bands are growing more narrow and become more concentrated as they squeeze through NE. Vermont funnels migratory animals up into Canada where they are greeted with predominantly agricultural treeless lands. 

A fisherman fishes for alligator at Lily pond in Vernon on a warm day in November.

And here my friends is the other shoe you have been so patiently waiting to hear drop.  Climate change with it's rising temperatures is causing wildlife's traditional ranges to expand northerly at a rate of one mile per year. This means that long time Vernon Vermonters who traditionally scorn everything Massachusetts, are already living in a Massachusetts climate. Invasive species that out compete and damage our native wildlife are surviving our warmer winters and our  native wildlife vulnerable to climate change must move northerly if they are going to survive. In their way are, fragmented wetlands, fragmented forestlands, man's infrastructure, ever decreasing recourses and dwindling genetic diversity.  

I think my mother summed it up best when she asked me, "How are alligators going to get to Vermont?" -Norma Manning 

Recovery, Esther and Rambling Onward

 First I should acknowledge that I owe my readers an apology for my absence from this forum. I have been recovering from an injury for some time which has kept me out of the very woods of which I am so terribly fond.  Not many weeks ago I came to the conclusion that my self prescribed cane, while keeping me upright, wasn't assisting me whatsoever in my recovery. So if you by chance find me clinging to an oak on the trail or perhaps in the prone position along one of our lovely roadways, do stop and inquire as to what I am up to. 

As those of you within shouting (or baying) distance of our home have certainly become aware, the neighborhood and indeed beyond has fallen into more peaceful times. Wayne and I lost our Coonhound hiking companion Luna who has been laid to rest among my favorite flowers. I still at times tell Luna to get out of my daylilies in the same aggravated voice, though I know that in them she must remain.  Luna along with her much smaller friend Ginny were together by our side for many a wild adventure throughout the hills of Vernon and are featured in many of our past Nature Finds posts. Happy trails my sweet girl.

"I'm going out to clean the pasture spring:

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);

I sha' n't be gone long.- You come too."

Robert Frost; The Pasture

Because there are many more adventures ahead, I would like to introduce to my readers our newest hiking partner in training - Esther.

Esther is our southern bell from Georgia who came to us by way of Next Stop Forever Inc. Wayne and I together have loved five pups before adopting Esther (Luna came from MHS).  Over our dog loving years, Wayne and I have come to the conclusion that mutts and previously owned dogs are as easily loved as purebreds. Esther is nearly a year old and is a mix of: Poodle, Golden Retriever, Labrador Retriever, Pit Bull, Rottweiler, Staffordshire Terrier, Samoyed and Chihuahua. We know this because Wayne insisted that she was schnauzer while I insisted on poodle and I rarely back down from a bet.    

Georgia being included with the list of states impacted by the disaster Hurricane Helene and being Esther's former home state,  I request that you keep the people, wildlife and pets of those states now in recovery among your intentions. I have lived in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, they are beautiful places with good humans. -Norma Manning 

2024 The Year of Blackberries

 In 2023 I discovered quite unexpectedly, that I had morphed into a childhood memory that every adult seems to have of a neighborhood curmudgeon. One minute I was seeding and tending to wild flowers for the neighborhood's inhabitants to enjoy and the next, I was admonishing a family for gathering them in. I never wanted to be that person, my Mrs... what was her name again? The one who would spray us with her garden hose while warning our parents "would be awfully upset that we had gotten so very wet." Ahh but didn't we tease her just a bit with a game of we dare you to? 

As I grow older, these memories of my five year old self, tug at my sleeve like wild blackberries growing along the edges of farm fields. Isn't it odd I wonder, now just shy of my 60th birthday, how we forget the importance of choosing blackberries over roses? 

I hadn't always thought about blackberries with their snags and long scratches. It was Wayne upon moving to our first home in Hinsdale, who decided that we should allow for a patch of his childhood memories with his grandmother to remain in a what had seemingly been an acre of hopeless bramble. I grew to love that patch with its fragrant white flowers, even as it reached out to snatch at my hair when I drove the lawnmower past. I hadn't known it yet, but allowing for and providing for something to remain is the taproot of  conservation. 

Yes, where were we now? Curmudgeon, that's right. It was after I was not so neighborly and Wayne had given me a fair amount of space, that Wayne reminded me of a time when we were dating that he had stopped by the side of the road between BF and Westminster to pick me a bouquet of wildflowers. Why hadn't the farmer been aggravated by my picking his blackberries?  Hadn't the farmer made a plan for them? Why did our neighbor spray us for walking on her lawn? The very next time I ran into those children, we all apologized and I confessed my embarrassment at my behavior.

I rediscovered this Autumn that pollinators aren't the only ones that benefit from the wild blackberry patch that we maintain on our acre here in Vernon. I always tell Wayne to eat the berries along the edges but leave the ones in the middle for the birds. Wayne's favorite flavor is blackberry ice-cream so this is no small ask. I guess what I am saying here is this, we maintain our blackberry patch with intention. None the less, I was surprised one evening when I walked right up on an unconcerned porcupine slowly pulling down canes in order to munch on blackberry leaves. Later while reviewing my game camera images, I found a pair of deer dining on blackberry leaves. I even felt a sense of blessing to find a picture of a deer bedding down next to that very patch. 

I was super excited to share this find with Seth who spends a great deal of time scouting for wildlife here in Vernon. Seth's response, "I'm not surprised." That's okay Seth, your day will come.

I wish for Vernon in the new year and into all the years to come, a year of blackberries...No not quite, my resolution goes something like this: Only a few short weeks after my curmudgeon mistake, another group of almost teenage girls came by and greeted me as I was pruning back the very same wildflowers. I offered to let them cut their own bouquets from anywhere in my yard and handed over my pruners. When one of the girls came to return the pruners, they expressed to me a thank you and let me know that they were going to "place them on my grandmother's"...that's when her words failed her. I offered her the words she was was trying to find, "final resting place." She nodded and thanked me again. And so my dear Vernon, my resolution is to help replenish this town in such a way that it is filled with wild blackberries. -Norma Manning