HomeMy WebLinkAboutSD-23-07 - Supplemental - 0600 Spear Street (35)Page 16 • May 18, 2023 • The Other Paper
While planting the vege-table garden last May, I heard a repeated bird song emanat-ing from the adjacent raspberry patch: “Pleased, pleased, pleased to meetcha.” Finally, the small songster perched near the tip of a raspberry cane, its tail cocked. The bird’s yellow crown, black mask, olive back with black streaks, and white breast with rusty side patches were clearly visible — the striking markings of a male chestnut-sided warbler. Breeding females are similarly colored but lack the black eye mask.Chestnut-sided warblers migrate north each spring and nest throughout the Northeast, north to Atlantic Canada, and west across the Great Lakes states and south-ern Canada to North Dakota and Saskatchewan. Their breeding range extends south in the Appala-chians as far as Georgia. Unlike many warblers, which prefer mature forests, chestnut-sid-ed warblers thrive in early-suc-cessional habitat in rural areas — overgrown fields, regenerating deciduous forests and woodland edges. They benefit from forestry practices that encourage diverse vegetation and shrub growth. The song of the chestnut-sided warbler is more complex than that of most warblers. While there are two basic song patterns, there are several different variations within each category. The male warbler in my raspberry patch was singing to attract a female. Once nesting begins, males do not sing as often and switch from the “meetcha”
song to a whistled, unaccented song used to defend territory and in aggressive encounters with other males.In “The Singing Life of Birds,” author and ornithologist Donald Kroodsma describes listening to a dawn chorus of chestnut-sided warblers at a power line cut in a Berkshires woodland. Although the birds were all singing the “meetcha” song, he was able to differentiate individual males by their songs and to draw a rough map of their territories. His audi-tory observations were confirmed by the different patterns on sono-grams made from his sound recordings. Kroodsma described this early morning singing as a massive competition for females among neighboring males. In addition to his song, a male chestnut-sided warbler courts a potential mate by spreading his tail and wings and raising, lower-ing and vibrating his crown and flight feathers. He then guards the female as she builds the nest, and he will chase other males that enter their territory. This is with good reason; DNA analysis has shown that about half the young of a nest are typically fathered by other males, often neighbors. The female builds the nest between 1 and 6 feet from the ground in a crotch of a small tree or shrub such as blackberry or alder. She constructs the nest from strips of cedar bark, grapevine, or other plant fibers and lines the cup with fine grasses and hair. She lays three to five cream or greenish-white eggs speckled with brown or purple and incubates them for 11 to 12 days. The nest-lings hatch sparsely covered with
down and helpless. Both parents feed the young meals of regur-gitated insects and caterpillars many times each day. The babies develop rapidly. When a little older, the parents offer their young small insects. Ten to 12 days after hatching, the nestlings are ready to embark on their first flight. The parents continue to feed the fledg-lings until they are a month old. Ninety percent of the chest-nut-sided warbler’s diet year-round is insects, caterpillars, fly larvae, and spiders, with seeds and fruit comprising the remaining portion. In fall, chestnut-sided warblers migrate by night to the second-growth forests, thickets, and shade-grown coffee plantations of
Central America, where they can continue to find insect prey, some-times joining mixed-species flocks of resident birds. As farm fields in the Northeast and beyond were abandoned and reverted to second-growth wood-land during the early 20th century, the chestnut-sided warbler popula-tion grew. The species is now one of our most common warblers. Still, following the trend for most songbird species, this population has declined in recent decades — by 45 percent between 1966 and 2015, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. In addition to the usual stressors of habitat loss, building strikes during migration, pesticide use
and climate change, this warbler has likely been affected by the maturation of northeastern forests. In our many young forests, the distinctive song of the chest-nut-sided warbler prevails. If you follow the song and watch closely, you may catch a glimpse of this colorful little bird.
Susan Shea is a natural-ist, writer, and conservationist based in Vermont. Illustration by Adelaide Murphy Tyrol. The Outside Story is assigned and edited by Northern Woodlands magazine and sponsored by the Wellborn Ecology Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foun-dation, nhcf.org.
things like dead wood, canopy gaps, trees of different sizes and ages and old trees, each of which provides unique habitats and properties. Nearly all of Vermont’s forests are young, many having regrown from pastures within the last 60 to 100 years. Most are missing these attri-butes and developing them natural-ly may take centuries. In a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis, we need forests with these characteris-tics now. We cannot afford to wait. To this end, forest management can be a vital tool, helping create many of the attributes of old growth in just decades. We also need to acknowledge that our forests face an unprecedented array of threats and stressors and are moving into an uncertain future. As a result, many of our forests may never become old growth on
their own. As they navigate climate change, non-native invasive plants, pests and pathogens, forest frag-mentation, deforestation, deer over-abundance and more, inaction may be an expression of negligence. If we hope to protect forests’ function, their biodiversity and their ecology, we will need to manage them. Another topic which often lacks nuance is forest carbon. While, in theory, unmanaged forests store more carbon than managed forests, a forest’s ability to sequester and store carbon in the long-term is a function of its holistic health, its resilience and its adaptability. What we need is resilient carbon: carbon that is stored in diverse, multi-gen-erational, healthy forests. Managing forests, even when it causes some carbon to be released in the short-term, can help forests
respond to legacies, threats and stressors, build resilience and adapt to climate change, thus safeguard-ing their ability to store carbon in the future. What does it mean to love a forest? Celebrating nuance means having the courage to wade in uncertain waters, to recognize that what forests require from us in this moment is often complex and unintuitive, challenging and strange. Forests, and what it means to take care of them, will never be as simple as a bumper sticker, but that’s what makes them beautiful.
Ethan Tapper is the Chittenden County Forester for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. See what he’s been up to at linktr.ee/chittendencountyfor-ester.
INTO THE WOODScontinued from page 15
‘Pleased to meetcha,’
chestnut-sided warbler
The Outside Story
Susan Shea
ILLUSTRATION BY ADELAIDE MURPHY TYROL
PUBLIC HEARING SOUTH BURLINGTON DEVELOPMENT REVIEW BOARD
The South Burlington Development Review Board will hold a public hearing in the
South Burlington City Hall auditorium, 180 Market Street, South Burlington, Vermont, or online or by phone, on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 at 7:00 P.M. to consider the following:
Final plat application #SD-23-07 of 600 Spear FJT, LLC for a planned unit
development on an existing 8.66 acre lot developed with 7,000 sf storage building and single family home. The planned unit development consists
of one 6.10 acre lot containing 32 dwelling units in four-family buildings, a 1.80 acre lot containing the storage building and existing single family home proposed to be converted to a duplex, and a third lot containing
proposed city streets, 600 Spear Street.
Board members will be participating in person. Applicants and members of the public may participate in person or remotely either by interactive online meeting or
by telephone:
Interactive Online Meeting (audio & video): us06web.zoom.us/j/86347877699
By Telephone (audio only): (646) 931-3860, Meeting ID: 863 4787 7699
A copy of the application is available for public inspection by emailing Marla Keene, Development Review Planner, mkeene@southburlingtonvt.gov.
May 18, 2023