Tom Wessels - New Englands Roadside Ecology: Explore 30 of the Regions Unique Natural Areas

Paper birch growing on the fringe of the Great Meadow, Acadia National Park, Maine.

New Englands Roadside Ecology

Explore 30 of the Regions Unique Natural Areas

Thomas Wessels

To Marcia, my constant
companion for so many
explorations over the past
53 years.

This is a book of trail explorations that begin at a roadside stop, then take you into extraordinary natural places. My focus is on unique, interesting, beautiful ecological communities that most people might miss just walking along a trail.

There are so many fascinating and accessible ecosystems in New England! This book will lead you to and through unusual forestssuch as old-growth stands and one thicket containing the tallest trees in the Northeastas well as exquisite bogs, swamps, alpine tundra, and dunes. Each community is interpreted and its unique features along the trail are called to your attention. Photographs are incorporated to help people find noteworthy features.

All sites chosen for this book have well-developed trails or boardwalks that are open to the public. Trail lengths for the 30 sites vary from .5 to 4 miles, although most are between 1 and 2 miles. The majority of routes are of gentle to moderate difficulty, to accommodate a wide range of visitors. At the beginning of each chapter, you will find a short headnote about the site, its general location, and the difficulty and length of the hike. Specific locations, maps, directions, and additional information about the sites are easily found in a simple online search.

To help you learn the stories behind what you see on these hikes, there is a chapter following this introduction called Features Focus: Explanations of Common Natural Characteristics. The entries in that chapter explain interesting features and conditions that occur frequently in our region and how to interpret them. I refer to this as reading the landscape. Its what I taught to graduate students, and Ive been interpreting our northeastern landscapes for many years. I encourage you to read these explanations before you visit any area, because they contain significant facts about the organisms in our natural placesevidence to interpret the natural history of our regionand also because the features they describe are found in many of the explorations included here. At the beginning of each chapter thereafter, look for Features Focus in the heading, which will list the noteworthy aspects of the site that are covered in more detail in this special chapter, as well as corresponding page numbers.

In writing this book, I had to grapple with the reality that it could boost visitation rates to these areas, possibly increasing the adverse impacts of foot traffic. It is a risk. But I decided that helping people explore these extraordinary spots might help them forge stronger bonds with the natural world, and develop a greater level of respect and stewardshipand those potential benefits outweighed the risks. But I pledged to help mitigate any impacts by stressing good hiker etiquette. So I implore you to help protect these special places by staying on designated trails. Many of the areas are quite fragile and off-trail traipsing will quickly degrade them. Recently I did a site visit at Orono Bogone of the sites shared in this book. It has a terrific boardwalk and yet I was disheartened to see that visitors had trampled the vegetation within 2 feet of the walkway. My guess is that they wanted to get closer to flowering plants to take photographs. Sadly (and ironically), if the visitors had just walked a bit farther down the boardwalk, the flowers they were seeking were growing right next to it.

I find that children develop hiker etiquette far quicker than adults. Granite outcrops are ecosystems to which I am very drawn, but they have fragile crevice and depression communities. When I tell children to only step on the granite and nowhere else, they instantly get it. Their parents, however, often have to be reminded. Most people have become so used to hiking on trails that they dont think about where they should place their feet, even when this awareness could protect fragile plants along a trail. So: if you have trouble remembering to stay on a trail and off its bordering vegetation, consider taking a child with you. Teach them good trail etiquette, and they will not let you forget it.

This chapter offers deeper explanations and additional information on common aspects of the natural areas you will find in this book and throughout New England. The features here include the good, the bad, and the ugly: the amazing systems and interrelationships that organisms form to survive; explanations of how some life forms can have detrimental effects on other life forms in the quest to survive; and details of how even when life forms dont survive, life emerges from death in new and interesting ways. These are the clues to what has happened and continues to happen in our regional ecosystems.

As you browse the hikes and explorations in this book, look for Features Focus in the chapter heading, which will list the noteworthy aspects of the site that are covered in more detail here.

Tree wounds known as basal fire scars can be seen on many trees in natural areas of our region. Such a scar occurs at the base of a large trunk and is evidence that the tree survived a burn. These were spots where piles of leaves, sticks, branches, and other material had accumulated, providing fuel that burned long enough to kill the cambial tissue under the bark of the tree. The fire didnt burn through the bark, but a few years after the cambial tissue died, the bark fell away from the trunk and created the scar.

An uphill basal scar occurs when trees are growing on a slope. As forest debris moves downhill, tree trunks stand in the way of this flow. This material piles up on the uphill side of an obstructing trunk, while the trees downhill side remains clear. If a fire is sparked and burns upslope, it runs right past the clear downhill side of a tree, but when it hits the combustible pocket on the uphill side, it burns there far longer. As with any basal scar, the heat then kills the cambial tissue beneath the bark and a scar eventually forms on the trees uphill side. Any slope with a number of trees that have scars like this on their uphill side has likely been burned in the past.

An example of a basal scar on a northern white cedar tree.

This disease is the result of an exotic scale insect that came to the New World on a load of European beech logs shipped to Nova Scotia in the late 1800s. The scale insect resides on the bark and feeds on the sap of beech trees, covering itself in a white, waxy coating to protect it from desiccation. It appears as a little white dot on the bark of beech trees. Eventually, as the number of scales on a tree increases, they compromise the trees bark, allowing Neonectria fungi to invade. These fungi eventually weaken the trunk of a beech to the point where it will just break off, in what is called beech snap, killing the aboveground portion of the tree, but not its root system. Because beech is our only native interior forest tree that root-sprouts, as the trunk of the tree dies, it is replaced by root sprouts that also will eventually succumb to the disease. After a number of outbreaks, the beech trees in a stand become replaced by a dense understory of root sprouts. These form what is known as a beech hell. Historically, beech trees were the most common representatives of northern hardwood old-growth stands, but this disease has dramatically changed the composition of this type of old growth.