Alan Gregory’s Conservation News

I wrote this feature article for the Hazleton, Pa., nwspaper earlier this decade. This bird was an incredible sight as it prerched atop a building just three or so miles — and uphill — from here.

By ALAN GREGORY

The Standard-Speaker

USA - Jason Kipp was among the very first people to see the great white visitor from the far north. But by the end of the workday, he wasn’t alone. Kipp first saw the snowy owl when he showed up for work at the Athena Building in Hazle Township Tuesday morning.

By mid-afternoon, the nearly all-white owl with a wingspan of about 55 inches, still sat - contently in human terms - atop a decorative chimney on a corner of the building just off Airport Road near Laurel Mall.

“That is amazing,” Kipp, who works for an insurance company, said as he watched the bird as it, in turn, watched a small single-engine aircraft fly overhead.

“Athena is the goddess of wisdom and the symbol is an owl,” said Dr. Louisa Voutsinas, whose medical offices are inside the same building.

Voutsinas had already seen the bird - more than a few times, probably - by the time she took another look just after 2 p.m.

“Oh yeah,” another person said as he hoisted binoculars to get a close-up look.

“It’s beautiful . . . I think it’s beautiful,” yet another viewer said.

The snowy owl’s presence was also noted by a flock of American crows, which harassed the perched owl on several occasions during the day.

The appearance of a snowy owl - anywhere - can become the stuff of bird-watching legend.

When a snowy showed up near Brodheadsville in Monroe County during the winter of 2003-2004, word of the bird’s presence spread fast - fed by birding hotlines and e-mail lists.

And by the time spring rolled around, hundreds of birders from across the state and region had driven to Brodheadsville to get a glimpse of the bird - through cameras, spotting scopes and binoculars.

A photograph of that bird eventually was published in “Pennsylvania Birds,” the official birding journal of the state.

“Looks like a first-year bird or possibly an adult female,” said Dr. Keith Bildstein, a birds of prey scientist at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary near Kempton, Berks County.

“But not an adult male,” he said after viewing a photograph of the Hazleton-area visitor.

Fully-grown adult male snowy owls have all-white plumage. The bird that showed up in Hazle Tuesday has dark or black spots, or barring, across its back, belly and chest.

“In most years, young birds are more likely to irrupt (south from the Arctic) than are older birds,” Bildstein said.

In most winters, only a handful of snowy owls show up in Pennsylvania.

The large day-hunting owl has a rounded head without the “ear” feathers of more familiar owls like the great horned.

Its yellow eyes are distinctive and immature birds - such as the one that’s visiting the Hazleton area - are “boldly barred with black,” notes a Web page of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.

The snowy owl, unlike most other owls, is diurnal or active during the day.

And “snowies” are found only in the Arctic region during the summer, or breeding season.

During that time, they’re most commonly seen sitting very still on the tundra.

But in late fall and early winter, when food supplies sometimes fall off, some snowy owls - usually the young - head south in search of food.

While a snowy owl that shows up in Pennsylvania or elsewhere in the United States presents a great birding opportunity, its presence here is indicative of a hungry animal, Bildstein said.

“They’re great birding opportunities, of course,” he noted.

In some years, large numbers move south in search of food - their principal northern prey, the lemming, having fallen off in abundance.

Ornithologists call that southerly movement an “irruption.”

When a snowy owl arrives in Pennsylvania, it’s “using our habitat as a last-ditch attempt to survive the winter . . . The birds that we wind up seeing (here) are really grasping at habitat straws,” Bildstein said.

“This is not where they want to be. And I would want to caution bird-watchers not to move the bird around. We really need to be careful. They’re not in great shape when they get here.”

Autumn Pfeiffer of Hobbie tried to view the visiting owl just before dusk Tuesday, but without luck. It had apparently moved to a more open-field area, perhaps near the airport, where mice might be more plentiful.

Large numbers of snowy owls moving south into the Northeast is the exception. But almost every year, a few of the Arctic owls seem to show up in Pennsylvania, New York and New England.

The snowy owl is considered the heaviest of all North American owls, and adults must capture and eat the equivalent of 7 to 12 mice per day, or as many as 350 a month, to meet their food requirement.

In winter months, snowy owls spend much of their time conserving energy by perching on fenceposts, rooftops, utility poles or other sites that offer unrestricted views.

“In winter, the snowy owl visits many parts of southern Canada, providing most Canadians with the opportunity to observe one of the most striking and distinctive of the world’s 146 species of owls,” notes a Canadian Wildlife Service Web site.

On the Net:

Canadian Wildlife Service:

http://www.ffdp.ca/hww2.asp?cid=7&id=76

Cornell University Lab of Ornithology:

http://birds.cornell.edu/crows/snowy.htm

A white-crowned sparrow visted the front porch feeder this morning. It’s a beautiful songbird with a distinctive white patch over the eyes, not extending below the bill as in the white-throated sparrow. So, that was the grand sighting for this morning. Now the birds have all flown off as the lawn-mowing industry has arrived. There’s a weed-wacker, a walk-behind mower and a riding “gang” mower toiling across the street. This is crazy. A mindless consumption of gasoline, oil and electricity just to have the all-American lawn.

I wrote this letter to the editor (of the Hazleton, Pa., daily newspaper and submitted same yesterday. There is no end apparently to the list of boondoggle projects the loclal industrial widgets keep coming up with (industrial “parks”, bidness campuses, roads, anthracite coal mining stripping pits, rock quarries, subdivisions of McMansions, etc.) 

Dear Editor:

Folks will lose plenty if this “cargo” airport is built and goes into operation. And our state’s fish and wildlife heritage also will lose – a lot.

I lived and worked within a good walk or so of heavy-duty asphalt/concrete runways at Air Force bases in South Korea, New York state, Georgia and Oklahoma and completed temporary duty assignments at bases in Iceland, Japan , Saudi Arabia and Honduras. I recall more than a few tales of sleepless nights – nights filled with fighter jets and bombers taking off in the pre-dawn darkness and transport craft like C-130s, C-141s and C-5s rumbling in line for takeoff at the same hour.

But aircraft are only part of the picture we should consider before allowing a “new” airport to drastically alter our way of life. Such operational ports also require jet and aviation fuel depots (petroleum-based fuels,) which, as we all should know by now, already cost a helluva lot and are going to become scarcer as the days go by. Then there’s the truck traffic. I get enough of this just listening to the pre-sunrise din of Route 93 and Interstates 80 and 81.

Progressive wildlife biologists are telling us that roads and other human artifacts, like parking lots, are to blame for population declines in species after species of wild creatures. And roads also serve as conduits for the poaching crowd. We can no longer take nature’s persistence for survival as a given. Consider how much of the native countryside we have already taken for strictly human uses like transportation, shopping and housing. There are only tiny undisturbed wildlife habitats left across our region. Even forested ridge top forests around here seem doomed to disappear. Conservation biologists have found that: The number of plant and animal species living in an area depends on the size of that area and its connectivity to other natural country sides. The landscape of the United States is crisscrossed today with more than 4 million miles of paved roads.  Yet walking as a way of getting from point A to B is lost amid the clamor for cheaper gasoline.

I’ve not heard a peep from any major cargo-oriented corporation that thinks it would somehow benefit financially from a cargo airport near Hazleton. And even if there are millions of dollars out there to be spent on such infrastructure, it would make a lot more sense to invest them in making our municipalities more walking and bicycling friendly than they are today.

A new cargo airport? What’s the matter with Hazleton’s present airport? And I’ve not heard a clamor to make the Avoca airstrip bigger than it is.

Alan C. Gregory

Lieutenant Colonel, Retired, U.S. Air Force Reserve

PO Box 571, Conyngham, PA

Alan Gregory is a writer, specializing in natural resource and conservation policies and politics. He’s also a naturalist, but is not a biologist, having flunked his first college biology course before switching his major to journalism. He was born in Massachusetts, but his family moved soon after to Oregon, then California and New Mexico before landing in Idaho. He’s been hiking forests, bogs and wetlands in his home state as well as New England, the Adirondacks and Pennsylvania, where’s hung his shingle since 1989, the year he departed active duty in the Air Force.

Alan wrote a conservation column for a daily rag in eastern Pennsylvania for more than a decade and a half. He’s done volunteer work for a whole bunch of conservation organizations, including Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, the Nature Conservancy and the North Branch Land Trust near his current home of Conyngham, Pa. He’s also a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association and the Air Force Public Affairs Alumni Association.

Alan’s spouse, a double lung transplant recipient, is the chief academic officer at Penn State University’s Hazleton campus.

Alan’s home

How big is my place? Well it’s millions of acres wide. And guess what? It’s also yours, if you’re a citizen of America. The place is our American public lands, our great national commons.

Trouble is there’s a lot folks who want to steal our land; some live here in Pennsylvania, others are back home in Idaho. Sen. Rick Santorum, who claims to be from Penn Hills, Pa., is one of the thieves. He’d just as soon as give our public land to developers, foreign mining corporations, campaign contributors, oil companies, anything but the American public.

My goals are different. I want to put some wolves back in the woods and keep more wild brook trout in the water. I favor fewer whitetails and more critters with big teeth and claws to match.

Some folks say that’s perverse. Maybe it’s because like a lot of other folks my ranch house and my job are in the city.

As a conservationist, I’m strictly opposed to the good old boys, off-road cowboys, bucket biologists and politicians whose vocabularies are limited to what their rich cronies want to hear.

My dad (he died in August 1980 while I was a second lieutenant at Robins AFB in Georgia, launched the parks and recreation curriculum at Idaho State University. And That’s where I got my J-school degree. I’m in the minority. I’m not at all quiet about the men and women who’re stealing and trashing our natural heritage.

In old-time cowboy movies, the good guy always wore a white hat and his nemesis carried a black fedora.

The same goes with the colors green and red.

Green on a map signifies forested land. Red, though, means trouble.

Trout Unlimited’s map of Pennsylvania’s wild brook trout populations is mostly red. Where not colored that shade, the map is gray, indicating extirpation of the fish. You’ve gotta look hard to find any green on the map. In fact, only 16 sub-watersheds in our state now support healthy, intact wild brook trout populations, according to TU.

(Disclosure: I’m a member of Trout Unlimited).

“Brook trout are the only trout native to much of the eastern United States,” the conservation organization notes in the introduction to the seminal “Eastern Brook Trout: Status and Threats” report it issued this spring.

What’s more, the species, Salvelinus fontinalis, is Pennsylvania’s state fish.

We’re not taking care of this species.

And those we’ve placed in charge of our fisheries often seem more focused on running hatcheries since stocking mongrels into put-and-take waters keeps the license revenue flowing.

And the Fish and Boat Commission gets its operating budget dollars from license and stamp sales.

“Arguably the most beautiful freshwater fish, brook trout survive in only the coldest and cleanest water. In fact, brook trout serve as indicators of the health of watersheds they inhabit. Strong wild brook trout populations demonstrate that a stream or river ecosystem is healthy and that water quality is excellent,” TU’s report states.

Given the map’s largely red coloration, it’s not hard to come to the realization that most Pennsylvania trout streams are suffering ills.

And those are of human making:
o Removal of streamside vegetation.
o Increasing sedimentation from developed lands.
o Nutrient runoff.
o Pollution from roads, highways, parking lots.
o Stocking hatchery fish on top of wild trout.

While development-damaged streams can be rehabilitated through tough, hands-on labor, arguably the best way to protect healthy wild brook trout populations is to leave the fish alone and protect a stream’s surrounding countryside.

No one seems to know just how many times – and where – hatchery-raised fish have been planted in Pennsylvania.

“It would take a lot more time than I have to list the many streams that the PFBC stocks that hold wild brook trout populations,” TU’s Ken Undercoffer told me.

“This would entail going through the stocking schedule and comparing it with the list of trout streams with natural reproduction.”

What’s so great about wild trout?

Eric Palmer, the state of Vermont’s director of fisheries, summarizes the uniqueness of wild fish on the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department’s Web site:

When you catch a wild fish “you have living proof that the water they came from has suitable habitat for all of the life-stages of that species. It is like holding an intact ecosystem in your hand.”

What does stocking hatchery mongrels do to wild fish?

Undercoffer: The negative effects are many and have been demonstrated by numerous studies including those by the Fish and Boat Commission.

o Stocking encourages overharvesting.
o Mongrels compete with wild trout for scant resources in infertile freestone streams, which are the last refuge for wild brookies in the state.
o Interbreeding between mongrel and wild fish weakens the wild strain, making them less capable of surviving in the wild.
o Hatchery trout can carry diseases into wild brook trout populations.

Undercoffer again: “I fish many streams taken off the stocking list during the early stages of Operation Future in the early 1980s. They have all improved immensely since stocking was terminated. To ignore the effects of stocking over native brook trout populations is absurd.”

Bob Bachman, a former fisheries supervisor in Maryland, traveled to Vermont to testify at a recent meeting concerning a proposal to stock hatchery fish into that state’s most fabled trout stream, the Battenkill.

Bachman has studied wild trout for years, once spending countless hours perched in a lookout tower over Pennsylvania’s Spruce Creek (arguably the most famous trout stream in our state).

Hatchery trout dumped into waters like the Battenkill “run around like a motorcycle gang making trouble wherever they go,” Bachman said.

“Bachman had film footage that echoed his observations,” columnist Dave Mance III wrote in the Bennington, Vt., Banner.

“Whereas the wild trout he filmed were lithe, calm creatures who spent their days in the same spot, expending as little energy as possible, feeding robotically off the current’s figurative conveyor belt, the hatchery trout he showed were spastic, clumsy and without any clue as to the stream’s generations old hierarchy.”

Bachman’s footage showed just how inferior hatchery mongrels are to the real McCoy. They had ratty tails. One was missing an eyeball. “They came off as less-fish than-human-engineered pieces of meat which, if fact, is their design . . . Bachman’s data showed that most of the hatchery trout in his study were dead within three months. None survived the winter.

“The disturbing data, from his perspective, is that 12 percent of wild trout in the study area also died after he introduced hatchery fish; a fact directly attributable, in his opinion, to increased stress.”

“I don’t see any way you can put hatchery trout into a wild trout stream without doing a great deal of harm. Period,” Bachman told Vermont TU members.

On an aesthetic level, stocking hatchery trout into a wild trout stream ends up changing the stream’s very character, killing its wildness and placing it into another category, that of a tamed waterway.

Fish and Boat’s “rationale for stocking over wild trout is that anglers, sportsmen’s clubs and local businesses demand it,” Undercoffer told me. “According to the PFBC, stocking was resumed in Young Woman’s Creek and Cross Fork (both have substantial native brook trout and wild brown trout populations) in order to satisfy social demands.

“I don’t know if the PFBC has ever taken specific steps, like buying land to protect a wild brookie stream.”

Ironically, depending on one’s perspective, the Pennsylvania Game Commission owns far more stream mileage with wild brook trout populations than does the PFBC, “which must be telling us something,” Undercoffer says.

Some follow-on thoughts:

Pennsylvania has plenty of put-and-take water suitable for stocking.

Hatcheries, including Pennsylvania’s, produce effluent, a pollutant.

Fish and Boat is supposed to manage the state’s fisheries on behalf of all of its citizens, not just those who buy licenses.

Giving the agency general tax revenue, like a small percentage of the state’s sales tax, is not only appropriate but of paramount importance if we are to save even the best remaining wild brook trout populations.

Removing the connection between growing hatchery mongrels and selling licenses would be a positive step.

“What we need are more wild trout in more wild rivers,” the New York Times’s editorial page stated in June.

Catching a wild fish, then releasing it back into its home water, is an experience unlike any other in angling.

Plucking a hatchery-raised fish that grew up in a concrete tank on a diet of trout pellets is akin to handling a wan spirit.

Even if one could convince  a local reporter and his/her editor to pursue the story, it’s doubtful that any coverage would occur. After all, what happened last week with the local highway project is more important. And so are the latest complaints from the local political candidate. Hah, hah, hah.

I first visted the Valmont Industrial Park cranberry bog nearly 10 years ago. Took Ann Rhoads of Pennsylvania’s famous Morris Arboretum there. The Cranberry mat was just one of the big finds. There were also state-listed orchids and and a rare little butterfly closely tied to native cranberry plants. Ah, but almost nightly since then, the local all-terrain vehicle crowd has made a playground out of this natural, botanical hotspot.,

 “One night of destructive fun is all it takes to alter the course of nature in this otherwise peaceful place.  Local wildlife watchers say it is  the most egregious act of nature destruction” they’ve ever seen by off-road vehicles.

That’s bad press for a movement whose members claim to be responsible users of the land. Vehicles and their riders have trashed natural streams feeding the bog mat, rerouting the creek and damaging the little rivulets that give the bog its life-sustaininng water. Because of their power and speed, off-road vehicles can be wildly destructive to natural areas if their owners ride off-trail. Dirt bikers and ATV riders say routinely say they prefer to ride off established trails. Off-road use has been risin steadily across Luzerne County and natural areas take the hit. The evidence is everywhere in the county: rutted public roads, the spread of noxious weeds and alien plants, and the safety of children and of other trail users compromised.

I’ve been adding native plants to our nodest yard for more than a decade. I started with easy ones, like eastern white pine and paw paw. Why natives? Native plants provide natural and sustainable beauty and a welcoming habitat for birds, butterflies and other insects, ensuring a future filled with a healthy diversity of plants and wildlife. Well tes. And it is a big deal, you see, especially since narly all the rest of his wittle borough (burro?) has ben turned over to Japanese this and that and Norway maples and other nonnative plants. Throw in the ravages of suburban sprawl and one can quickly see what’s happening, to especially to the natives.

 In southern Luzerne County, Pa., the presently two-lane Route 93 will soon be a three-lane superhighway. Wildlife alreayd finds life within a mile of this highway to be rough going. Squirrels, woodchucks, raccoons, white-tailed der, American robins, grackels, wild turkey and all manner of smaller terrestrial critters are hammered on this highway and few motorists seem to realize the toll, much less their role in it.Ensuring high quality wildlife and fish passage options – both underpasses and overpasses - is not part of the plan, of course. Nearly all of Pennsylvania is roaded beyond belief and even the average state park here is a trap for wildlife.

Bad ideas, it eems, sometimes migrate to Wilkes-Barre to find a new life (or life of their own). So it is with the idea to dam the Susquehana River at the Luzerne County seat of government. Read why this is a supid idea right here: http://www.rayproffitt.org/wbdam.htm

Back in the late 60s, when I was still a year or so off from high school graduaion day, my brother and I moved irrigation pipe in a potatoe field. Every day we’d pile on his motorcycle and ride out to our employer’s spread near the Fort Hall Indian Rservaion (southeastern Idaho). It wasn’t easy work but after a few hours’ time, I had the routine down pretty good, learning in quick fashion how best to balance the pipe (with attached sprinkler head) on my arms next to my waste. Today, I can’t even remember how much we earned for this daily chore, but it was great fun and done at very little envionmental cost (a wittle bit of gas to fuel the motorbike) and all manual work upon arrival at the job site. Today, big farmers growng sugar beets or potatoes or other crops in Idaho and other dry-pone states depend not on teenagers to move their irrigaion equipment but on gaoline-powered lince machines. I wonder wat kind of cutbacks, if any, will take place as fuel prices continue their upward climbs. I still see folks who live a quarter-mile or so aay from me driving their vehikles to the church a 10rh of  mile away. An absolute waste, to be sure.