From the Publisher:
Volume II, Issue I. These few words, in fact, speak volumes. Estuary’s Volume I, Issue I, better known as Spring 2020, came out, arguably, at the worst possible time for a new print magazine. The publishing industry had long since administered last rites to print magazines in general, so why did we think we could succeed with Estuary?
One concern: would we have enough significant material to interest our readers every quarter?
This issue, Volume II, Issue I, aka Spring 2021, signifies the start of our second full year. This issue blossomed into maturity at our “quarterly story acquisition meeting” on October 17, 2020. Twenty-one persons attended this 90-minute meeting via Zoom. We began by introducing participants. Next, Estuary’s Creative Director, Chris Zajac, previewed Winter 2020 (on its way to the printer at the time), including the giant moose on the cover and selected stories. We then turned to this issue, Volume II, Issue I.
Had it not been for the pandemic, I confess we might never have seized upon a Big Zoom meeting for story acquisition and content planning, but it has worked well for us. I expect we will continue this approach in some form long after COVID-19 recedes from memory. When the time came to “go around the room,” this group of professionals bounced ideas around like colliding molecules in a chemical reaction, releasing constructive energy. Following this meeting, we had enough good ideas, not only for Spring 2021 but also for structuring content well into the future, balanced in terms of time, geography, and subject matter.
Another concern: can we attract readers across a broad spectrum of ages?
In this issue, Leslie Tryon, widely acclaimed author and illustrator of books for young readers, has written and illustrated chapter one of her ongoing series about JJ the Ferryman, inspired in large measure by her antecedents who piloted ferries across the Connecticut River. Will Estuary find its way into the hands of young readers? We shall see.
In another nod to youth, Nadia Goodman is our first teenage author, writing about learning to sail at an early age. Nadia is proof that it pays to learn certain things in life as early as possible, in this case sailing. Those who learn to sail later in life...say, in their twenties…may never gain the level of self-confidence as one who learns to sail, as Nadia did, at ten. We may give other aspiring young authors an opportunity to publish from time to time, especially concerning their views about the environment, water quality, a scientific experiment, wildlife, skiing, camping, hiking, fishing, kayaking, canoeing, and rock climbing. Parents and grandparents take note.
Thirdly, we believe a successful print magazine today should have a noble purpose.
Estuary’s purpose is to increase awareness and understanding amongst a wide audience about the challenges that lie ahead for our environment, especially within the Connecticut River watershed. We believe the more people who become aware of important challenges to our local ecology, the more people who will contribute time, talent, and other resources to the care and well-being of our environment...and tell their friends.
This issue contains a public service announcement by First Light Power concerning safety in and around the water. The pandemic led to a dramatic increase in the number of people heading outdoors to take advantage of our natural surroundings. Necessarily, with more people hiking in the woods and kayaking on the water, more people twisted ankles or got soaked and dangerously cold after capsizing unexpectedly in small watercraft.
We are also pleased to announce, on page 60, a $50,000 grant to help, specifically, with the future of the Connecticut River watershed. This grant, awarded to a Connecticut non-profit affiliated with Estuary, CIME, will be used to assess the need for a much larger, long term grant. Should it come to pass, this larger Master Watershed Grant will encourage and reward collaboration between the hundreds of non-profits in the watershed, small and large…cultural, scientific, and educational. Estuary will track and report on progress of this pilot effort throughout this year and, hopefully, beyond.
Dick Shriver
Publisher & Editor
This is a problematic plant in wetlands and floodplains (riparian areas), where it competes with native plant species and is difficult to control without damaging sensitive areas.
Japanese Knotweed
It would be hard to proclaim which plant wins as the worst terrestrial invasive species in the US, but Japanese Knotweed, Polygonum cuspidatum, is a clear contender. The World Conservation Union considers it to be one of the world’s worst, if that’s any indication. Even where it grows naturally, in Japan, it is said to be capable of surviving burial by volcanic lava and landslides, its hearty roots waiting below ground for more favorable conditions to resprout. Knotweed can tolerate acid soils, heavy metal concentrations, air pollution, and has even been observed surviving salt water in order to spread to new locations. It can grow in full sun and shade, and dry, low nutrient soil, although it clearly thrives in moist conditions.
In the estuary region, and throughout the Connecticut River watershed, Japanese Knotweed has a solid foothold (and according to one account, it has taken over more than 200 acres of parkland in nearby New York City).
It’s easy to see how Knotweed would have been seen early on as an appealing ornamental: heart-shaped leaves, a spray of creamy white flowers in late summer, and especially its jointed stems that look like bamboo—hence its common name Japanese Bamboo. Once outside of its natural habitat, it’s virtually bug and fungi free. And it’s a quick—and as it turns out, fearless spreader.
The United Kingdom has experienced this plant for longer than we have here in the states; it was introduced, via a gift from a Dutch doctor-in-residence in Japan, to Kew Gardens in 1850. It made it across the pond to us in the late 1800s. While this may not seem relevant to our estuary, it is noteworthy that today within England and Wales the presence of Knotweed has taken on legal significance. This plant must be declared on residential property sales documents during real estate transactions; British banks have gone so far as to say that a mortgage will not be issued if a property has, or is near Knotweed, unless a management plan is in place. In Wales, it is a criminal offense to plant it, and elsewhere in the UK, having been classified as a “controlled waste,” Knotweed must only be transported by a registered waste carrier.
Knotweed, as it turns out, is capable of impacting building foundations, surfacing through asphalt, lifting pavement so as to become a tripping hazard, and obstructing site lines. It has limited soil binding capacity, which can lead to erosion, especially along watercourses. And it grows, well, with reckless abandon.
Although this plant is insect pollinated and produces seeds that are dispersed by the wind, it’s the roots of Knotweed (known as rhizomes) that make this invasive plant notable and does the lion’s share of distribution, and damage. Rhizomes are modified, fleshy stems that run horizontally underground and are capable of sending new roots downward as well as new stems above ground; it’s an effective strategy that is shared by a number of problematic plants. It is also why trying to smother Knotweed with a tarp is ineffective.
A 2019 article in Slate magazine refers to a Knotweed researcher in New Hampshire who uncovered a 32,000-square-foot (more than half the size of a football field) network of Knotweed plants connected underground, and believed “almost certainly” to be the same plant. In 2000, two biologists analyzed 150 samples across the UK and similarly concluded that they represented a clone of the original plant dating back to the 1850 introduction through Kew Gardens. When fresh, the plant’s fleshy roots are described as carrot-like in color and consistency and withstand the “snap test” before turning woody with age.
Closer to home, Knotweed in Connecticut is prohibited from importation, movement, sale, purchase, transplanting, cultivation, and distribution, according to the state’s General Statutes. It is similarly listed in other states across the nation; this plant is most problematic in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. Notable in the Estuary region, and because of the ecological significance of our coastal waters and the Connecticut River watershed, Knotweed is on the radar of most conservation organizations, active Land Trusts, and local environmental advocates for the threat it imposes to our natural resources.
Especially troubling is the ability, and preference, of Knotweed to invade riparian—riverfront—land, where it rapidly outcompetes native vegetation while being a poor substitute as wildlife habitat. Despite its rapid and aggressive growth, Knotweed fuels few food webs and displaces the native plants that can. There is some evidence that in addition to bullying existing vegetation in these areas, Knotweed also employs allelopathy—it releases chemicals that suppress the growth of would-be competitors. And the location next to moving water in riparian areas means that Knotweed—a plant capable of regenerating from a fingernail-sized sliver of stem or root—will readily ride the current to establish new plants further downstream.
Can anything be done about this plant? The one thing that everyone is in agreement about is that there is no quick fix for Japanese Knotweed removal, underscoring the importance of rapid detection and removal of newly established occurrences. Early detection also increases the potential for less damaging control techniques. And any effort needs to take into account both the above and below ground parts of the plant, as well as bullet-proof disposal.
Scientists in England completed the first phase of the world’s largest Japanese Knotweed field trial in 2016, testing control methods. Despite the results showing that no control treatment delivered complete eradication within a three-year period, the use of the herbicide glyphosate (a.k.a. Roundup) was the most effective treatment when applied at the correct growth stage, and using the correct dose and coverage (both sprayed and injected). Control with the herbicide glyphosate takes three to five years, and in New England, its use may be subject to local permit and posting requirements if associated with wetlands. The investigators further recommended that stakeholders “discontinue the use of other widely used herbicides…and unnecessary physical control methods (cut and fill, summer cutting and excavation) that add equipment and labor costs and increase environmental impacts, without improving control compared to spraying alone.”
Left: Leaves on zig-zag stems (note no insect herbivory). Right: Early, robust spring emergence makes this plant tough to compete with; it will quickly shade the ground.
Left: Soft lacy white flowers; Knotweed is sometimes called fleece flower. Right: Knotweed emerging from coastal bulkhead, showing the tremendous tenacity of this plant.
Back to early detection. If caught soon enough to make hand cutting feasible, it is possible, with persistence, to control and even eliminate areas of Knotweed, and without the use of chemicals that can come with their own environmental consequences. In Connecticut, local efforts, such as “Nix the Knotweed” in the Estuary region, have focused on strategic, repeated cuttings designed to essentially rob the plants of the energy that drives their root system. Persistence, and attention to when and how the stalks are cut, is important. And it will take a minimum of three years. Disposal, although not regulated in this part of the world, yet, is also critical: Knotweed is seriously intent on persisting and has demonstrated that it doesn’t take a whole lot of any portion of the plant to succeed.
Perhaps the greatest threat, at this point, is the lack of public awareness about Japanese Knotweed. Admittedly, my own dad once transplanted a clump from my grandparents home in New Hampshire (“It’s just like a bamboo plant!”), and spent a concerted effort, eventually, to get rid of it once it was established in our backyard. And at a talk that I gave in Norfolk, Connecticut, a retired physician proudly presented me with a potted Knotweed plant that I could use for fresh greens (until I, or any other recipient, might grow tired of it and perhaps add it to the backyard brush or compost pile).
The increasing interest and emphasis on using native plants in our local landscapes takes on increasing significance, and urgency, as we come to realize how persistent—and destructive—some non-native substitutes can be. In the internationally significant Connecticut River Estuary region, the stakes are high. And the opponent formidable.
Judy Preston is a local ecologist active in the Connecticut River Estuary. This is her third article for Estuary about a non-native, invasive plant species.
Showing ecological amplitude of this plant: full sun and sand (and in competition with beach dune grass, which does a better job holding the dune together in storms).
Dinner?
Roasted Lamb
Lamb vs. Mutton
They are both domestic sheep…but hardly interchangeable.
Sheep, it is believed, were brought to the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 for wool as well as a food supply. When England cut off the wool supply to America, the sheep industry grew out of necessity, not for its meat but for its wool. Over time it became a profitable livestock.
So, what are the differences? They are the result of the age of the sheep. Lamb is a sheep less than one year old with little fat, tender meat, mild flavor, and color ranging from light pink to pale red. Lamb offers a wide variety of preparation choices ranging from grilling to braising to roasting.
Mutton is older than one year, ideally three years old, with lots of fat, tougher meat, gamey flavor, and an intense red color…it is best prepared as a stew slowly cooked. It is no wonder that Americans prefer lamb!
Enjoyed year round but particularly in the spring…so enjoy this simple and tasty dish!
Grilled or Roasted Butterflied Leg of Lamb
Easy to prepare, this leg of lamb is boned, butterflied, and grilled over a charcoal or gas grill or pan seared and roasted in a hot oven. Best served medium rare with an internal temperature of 140° or to your liking.
♦ Marinate a 5–6 lb leg of lamb that has been butterflied and pounded to even out the high spots…for at least 8 or up to 24 hours in a shallow baking dish.
♦ To make the marinade, whisk together 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil, fresh juice from ½ of a lemon, 2 large minced garlic cloves, 1 TBS each of dried thyme and oregano leaves, 1 tsp kosher salt, ¼ tsp ground cumin, and a pinch of cayenne pepper
Pour over and rub into lamb.
To Grill on a barbecue:
♦ Preheat grill and place on a very hot oiled rack until charred on both sides…about 10 minutes per side.
To Serve: Slice meat and serve on warm platter with lemon wedges and a sprinkling of fresh herbs and a side of peas sauteed in butter with shallots and mint or perhaps minted mashed potatoes (steep chopped mint in milk before adding) or grilled asparagus with lemon breadcrumbs.
♦ Let rest 5 minutes before slicing.
To Roast:
♦ Pan sear the meat in a little canola oil in a very hot ovenproof skillet until quite brown and crusty.
♦ Drain off all fat and finish in 450–475° oven for 15 minutes.
♦ Let rest.
To Serve:
♦ Slice meat and serve on warm platter with lemon wedges and a sprinkling of fresh herbs and a side of peas sauteed in butter with shallots and mint or perhaps minted mashed potatoes (steep chopped mint in milk before adding) or grilled asparagus with lemon breadcrumbs.
Grilled Asparagus
♦ Toss asparagus with tough ends snapped off in a light coating of olive oil and grill on BBQ or roast in 400° oven till lightly charred, about 10 minutes. ♦ Sprinkle with lemon breadcrumbs: Heat 1 TBS olive oil in small skillet, add ½ cup of coarse breadcrumbs (dry bread out in 200° oven and grate or crush), zest of one lemon and juice of 1/2 lemon, 1 TBS chopped parsley, and salt and pepper to taste.♦ Sautee until browned, about 2 minutes.
♦ Serve asparagus on a platter with a sprinkle of juice of ½ lemon and breadcrumbs.
Chapter 1: The Rescue
I put my hand out in front of me like I’m offering to shake and say: “How do you do, sir. I’m called JJ, just like my father, and his father, and his father before him. We’re all ferrymen here in Old Saybrook, and we’re all called JJ.”
Oh spit! What I just said, that’s not a whole truth. Cap—he’s my father—Cap says never start out with a lie when you first meet a man because he’ll never believe a thing you say from then on. Truth is I’m not a ferryman yet because I’m thirteen, but when Cap decides I’m old enough and I’ve learned enough, I will be. It’s not a law; it’s just the way it is here on the Connecticut River: father-to-son, father-to-son, all ferrymen. No boy in my family named JJ ever thought of being anything but a ferryboat captain.
Until me.
I jump nearly out of my boots when my cousin Ray comes up behind me and says, “Who you talking to, JJ?”
“Oh, nobody, really.”
“You in the practice of offering to shake hands with nobody?”
Three houses, all side-by-side, all close relations. Ray’s father and mine are brothers and live in side-by-side houses; Grandfather JJ to both Ray and me lives alone in the third house. Lots of other relatives live on streets near here, but they aren’t all ferrymen. Many of the ladies, who are the mothers, come from fine houses upriver, the sort of house with a library and stained-glass windows. The kids you might see on these streets here are likely my cousins of one rank or another.
Ray joins up with me most mornings, and we head off together to some place we need to be—like the ferry landing, school, or church—or someplace we don’t need to be, which is always more fun.
“Talking to Nobody, JJ?”
“Never you bother, Ray. I’m practicing asking a man about a job.”
“I keep reminding you, you got a job; you’ll be a ferryman, just like me.”
“Come on, Ray, haven’t you ever at least thought about doing something else? With all the talk about building a bridge across the river, right here, well, if they build that bridge before we get any older, we’ll be left without a job.”
“Unless the river washes that bridge away; you watch, JJ, just who they come running back to when they gotta get across that river.”
“Even so, you and me, Ray, we’re probably the last. I’m just thinking about what I might do if I knew I wasn’t going to be a ferryman.”
A little voice shouts up to us from down below, by the river bank, “Can you help us, JJ? Please?”
Adam and Ben, 5-year-old twin boys; Clara, their 6-year-old sister. The boys are struggling to pull their cart up to the road; Clara sits inside the cart; she’s hugging something all swaddled in a blanket. Ray, who has 7 brothers and sisters, says, “You go. I already broke up two punching fights this morning in my own house and that was before I even finished my porridge or put my boots on. I’ve done my big brother work for one morning.”
So, I go down the bank and pull the cart up to the road for them. “What’ve you got all wrapped up there, Clara?”
“Rescuing another bird, JJ, never saw the likes of this one.”
“It’s really sick,” Adam said. “It took all three of us just to wrestle it into the blanket stumbling all over the bank like it was; maybe got a broken wing.”
“Not a broken wing. Lame, that’s what it is,” Ben said.
These three pull their cart up and down the dock neighborhood like a tiny Greek chorus, seeking out and announcing tragedy and distress in the animal world. Ever since the day they found an injured seagull, took it home, wrapped it in a blanket, put it in a basket, and nursed it back to health, they marked their wagon with a red cross and made it their mission in life to save all birds in distress.
“He can’t walk, and he’s been plucked bald as a chicken,” Adam and Ben report as nearly in a single voice, “just one or two little black feathers with white dots left.”
“I’m pretty sure it was that new boy that done it,” Ben says.
“I think he’s mean, that one,” Adam adds. “If he’s the one what plucked him naked, it will be all his fault if this bird dies.”
“Like last Sunday,” Adam says, “when the preacher read part of that rhyme story about a man what killed a sea bird, and because it was such a mean thing to do, he had to tie the dead bird with a rope and hang it around his neck and wear it forever, so he’d never forget how evil his deed was.”
“True is true,” Ben says. “That’s Bible truth; I heard the preacher say it.”
I laughed. “You two tadpoles telling me your sister’s got an albatross wrapped up in that blanket?”
“You think you’re so smart, JJ,” Adam says. “Well, we know how to fix him, just you watch. We’ll take him home and put some splints on his legs; they’re probably broken; we witnessed him; he can’t walk without falling over forwards.”
“The splints, that’s my job,” Clara says, hugging the bundle to her chest.
Judging by the size of the bundle, I decided it must be a goose. I unwrapped the blanket just enough to reveal a bald head and neck and one terrified red eye looking back at me.
“Oh spit! It’s a loon in molt,” I said, and quickly covered his head again.
“You have to put this poor bird back in the exact place where you found him. Where did you pick him up?”
“There.” Adam and Ben both pointed. “Past the outcrop we use to jump off of; by the swimming spot; where the mink lives between the big stones.”
I pulled the cart back down the grassy bank, Clara still clutching the loon, while the twins lead me to the scene of the rescue. As we walked, I told them about how when the loon molts, it loses every last feather on his body and can’t fly back to the lakes up north until it grows them all back. Then I told them how no loon can walk much on land because it’s legs are set all the way back by the tail feathers.
“Poor baby,” Clara says, stroking the blanket. “Did someone put you together all wrong?”
I watched as the three of them eased the featherless loon back into the water, just like I told them to, then they sat on the bank and watched to make sure he didn’t need any more help. As I walked away, I heard Clara say: “JJ knows so much about everything; it seems to me like there is always one more thing to learn about in life. I would have made some really fine splints, though.”
“Oh,” Adam says with a shrug, “he’s not so smart, just older.”
I catch up with Ray, who says, “What’d she have in that blanket?”
“A loon,” I say. “Funny, she was about to put splints on it. They thought its legs were broken because it couldn’t walk. They’re learning. Who knows, maybe they’ll be veterinarians when they grow up, all three of them.”
“And not work in the ferry business?” Ray said, smiling.
“Listen, Ray, we’re not all destined to work on the river.”
“Didn’t you decide a while back that you wanted to be a boat builder, JJ?”
“Yes, but I’d still be stuck here on the wharf; I’d like to see Boston, you know, other places, maybe New York. I could do all of that if I was a post rider.”
“But you don’t know how to ride a horse,” Ray says.
About the Author
Leslie Tryon is an award-winning author-illustrator of children’s books (Simon & Schuster publisher). Tryon has spent her life working in the arts. Her experiences include dancing on a cruise ship, working for the book review of the Los Angeles Times, choreographing theater productions, and creating books for children, earning her an ALA Notable award among many others.
Five generations of Tryon’s family served as ferrymen on the Connecticut River between Old Saybrook and Old Lyme, Connecticut, and many of those men were named JJ, which gave Tryon the perfect place to begin this series for Estuary.
Tryon lives in Westerly, Rhode Island, with her husband, JR Fowler; together they spend as much time as possible in their tandem kayak, along with their kayaking friends, tracing and exploring the coastlines of Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Last of the Legendary Watermen
Oliver LaPlace was born on the Connecticut River, almost. The family homestead in Lyme backed up to its eastern shore. They had to keep a close watch on young Ollie, especially during the spring freshet. He was drawn to the water something fierce.
Oliver LaPlace would spend virtually his entire life, from 1901 to 1987, on the banks or out on the mighty Connecticut. He was imprinted on it early, like a duckling is to its mother. A master carpenter and shipwright, he built his house in Essex smack dab on the water, with a dock and a boathouse, ringed by duck blinds he’d scattered about North Cove.
He had as much claim to the Connecticut River as the American shad that filled his nets in the spring, or the muskrats he trapped in the winter, or the elusive rail birds he guided out-of-state “sports” to shoot in the fall, or the giant snapping turtles that became soup. Oliver LaPlace was a force of nature in the most literal sense.
By all accounts, he was a quiet man, especially around people he didn’t know, but then again, he knew a lot of people. Even more knew him. And yet he didn’t mind being alone for hours in a soggy duck blind, or silently polling his rail boat, Bluebell, through frigid marshes. He was comfortable with himself and with what he did.
LaPlace with a catch of shad.
LaPlace and his turtle traps
And what he did was extraordinary. Towards the end of his life, there was no one else left who could do the things that he did. There were no more river guides, like the ones who had guided him—the old timers, known as “watermen,” who viewed the Connecticut River as their backyard.
Oliver LaPlace was, indeed, a proud waterman. He earned the title through ingenuity and determination. He could fish nights, pack the shad in ice to ship to the Fulton Fish Market in New York City, then go to work building wooden boats the next day. He was the kind of person who could make a better turtle trap—or an eel throater (don’t ask and don’t bother Googling it: you won’t find it). If civilization had shattered overnight, like a busted streetlamp, Oliver and his family would have gotten along just fine.
Because he was the last and the best at what he did, Oliver LaPlace quietly grew famous. People came from all over—from New York and New Jersey, heck, from Florida—to go hunting with him. He travelled light; he didn’t need a duck call because he was conversant in avian languages. What he didn’t know about the River wasn’t worth knowing. He got written up in the local Gazette and the New York Times. Everyone in Essex and thereabouts knew who Oliver LaPlace was.
The state encouraged him to trap snappers because they prey on ducks and other game birds. He’d catch dozens at a time and off they’d go, live, to New York City restaurants. One reportedly topped 50 pounds. Watch your fingers! He planted wild rice along the river for the state, too. He knew where all the best places were.
Where once there had been many watermen, by 1980 there was only one left standing. Oliver LaPlace had become river royalty. He had his own table at the Griswold Inn on Main Street in Essex, where twice a week he held court. He was a regular on banjo night and would “play the spoons,” mostly in time, with the band.
Patrons had to pass by him to get to the bar. He’d have a beer with a coffee chaser and chitchat with folks. He used to say of his nights out, “I meet a lot of people there; I can’t remember their names, but I love them all.” He once reportedly told Bill Winterer, the late owner of “The Gris,” “Bill, I don’t know why all these people want to talk to me.”
He rarely had to pay for his beer. People wanted to know how the fishing was, or the eeling, or the gunning. He was always smoking his pipe, and he talked like no one else in the place—sounded kind of like a Mainer, but he wasn’t, of course. He talked the way Connecticut Yankees up and down the river talked before the rest of us showed up. Oliver LaPlace was the genuine article.
Late in his life, the Connecticut River Museum in Essex, down at Steamboat Dock, honored Oliver with an exhibit of his winsome decoys, which work well gracing a mantelpiece or floating seductively in North Cove. He gave them away to friends and family like they were Halloween candy. Other artifacts of his are on permanent display, including the aforementioned eel throater.
Eastern Connecticut was still a frontier when Oliver LaPlace was born. It was the wild, wild East. The interstate wouldn’t get there for another 60 years. The locals crossed the River by ferry, and steamboats from Hartford and Middletown, bound for New York City, stopped at Essex to pick up passengers, along with boxes of iced roe shad, eels, and whatnot. Unrestricted market hunting, the wholesale slaughter of ducks and shorebirds for meat or their fashionable feathers, was still common, if waning, in 1901. Oliver shot them, too, but retail, in relative moderation, abiding by the new hunting laws.
Like Mark Twain, another Connecticut Yankee (albeit a transplant) who was still alive when he was born, Oliver was fascinated by steamboats. And like Huckleberry Finn, young Ollie would camp with friends on the islands that punctuate the Big River, hunting and clamming and fishing to pass the time.
Decades later, he’d take his children and grandchildren out on the river for picnics on Selden Island. What Huck said about rafts applies to rivers as well: “Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”
As hard as he could be on riverine wildlife, Oliver LaPlace was kind to his own species. In the 1950s, Ned Libby and his teenage friends used to play in the gravel pit near Oliver’s house on River Road in Essex. They naturally were drawn to the weathered man who did intriguing things down by the river. He might be carving a decoy or beheading a snapping turtle or plucking ducks for dinner—doing stuff their parents never dreamed of. Oliver would let Ned tag along shad fishing or duck hunting, showing him the ropes, and Ned grew up to do considerable shad fishing himself. Today he remembers his mentor fondly, explaining simply, “He was a quiet man, and if he liked you, he’d help you.”
It should be noted here that Oliver and Mary LaPlace’s only son, Neil, had died in 1943 when he was 16 years old. The couple also had a daughter, Maureen.
Maureen’s daughter, Ann Roussel, has fond memories of the times she spent with her grandfather, picnicking on islands in the River or being treated to ice cream in downtown Essex. “He was like a second father to me,” she said. “On Christmas Eve, I’d spend the whole day with Oliver while my parents were getting ready for the holiday, and all of his friends would come by, one after another. It was a running party, all day long.”
She remembers that his wife, Mary O’Neill, a native of Ireland, always called him Jack; she always wondered why and finally found out. When the two first met, Oliver was so smitten that he ad-libbed, telling the winsome lass with the lilting accent that his name was Jack Murphy, that he, too, was of Irish descent. She wasn’t fooled for long, but she called him Jack ever after.
It should be noted that marrying an Irish Catholic in 1925 was not without complications for the groom, whose kin were committed Baptists.
If it is indisputable that Oliver LaPlace was a waterman extraordinaire, what is less clear is how and why he became one. His older brother, George, showed him how to hunt, for starters. Besides, the most interesting people around Lyme and Essex were the folks who plied the Big River, set their own hours, and answered to no one. In an oral history recording done for the Connecticut River Museum, Oliver explained succinctly how it was a century ago: “Some people shad fished in the spring, trapped in the winter, and loafed in the summer. Some people just made money to live on.”
Oliver was more ambitious than that. He always had a day job, and he was so skillful at carpentry and boatbuilding that his bosses understood when occasionally he had to take days off to catch shad or take people gunning. They told him to come back when he was done. But most often, Oliver did both jobs, night and day, catching his winks where he could.
Working extra hours making money on the river made perfect sense back then. He wasn’t getting rich working 9 to 5, six days a week, for maybe $6 a day during the Great Depression. The River paid better and was more exciting.
Oliver LaPlace never really retired from being a waterman. He just slowed down some. He rowed and fished and gunned right into his 80s, although he confessed that he’d grown more kindhearted by then. The word must have gotten around: once a snapping turtle crawled up on his lawn to lay its eggs. He let it be.
Andy Roussel, Ann’s husband, sat in the North Cove duck blinds with him in the early 1980s, and if all they did was talk, it was a successful outing. Oliver talked about olden days, about shad fishing in the Roaring Twenties, when he and Bluebell shared the River with rumrunners hauling their harvest of hooch. The two boats gave one another a wide berth, but the captains would nod respectfully as they passed.
In the oral history in the archives of the Connecticut River Museum, Oliver LaPlace talks about shad fishing and his life in the Great Before, when people often had to struggle to get by—and needed one another more than they do today. “Everybody was trading, you know, that’s the way Essex was,” he said. “You’d work for somebody, and he’d come back and work for you some Sunday, ’cause we worked six days a week in those days. Yup, everybody helped; your neighbor was a neighbor in those days.”
He outlived most of his neighbors. But on the day Oliver LaPlace finally was laid to rest, the Catholic Church in Essex, Our Lady of Sorrows, was overflowing with a freshet of humanity. He had died soon after the birth of his grandson. When he got the news of that blessed event, he reportedly said, “Everything is in order” and fell asleep for the last time.
But he didn’t go quietly. As the Funeral Mass came to a close, a mighty blast reverberated through the pews and everybody jumped. Outside the church someone had fired his 12-gauge Winchester toward the heavens. Who pulled the trigger remains a mystery.
A decoy carved by LaPlace
Images credits: Courtesy of Connecticut River Museum (Oliver LaPlace photographs). Getty Images, Eerik (picture frame).
The fishway bypass from the Connecticut River bridges the spillway and enters the power canal next to the Cabot Power Station in Montague, Massachusetts.
Up and Over,
Clearing Obstacles to Reach Habitat
Photos by Christopher Zajac
Historically, each spring throngs of migratory fish from the ocean surged up the Connecticut River and its tributaries as far inland as they were able. How far upstream the fish were able to migrate depended upon the species and their swimming abilities and natural features such as waterfalls, gorges, and rapids. Rainbow Smelt were stopped by the first rapids of any significance while American Shad raced over those but were stopped by any barrier greater than three feet. Shad don’t jump. Atlantic Salmon, known for their leaping abilities, were able to surmount falls up to 12 feet high and muscle up the heaviest of rapids including Bellows Falls, one of the most powerful gorges in the eastern US. Smelt migrated as far as present-day Windsor Locks, CT; shad as far as Bellows Falls, VT; and salmon as far as Beechers Falls (Pittsburg, VT). These and other species penetrated upstream on tributaries until they encountered similar natural barriers. On some streams, like the Farmington (CT) and White (VT), they were able to “run” right up to the headwaters, dozens of miles from the river’s mouth. On other streams, such as the Cold (Drewville Gorge, NH) and Whetstone Brook (Brattleboro, VT), there are waterfalls very close to the mouth of the river that blocked entry to all species.
European settlers impacted these migrations soon after their arrival. First, they dammed the smaller streams for gristmills, sawmills, and ice ponds. Then they dammed the larger tributaries like the Salmon (CT), Chicopee (MA), West (VT), and Ashuelot (NH) for larger mills that manufactured goods using mechanical hydropower. Finally, they dammed the mainstem Connecticut River for planned industrial towns like Holyoke and eventually for hydroelectrical generation. When the first mainstem dam went up in Montague, MA, in 1798, it was the engineering marvel of the world—and it blocked access to the last of the spawning habitat for Atlantic Salmon, extirpating that species from the watershed. All other species could still spawn in downstream habitat. The lowermost dam on the River was the Enfield Dam (Windsor Locks, CT), and some species were able to get over it at some flows. Regardless, there was still some downstream spawning habitat for shad, river herring, lamprey, and sturgeons, so those species persisted, albeit in dramatically lower numbers.
The fishway on the Connecticut River at Turners Falls in Massachusetts.
Thanks to fishway construction, fish are now able to migrate upstream of these dams. You may be more familiar with the term “fish ladder,” which originated in Europe and the West Coast of the US where salmon leaped from artificial pool to pool. Shad and some other East Coast species do not leap, so a variety of different fish passage designs have been developed, including elevators, and therefore use the generic term “fishway.”
All of the dams on the mainstem river produce hydroelectricity and therefore are licensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). FERC’s regulations allow the state and federal natural resource agencies to recommend (“prescribe”) fish passage facilities as a condition of a license when they deem them necessary. All four Connecticut River states, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service joined forces to create the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC), the mission of which is to restore runs of migratory fish back to their historical habitat within the watershed. To succeed, providing fish passage at these dams is critically important. The FERC licenses for the lowermost five hydroelectrical dams include conditions that required upstream and downstream fish passage. Due to the very tall Commerford and Moore dams upstream, fisheries managers decided not to pursue fish restoration beyond these five dams.
When the Enfield Dam (CT) washed out in the 1970s, fish gained access to the mouths of all Connecticut tributaries and the Westfield River (MA), which enter below the next dam, the Holyoke Dam (MA). This 30-foot-high dam is 86 miles upstream of the river mouth and included a rudimentary fishlift as early as 1952. Since then, the fish passage facilities have been expanded and modernized several times. They are now owned and operated by Holyoke Gas and Electric. There are two fishlilfts, one that is located at the top of the tailrace near where the water exits the turbines and the other on the other side of the powerhouse at the base of the dam. These lifts are elevators for fish that are operated by computers and technicians. Motorized gates crowd fish into a confined area under which a large bucket (“hopper”) rises, capturing them with hundreds of gallons of water and lifting them to just above the water level behind the dam. At the top, the hopper discharges its cargo so the fish can continue to swim upstream. Early in the season, these lifts may accumulate fish most of the day and operate only once or twice a day. During the peak of the migratory season (late May to early June), the lifts operate continuously. In 2020, over 360,000 American Shad, 760 Blueback Herring, 33,000 Sea Lamprey, 440 Striped Bass, and 18 federally-endangered Shortnose Sturgeon, as well as many other species, were carried above the dam in the lifts. (Note that not a single Salmon was spotted).
The Holyoke Dam has a fantastic visitor’s center. After the fish are discharged from the hopper, they swim past two windows. Behind one window is the nerve center of the operations where staff operate gates, lights, computers, and cameras from April through July and sporadically throughout the summer. This is where fish biologists identify and count the fish. The other is a public viewing window where visitors can stand in an exhibit-filled room, reading about the facility and the species they may spot swimming past the window. It’s like going to an aquarium, except there are no walls for the fish. They are wild, actively migrating, and moving upstream. COVID restrictions caused the facility to be closed to the public in 2020. To get information regarding visitation in 2021, search “Robert E. Barrett Fishlift” on the internet.
Upstream of the Holyoke dam is the 30-foot-high Turners Falls Dam (MA) (river mile 123), that sends water down a two-mile-long canal to a hydroelectric powerhouse operated by First Light Power. Three fishways are associated with this dam: one at the powerhouse, one at the spillway, and one just upstream at the gatehouse that allows fish from the other two fishways to leave the canal and enter the upper river. There is a public viewing window at the gatehouse ladder, but it, too, will likely be closed to the public this season. The fishways at this dam, built in 1980, used a West Coast design developed to pass salmon (more like the old “ladder” design) and have not performed well, especially for shad passage. First Light Power is in the process of renewing its FERC license, and the government agencies are seeking new and improved fish passage as a condition of the new license.
Next is the 30-foot-high Vernon Dam (VT/NH) at river mile 142, owned by TransCanada Hydro. Here there is a fishway with a public viewing gallery just downstream of Brattleboro (VT). The fourth dam in this series is the Bellows Falls (VT/NH) dam at river mile 174, also owned and operated by TransCanada Hydro. This was an important Native American fishing site because enormous numbers of fish congregated below the falls. Some fish could get upstream over the falls, but when the dam was built atop the falls, it blocked the migrations of all species. In 1984, a 57-foot-high fishway was built to allow Atlantic Salmon and Sea Lamprey to pass as they had historically. Shad never got above the falls, but with the fishway in place, some shad now go farther upstream. A total of 39 ascended in 2020. This site also has an excellent visitor center within walking distance from the center of the village. The final mainstem fishway is located at the Wilder Dam (VT/NH) (river mile 217) just south of Hanover, NH. It is also owned by TransCanada Hydro and was built to allow salmon access to the Ammonoosuc River and the White Mountains. Since the cessation of the Connecticut River salmon restoration efforts, this fishway has not been operated. Nevertheless, with all of the downstream fishways operating, migratory fish have annually ventured throughout the watershed, as far as 240 miles upstream of Long Island. The many partners, biologists, engineers, and conservationists who have teamed together to design, build, and operate these fishways to allow fish to reach historical habitat have made great contributions to the discipline of fish passage worldwide. Fishways have been critical in supporting fish restoration to the Connecticut River, but a better strategy, when possible, is dam removal. We will talk about that approach in a future column.
The fishway bypass around Vernon Dam on the Connecticut River in Vermont.
The Cabot Station powerhouse is next to the Connecticut River with the drawn down power canal extending behind it. The fish ladder is built over the spillway adjacent to the powerhouse. (Photo by Christopher Zajac.)
No one would, or possibly could, build a hydro dam in the Connecticut River valley today…and that seems even less likely to happen at any time in the future. Many of those dams that were built a hundred years ago, however, for whatever purpose at the time, based on whatever economics, and independent of modern-day environmental considerations, are still functioning productively, providing renewable energy with zero carbon emissions.
There are sixteen large dams along the main stem of the Connecticut River, most of them with hydropower plants. If one takes into account the entire watershed with tributaries, there are more than a hundred small hydropower plants. Those plants that produce electricity have the capacity to generate a combined maximum of 470 megawatts.
And so, you ask, “How much is that?” Well, it’s either a lot or a little, depending upon your frame of reference. And, what’s a megawatt? We realize that not everyone is interested in such comparisons, calculations, and equivalencies; if that’s you, simply skip the following three paragraphs.
Left: Historical photo showing the inside of the Cabot Station powerhouse in 1916. Right: The Cabot Station at the end of the power canal along the Connecticut River in Montague, MA, houses six generators for a total generating capacity of 62 megawatts.
Start with something we can all relate to: our monthly electric bill. The average household in the Connecticut River Valley pays about $120 per month for electricity. The electric meter on the average home reads 700 kilowatts consumed during the month, and is charged at the rate of about $.17 per kilowatt hour (700 x .17 = $120). In one year, therefore, the average home in the watershed consumes about 8400 kilowatt-hours (700 x 12). Since one megawatt is simply 1,000 kilowatts, all of the hydropower in the Connecticut River watershed can provide, at maximum, (bear with me on this): 470 megawatts times 8760 (24 hours per day times 365 days per year) hours per year divided by 8400 kilowatt-hours per home per year equals the electricity needs of 490,000 homes.
Left: Workers pose for a photo next to one of the five generators in the Number One Station at Turners Falls, MA, circa 1905. Right: The interior of the Number One Station next to Turners Falls at the head of the power canal in 2016. Images courtesy of FirstLight Power. Modern photos by Beth Pelton.
One more assumption: the total hydro system does not operate at maximum; a more likely number is half the maximum. This means the system can serve about 245,000 homes in the River valley. With an estimated 700,000 homes in the River valley, the River itself accounts for about one-third of the electricity needs of those living there.
In terms of fossil fuels, 470 megawatts translates into the equivalent carbon-based energy of a modest 6,000 barrel per day oil refinery. Again, since the system operates at effectively half maximum capacity, the estimated savings are some one million barrels of oil per year (6000 x 365 / 2) that needn’t be pumped from the ground. This, in turn, translates to a savings, through use of hydropower, of a half million tons of carbon dioxide per year (yes, air has weight just like we do). Okay, that’s it for the heavy calculations.
The potential power of a hydro plant is determined by the amount of water involved, and how far it falls. (One of the best explanations of hydropower can be found at the Granite State Hydropower Association website; click on “How hydro works.”) The map on the previous page shows the location of the dams along the Connecticut River and their height; the dams upriver (note the heights of the Moore and Comerford dams versus the much lower Holyoke dam) are generally higher, but there is less water going over them.
According to Holyoke Gas & Electric (HG&E), the hydroelectric generating utilities of the Holyoke Dam and the Holyoke Canal System have a capacity of 50 megawatts, providing approximately 55% of Holyoke’s retail electrical load annually. HG&E is a municipal utility, so those benefits are offered directly to their customers in Holyoke.
More than a savings to the environment, hydropower offers important advantages to the power industry, such as flexibility for emergencies, and even storage of power for a period of time. This is the case, for example, with the Northfield Mountain pumped hydro system in Northfield, Massachusetts. Built in 1964 as a companion to the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, the Northfield pumped hydro system still has value even though the atomic plant has since been shut down. Pumped hydro is a process whereby water is pumped uphill and stored in a reservoir when electricity is plentiful and cheap (say, during the lower-demand daylight hours), and then allowed to flow back down and drive the turbines when electricity is in high demand, and the price is correspondingly high (say, at night when people turn on the lights). The Northfield pumped hydro facility, with a generating capacity of 1,143 megawatts, was, when new, the largest such facility in the world. This plant can only generate electricity while the water in the reservoir lasts, which is only for a few hours per day; so it is “turned on” when the price during the day is right. Actual production is a modest fraction of its maximum capacity.
Oddly, this facility actually consumes more energy than it creates. It is still operating because it makes money when the cost of electricity to pump water uphill is less than the value of electricity that is sold when that same volume of water runs downhill, powering the turbines. A purely hypothetical case: Let’s say it cost $10,000 to run the turbines backwards and pump water uphill into a reservoir all morning long (the buying cycle) when the cost of buying electricity from the grid is, say, 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. Then, in the afternoon and evening (the selling cycle), that same volume of water is allowed to run back downhill to drive the turbines and send electricity back into the grid at, say, a price of 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, with total revenue of $20,000. The gross profit for this particular day is therefore $10,000. However, since no part of this system can work at 100% efficiency, this profit was derived by the plant consuming more energy during the buying cycle (energy in the form of kilowatts, not dollars) than it generated (again, as measured in kilowatts) during the selling cycle.
Wind and solar power are, of course, at their peaks when weather and time of day dictate, which rarely corresponds to when consumer demand for electricity rises and falls. Thus, when wind and solar are producing at their maximums, the power company may be able to purchase electricity from the grid at less-than-maximum prices to pump water uphill, and when the wind dies down, and the sun goes down or behind cloud cover, the company may be able to reverse the flow through the turbines and sell electricity back into the grid at a profit. In this way, a pumped hydro facility can help justify investments in solar and wind by “storing” the electricity generated or bought during the cycle of maximum generation or supply, and then releasing or selling it during the next cycle of maximum demand.
About the grid. This mysterious entity, like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, is, in the case of New England, operated by a non-profit called ISO New England. Authorized by the federal government, ISO operates the high voltage system throughout the region and runs and regulates three markets for buying and selling electricity at the market price at any given instant.
Unfortunately, and this is doubtless a problem that was downplayed or little recognized at the time they were constructed, the dams are an impediment to fish trying to get upstream to their historic spawning grounds. The dams also impact (generally adversely) the habitat for other important animal species such as eels and lamprey. The impact of the dams on fish and other wildlife is a highly relevant topic for five of the major dams; the owners are currently applying to the US government to relicense their operations for the next forty years.
In addition to the dams and power stations, the hydropower companies also own vast tracts of property that include forests, farms, and flood plains, and reservoirs that extend behind the dams for many miles. In varying degrees, the hydropower companies make these properties accessible to the public in the form of campgrounds, hiking trails, and boating areas. Such sites below the dams may be subject to sudden changes in the water levels as the plants open and close the gates, which, where possible, is done in coordination with recreational interests.
Each spring, HG&E welcomes 10,000 visitors to its Robert Barrett Fishway and Visitor Center. The center is designed to show HG&E’s commitment to local, renewable energy generation and the steps taken over the years to protect the environment.
From the standpoint of the public good, hydropower in the Connecticut River Valley is clearly complex. What is clear, however, is that the more the general public understands about hydropower, the more attention will be paid to the multitude of stakeholder interests.
The Turners Falls-Gill Bridge crosses the Connecticut River over Turners Falls Dam in Massachusetts. Water is diverted into the power canal (under the bridge at right) through Number One Station and 2.1 miles down the canal exits at Cabot Station. Photo by Christopher Zajac.
Relicensing Major Power Plants
Photos by Christopher Zajac
The Vernon Dam in Vernon, Vermont, is one of several dams undergoing relicensing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The fish ladder is to the left of the powerhouse. Upstream the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, no longer in operation, is seen on the banks of the River.
Believe it or not, there are more than 3,000 dams on the mighty Connecticut River and its myriad tributaries.
Sixty-five of these are “major dams” that produce measurable “hydrologic alteration” of the river basin, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers.
In layman’s terms, these sixty-five imposing barriers affect the water’s flow, elevation, and temperature—measurably impacting the riverine environment and many of the species that depend on it, including our own. According to The Nature Conservancy, the Connecticut River is one of the most heavily dammed waterways in North America.
Sixteen dams span the river’s 410-mile-long main stem. Some dams were designed to stop the natural flooding that once devastated—and also nurtured—the watershed. Others collect drinking water for nearly five million people. Of course, what is good for our species is quite often not good for other living things.
The Connecticut River spills over the Turners Falls Dam under the Turners Falls–Gill Bridge in Montague, MA, in September. To the right of the falls is one of the fish ladders in the area. The Number One Station powerhouse and entrance to the power canal is just under the bridge behind the fish ladder.
By early 2021, two power companies that operate four large hydroelectric dams and one associated pumping station on the Connecticut River are expected to submit final relicensing applications to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). These five facilities, which account for more than 40 percent of the hydropower capacity in New England, were last certified half a century ago, when far less was known about how they impaired fish passage and habitat for species such as Atlantic salmon, freshwater mussels, shorebirds, sea lamprey, and blueback herring.
The journeys up and down the River of thirteen species of migratory fish are significantly affected by this cohort of dams. American shad is the object of a longtime but declining fishery on the lower Connecticut River. The annual harvest has been dwindling for years, and there are now only six people licensed to take shad commercially in Connecticut. An anadromous species, shad return from salt waters to their home rivers to spawn where they historically traveled unimpeded as far north as Bellows Falls, Vermont.
A fish ladder connects the lower Connecticut River with the river above Turners Falls.
It turns out that what happens at the Turners Falls Dam in Massachusetts, some ninety miles upriver from Long Island Sound, affects what goes on in Old Lyme, Connecticut, at the river’s mouth. Amazingly, this dam has presented a formidable obstacle to shad and other migratory species since 1798.
Shortnose sturgeon was another lucrative catch a century ago, but it has been listed as an endangered species since 1967. “It took about thirty years to basically wipe that fishery out,” said Andrew Fisk, executive director of the nonprofit Connecticut River Conservancy, an advocacy organization that is closely following the relicensing process.
How shad, sturgeon, and their fellow travelers will fare in the decades to come will depend in large measure on the relicensing of five large hydro projects on the Connecticut River: Turners Falls Dam and Northfield Mountain Pumping Station in Massachusetts and three dams in Vermont: Vernon, Bellows Falls, and Wilder. In 2021, the applications from the two power companies that operate these facilities will be under scrutiny by federal agencies as well as state officials from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont—and from the public.
By law, surface waters belong to the people. Great River Hydro of North Walpole, New Hampshire, and FirstLight Power of Burlington, Massachusetts, are asking for permission to continue manipulating those waters to turn turbines and to turn a profit.
Great River Hydro is seeking approval to run its three hydro plants in Vermont: Vernon, Bellows Falls, and Wilder. The last is the northernmost of the three dams, more than 200 miles upriver from Long Island Sound. FirstLight’s application is for the Turners Falls Dam in northern Massachusetts and its companion facility, the Northfield Mountain Pumping Station. A pumping station allows for the diversion of water from the river so that it can be released later to generate power to meet demand, usually when the kilowatt price is higher.
The Connecticut River flows over Turners Falls Dam, at left, before turning sharply south. Flow is usually diverted through one hydroelectric powerhouse, down the manmade power canal that runs between the river and the village of Turners Falls, and after 2.1 miles, out the Cabot Station powerhouse back into the Connecticut River.
Monitoring or participating in the relicensing process for hydropower facilities is not for the faint of heart. In addition to federal and state agencies, myriad consultants, researchers, and nonprofits like The Connecticut River Conservancy and The Nature Conservancy are involved. The relicensing process began in 2013. More than seventy scientific studies and thousands of pages of information, testimony, and comments are already in the public record. Great River Hydro alone authored thirty-three of the studies and was still working on some of them in mid-September 2020, according to spokesman John Ragonese, the company’s federal license manager. He declined to comment on contents of the final application.
FirstLight has conducted forty studies and as of August 2020 was still working on its final application after receiving a request for more information from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. A spokesman from FirstLight also declined to comment on specifics, including the submittal date of its final application. It will be a public document once it is filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
There are, however, publicly available statistics that shed light on areas where environmental stewardship could be improved—for example, by comparing the fish passage numbers for the Holyoke Dam (which is not part of this relicensing process) with FirstLight’s Turners Falls Dam (which is). The US Fish and Wildlife Service reported in July 2020 that this spring 314,361 American shad, swimming upriver to spawn, safely passed Holyoke and headed north for the next obstacle: the Turners Falls Dam, which allowed just 41,252 of the fish to pass. Some 760 blueback herring successfully ascended Holyoke, but only 3 got by Turners, whose passage number for American eels was zero, compared with 2,645 at Holyoke.
This discrepancy, which has been known for decades, is largely due to the fact that Holyoke has a fish lift, or elevator, that boosts the fish up and over the dam, while species arriving at Turners have to climb fish ladders, which are essentially man-made waterfalls. The ladders were mandated to help Atlantic salmon ascend but are less well suited for species like shad.
“Right now they have poor fish passage at Turners Falls that is out of compliance with federal goals, but those goals are not in their current license,” said Andrew Fisk, executive director of the Connecticut River Conservancy. “We’d been in discussions with them from the late 1990s up to 2010 on how to fix this, but the company took no action, pointing to the license application process that would begin in 2013, saying they would do it then. They were able to get another 10 years without having to make infrastructure improvements.”
“We want 75 percent of the fish that reach a dam to pass upstream,” said Ken Sprankle, US Fish and Wildlife Service project leader for the Connecticut River Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office. He added that Turners Falls passes only about 10 to 15 percent of the fish that reach it.
In addition to improved upstream passage, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has set a target of 95 percent survival rate for fish heading downstream. The mortality rate of fish that pass through the turbines at Turner’s Falls, for example, is greater than 20 percent, according to Sprankle. “The mortality rate of fish going through the turbines is unacceptable,” he said, adding that the dam also has a safer bypass route that is taken by some 40 percent of descending fish. The ultimate goal of improved fish passage, according to Sprankle, is to have shad and other species make use of underutilized river habitat upstream of Turners Falls and the other three dams in the relicensing process.
Len Greene, director of government affairs and communications for FirstLight, which owns Turners Falls, would not comment on the specifics of what the company will include in its application. “When we do file, the amended final license application will address all of the pertinent issues that we need to address according to what the federal government and the state [of Massachusetts] are looking to require,” he said. “I will say that whatever is required under the current license will be vastly improved; the environmental impact of the resources that we own will be substantially improved. That’s a guarantee.”
In addition to improving fish passage, governmental and private stakeholders in the relicensing process are concerned about how dams alter the natural flow of the River, holding back or releasing water based on economic considerations alone. This process, called peaking, can change not just the level and pace of the water, but its temperature and the amount of sediment it deposits as well. Species affected by such activity include not just fish and freshwater mussels but also plants, birds, and animals in the River’s floodplain.
A view south down the Connecticut River as it flows past the Northfield Mountain intake and outlet for the pumped storage facility in Massachusetts.
Regarding the artificial and regular raising and lowering of river levels, Kathryn Kennedy, a scientist with The Nature Conservancy, said, “Species don’t do well typically in systems like that.” She led a recently completed report, The Connecticut River Flow Restoration Study, which was conducted by The Nature Conservancy in collaboration with the US Army Corps of Engineers and other partners. “There are ways to manage the river to provide the energy that’s needed while mitigating and minimizing some of those effects,” she said. The study identifies the environmental impact of various flow patterns and provides “the basis for potential improvements in dam management.”
The ultimate goal would be to get the River to flow more naturally while still meeting the needs of the power grid, satisfying the bottom lines of the hydro companies, and providing for the safety of human populations downstream. It’s a tall order. One rapidly advancing technology that has the potential to help achieve steady-flow generation is lithium-ion storage batteries. The New York Power Authority has joined with Cadenza Innovation, a Connecticut firm, to test its advanced batteries by establishing a demonstration facility this year.
“The economics of battery storage are changing dramatically,” Andrew Fisk said. “It would be a great solution to stop peaking power and allow companies to harvest waterpower and sell it at a better price while not damaging the river as much.”
Kathryn Kennedy said, “We’re very interested in storage batteries, and the technology is almost there, but not quite; I think there is a lot of potential there, and it will probably be a solution at some point.”
When the two applications are received by FERC, the agency will determine if the companies need to provide additional information. At some point soon the applications will be final—public and citizens can weigh in. When FERC accepts the documents as complete, the states where the dams are located have a year to certify whether the two applicants have met their water quality standards.
One thing in this complex and highly technical process is certain—the hydroelectric dams will keep operating. No one expects them to be taken offline. FERC reports that waterpower accounts for 8 percent of total electric generating capacity in the United States and 48 percent of the renewable power nationwide. In a world beset with increasingly alarming impacts of climate change, hydropower can be a key part of the solution.
But that doesn’t mean the water has to flow like it’s 1970, according to Andrew Fisk. “The way you would make a typical hydropower facility to have a much smaller ecological impact would be run-of-river flow, so the water is always moving through the turbines,” he said. “And therefore, the river would fluctuate more or less naturally; you would have up and down stream passage—safe, effective, and timely, those are key words—for all migratory fish.”
Ken Sprankle of the US Fish and Wildlife Service put it this way: “The companies did what they were obligated to do under their current license. But we’re not where we need to be; this is our next bite at the apple. We have to redo this.”
The Northfield Mountain Reservoir covers 300 acres and holds 5.6 billion gallons of water. When released, the water turns the four turbines in the powerhouse below for station nameplate production of 1,146 megawatts. In pump mode, the station can pump up to 6.7 million gallons of water a minute from the Connecticut River into the reservoir.
An adult common loon floats in the water on a lake in Maine. Image Credit: Christopher Zajac.
I saw my first common loon in January of 1958, at the mouth of the Connecticut River. In those days, Griswold Point was connected to the mainland. As a twelve year old, on my own, I could hike dry-shod to the point’s end and survey the River’s mouth. This was an exotic (albeit chilly) destination; an exploration quite separate from my cozy daily family life. But for the loons, it was entirely normal: they wintered there on the cold waters of the Sound, not far offshore, diving and pursuing the small fish of the estuary. Thirty years were to pass before I had a chance to study the little-known migration and winter biology of this “very unbirdlike bird.” I began in 1988 on Maryland’s lower Choptank River, where migrating loons made a long autumn stop to flock-feed on juvenile “peanut” menhaden. Over the next thirty years, at various sites, I gradually came to realize what extraordinary creatures loons are. Loon study is a constant lesson in applied physics and chemistry!
A loon in summer breeding plumage stretches its wings on a lake in Maine. Image Credit: Christopher Zajac.
Loons are among the most aquatic of all birds. After they leave the nest, the only time most healthy loons return to land is for nesting, several years later. And that nest site is at the watery edge of land, sometimes boggy, usually inaccessible, enabling a quick discreet escape to the water. Loons’ obligate waterborne life requires frequent oiling of plumage, which traps an air layer that maintains insulation from cold water and assists floatation. Within loons’ skin are oil (sebaceous) glands that constantly secrete the feathers’ waterproofing. There is also a large oil or uropygial gland that lies in body tissue just above the base of their stub tail. It is drained by a wick of specialized feathers, which they run through their bill, or rub with the back of their head. Both bill and head are then used to spread oil all over the plumage. In calm waters, their white belly shows when they roll onto their back to anoint themselves. Studies estimate that about 10 percent of the day, thus six minutes of every hour, are devoted to this plumage maintenance. To us it may seem like living in a leaky boat, but for loons it quickly becomes second nature. In underwater pictures, loons become slimmer, streamlined creatures, as water pressure compresses the air layer underneath their body feathers. Alas, this marvelous arrangement also means extreme vulnerability to oil spills, which collapse their close-feathered “wetsuit.” Oiled loons can then die of exposure.
Loons’ many physical specializations give them comfortable access to a range of winter habitats unequaled in our bird world, from interior freshwater lakes out to continental shelf waters sixty miles offshore. The latter implies storm hardiness. Breathing between wave crests is doubtless second nature. Dr. Kevin Kenow of USGS (United States Geological Survey) has attached pressure sensors that demonstrate optional diving capacity to 150 feet, when Great Lakes feeding makes that necessary. Add to this the diverse freshwater lake stopovers that loons make on migration, and the huge northern range of lakes and ponds they use for breeding, and loons can fairly be called “Water Masters.” The British name “Great Northern Diver” gets at it—loons are goose-sized; they breed only in northern habitats; and yes, they can dive deep.
The loon’s life history—salt water, fresh water, underwater, aerial, and migratory—challenges our landbound imaginations. I am reminded of Henry Beston’s famous cautionary quote: “…the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.…They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
Flying loon in nonbreeding plumage. Note its feet are turned and pressed together as an aerial rudder and stabilizer, a "flight control device." Image Credit: Amber Hart (flying loon).
For many reasons, I consider loons triumphs of evolution—but they have paid a price for these specializations. Their paddle feet, their sole means of underwater propulsion, are the size of a small human hand. Unlike ducks and geese, these feet are very far back on the body, so loons cannot stand or walk. Thus they have extremely limited “push-along” mobility on land. They require a watery landing strip, which must be quite long to enable their subsequent labored takeoff—an extended taxi to get that weighty body back into the air. Their flight is powerful, three wingstrokes per second, but not buoyant. Their wings are slender compared to those of a wild goose, which has a similar weight. With such heavy wing-loading, they must fly fast, or fall. And yet large numbers of loons traverse the continent’s interior twice a year. They have a broad North American distribution, limited by winter ice on the northern end and heat on the southern end. This loon nation succeeds by using water sites and seasons where man’s presence is either limited or respectful. They are long-lived, potentially healthy into their twenties, slow to mature (given the challenges of learning to be a loon), and when they achieve breeding, they produce at most one or two young each season. To succeed in this beautifully specialized body requires loon intelligence—which might sound like an oxymoron, but clearly is not. Part of my thirty-year fascination has been a quest to learn the nature of that powerfully adaptive non-human intelligence.
Common loons’ biology in Connecticut is an incomplete story: an invitation for the curious coastal naturalist. For example, in a recent year, I visited Griswold Point on the first of November and observed several newly arrived migrant loons feeding together close to shore, in the surf. Such wave action tosses little prey fish around, leaving them less aware of the diving loon, and vulnerable as prey. This poses the question of whether autumn loons on Long Island Sound may flock-feed on locally produced schooling “peanut” menhaden—as I have found them to do very commonly on Chesapeake Bay.
Left: Common Loon chick (Gavia immer) rides on its mother's back as the father cruises past. Right Top: Common Loon on the water in nonbreeding (winter) plumage. Right Bottom: Common Loon resting at the surface of a northern lake. Image Credits: Morris Ellison (brown loon). Getty Images/BrianLasenby (loon family). Getty Images/RLSPHOTO (blue loon).
In winter and spring, two different forms of the Common Loon occur in Connecticut, and they offer a lesson of “Physics in Nature.” The loons wintering on the Connecticut coast are big-bodied, heavy loons that can take the cold. They breed locally in northern New England, and probably maritime Canada. Their heavy wing-loading works because they are short-haul migrants. In contrast, the loons that migrate through in spring come from a separate population of lighter, smaller birds, fledged in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and interior Canada. Research has found they are non-breeding subadults, headed for summer on northern salt waters from New Hampshire to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Thus, they are long-haul migrants, which have migrated south across the continent to winter on the Gulf of Mexico and the southern Atlantic coast. Being smaller and lighter, they are adapted to winter on those warmer waters—and they have the lighter wing-loading that is essential for their long overland cross-continent flights. But for their first few nonbreeding years, they migrate north in spring up the Atlantic coast, thus avoiding the extreme aggression of territorial adults breeding on interior northern freshwater lakes.
Here again, there is more for Connecticut watchers to learn. On May mornings in Lyme and Salem, I have seen and heard some of these loons headed east-northeast—presumably taking a short cut to the Atlantic north of Boston. But the extent of this flyway is unknown. Sometimes there are hundred-loon “fallouts” at the large, strategically located Wachusett Reservoir in eastern Massachusetts. However, other northbound loons continue due east along the coast, some until they reach Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. On the morning of May 6, 2017, I was again at Griswold Point, leading the first outing of the Connecticut Audubon Roger Tory Peterson Center’s new “ecological exploration” field program. The previous day, gale-force winds whipped Long Island Sound to a froth. Then on our two-hour morning watch we saw sixty plus loons headed east-southeast from the Connecticut River, apparently returning to their eastern coastal migration path after taking refuge from the storm somewhere upriver. So in late April and May, keep an eye and ear out for these migrating loons. When airborne, they may make their famous “tremolo” (laugh) call to stay in contact. In forested Connecticut, you might only hear their laughing overland passage.
Paul Spitzer, Wesleyan '68, Cornell PhD '80
Paul Spitzer lived in the Connecticut River Valley during his formative years as a naturalist and ecologist. He was a protégé of Roger and Barbara Peterson. He began his Osprey–DDT research as a senior at Wesleyan University. He continued his doctoral research on northeastern osprey population biology at Cornell. He pursued conservation biology projects on endangered Siberian cranes wintering in India; monarch butterflies in Mexico; endangered kakapo parrots in New Zealand; and raptors in India, with the Bombay Natural History Society. He returned to the Connecticut River Valley to document the successful osprey colony’s dependence on migratory Atlantic Menhaden, thus completing 50 years of intermittent osprey conservation biology. Along the way and over a 30-year period, he also studied the migration and winter ecology of the Common Loon on all three North American coasts. “Over a lifetime, certain species and study areas have become my ‘field laboratories.’” Spitzer says it was a privilege to be engaged in such long, detailed study of ospreys and common loons—“two fabulous creatures that are easy to share with the public.” He is currently seeking a publisher and editor for his loon book.
An Indomitable Spirit
Colt Factory National Historic Site. Image Credits: Christopher Zajac (Colt Armory).Public Domain/Wikimedia (Samuel Colt).
Heading up the Connecticut River, just below downtown Hartford, the west bank reveals an incongruous vision. Eyes are pulled to a blue, onion-shaped dome, spangled with golden stars and tipped with a rampant colt finial. It tops a brick building that once housed a crown jewel of the Industrial Age. The colt is the signature icon of Samuel Colt, one of the most significant Americans ever born on the banks of the Connecticut. His enterprises took him all over the world, but he always returned to his hometown. In Hartford, he established his manufacturing empire, and built his mansion. He loaded a lot of living into his forty-seven years.
John Chester Buttre made this steel engraving circa 1855 of Samuel Colt holding his Colt 1851 Navy Revolver based on a daguerreotype by Philipp Graff taken between 1847–1851.
Sam Colt was born in 1814. His mother died when he was seven. His father remarried, and Sam went to work at a farm just down the river in Glastonbury. He brought with him his two most precious possessions, the flintlock pistol his grandfather carried in the Revolutionary War and “The Compendium of Knowledge.” It was a trove of mechanical and scientific information that stoked his inquisitive nature. He read about David Bushnell who invented the “Turtle,” the hand-powered submarine, which underwent her undersea trials on the Connecticut River. Bushnell’s work had a strong influence on Sam.
When Bushnell was a Yale student, he dabbled in underwater explosions. He successfully detonated a submerged device in a local pond. Fourteen-year-old Sam replicated this feat years later in Massachusetts. He vowed to blow up a raft on a lake as part of the town’s 4th of July festivities. The explosion was mighty, but the raft remained intact. Onlookers wound up soaked and covered with slimy mud. Sam’s penchant for pyrotechnics got him into further trouble at Amherst Academy. He was there to study navigation. His river upbringing had instilled a love of the nautical in the lad. Sam’s prep school career was cut short when he set a school building ablaze with one of his bombs.
His dad decided to ship him out as a common sailor, aboard the Corvo bound for Calcutta. Sam was not popular in the fo’c’s’le. He was flogged for pilfering sweets. But it was there that sixteen-year-old Sam had the revelation that would transform his life. In India, he came across a Collier pistol that could fire more than one shot without being reloaded. Sam considered its deficiencies. He had an epiphany that the Corvo’s steering mechanism and capstan held the key to designing a rotating cylinder that would align a cartridge with a gun’s barrel for successive shots. Sam took out his pocketknife and whittled a piece of wood into the prototype that would change the world.
He returned to the states and fabricated a pistol and a rifle based on his wood model. The pistol exploded, but the rifle functioned well. His dad subsidized these early efforts but refused further funding. Determined to paddle his own canoe, Sam set out with some scientific knowledge to generate start-up scratch. Since he was familiar with nitrous oxide, he put together a show and traveled throughout North America gassing audience members and declaiming erudite aphorisms. He billed himself as “Dr. S. Coult of New York, London, and Calcutta.” He later transformed the act into an interpretation of Dante’s Inferno featuring elaborate wax mannequins, actors, and pyrotechnics. His experience in show business honed Sam’s skills as a raconteur and self-promoter. Self-promotion became an important element of his eventual success.
Sam worked with gunsmiths in Baltimore to improve his designs and manufacture guns. When his products became workable, he travelled to England for patents. Returning to the United States, he secured US patents to manufacture his innovative weapons. The head of the Patent Office was a friend of his family and expedited the process. Sam was ready to produce guns large scale. He attracted venture capital and opened a factory in Paterson, New Jersey. There Sam configured the mass production of interchangeable parts. Output sputtered along, and Sam met with mixed success marketing his inventive firearms. Regulatory red tape prevented sales to state militias. An early order of seventy-five guns was cancelled when Colt could not produce on time. Sam ran into trouble with his backers. They didn’t appreciate his use of company funds for bibulous dinners with potential customers. Sam also felt he should dress well on the company’s dime in order to impress clients. Clients were not sufficiently impressed, and the company folded.
The Colt Factory fire of 1864 is portrayed in this poster lithographed by Ehrgott Forbriger & Co. for the Aetna Insurance Company advertising the $17,485,894.71 paid to Colt for the losses. Image Credit: Courtesy of Jim Griffin/The Sam and Elizabeth Colt Heritage Center (insurance company poster).
Hoping to stay afloat, Sam, inspired by Connecticut River inventor David Bushnell, looked under water. He worked with telegraph pioneer Samuel Morse to create a submersible mine detonated by electricity to blow up enemy ships. He demolished several vessels, but Navy funding never materialized. The project was abandoned. During this time, Sam’s brother John committed a grisly murder. Sam stood by his sibling throughout his trial, but a guilty verdict was rendered. John was scheduled for execution in New York’s Tombs Prison. On the morning he was to hang, he married his pregnant paramour, Caroline Henshaw. After a conjugal visit in his well-appointed cell, a fire broke out in the jail. When the smoke cleared, John was dead from a self-inflicted stab wound. It was generally acknowledged that Henshaw’s baby was Sam’s.
It was by the Connecticut River where Sam’s dreams came true. Sam moved back to his hometown and established Colt’s Patent Manufacturing Company in Hartford’s flood prone South Meadows. He hired men of genius and vision who developed the machinery to create some of the most iconic firearms in history. An order from the Texas Rangers for 1,000 pistols provided the springboard Sam needed to rise to the highest echelons of the Gilded Age. With a proven product, eminently affordable and extremely useful in the mid-19th century world, Colt was the right man in the right place and time. He began construction on a massive industrial complex capped with his signature blue dome. But the river had other plans. The Great Flood of 1854 coupled spring snowmelt with sixty-six hours of driving rain and devastated much of Hartford, including Sam’s building site. His detractors guffawed. Served him right to build in a swamp.
Armsmear, Samuel Colt’s former mansion on Wethersfield Ave. in Hartford, was donated by Colt’s widow, Elizabeth, in her will to become a residential community for senior women. The house is still governed by The Trustees of the Colt Bequest. Image Credit: Christopher Zajac
Undeterred, Sam vowed, “I will bind myself to exclude the river from the South Meadows.” Exclude it he did. He built an extended dike to protect his property and construction recommenced. The following year’s freshet was no match for Colt’s embankment. The River was held at bay, and Sam’s factory came to fruition. It included Vrendendale Dock from which ships could carry his wares around the globe and receive loads of natural resources. The dock also accommodated his private ferry. He used his political clout to charter a service to carry his workers across the River from East Hartford. Some of his captains went on to skipper the grand steamboats that ran between Hartford and New York.
Sam became a world traveler; he hobnobbed with kings, czars, and caliphs. He used his personality to sell guns worldwide. His demonstration at the Crystal Palace Exhibition resulted in international celebrity endorsements and made Colt a household name. Today, in France, a pistol is still called “le colt.” Sam was also a pioneer in product placement. He commissioned famed artist George Catlin to paint scenes featuring Colt firearms. Colt was known to play two sides against each other as he ginned up arms races. He would sell to opposing countries, and supplied both the North and South with weapons in the run up to the Civil War.
The Colt Walker six-shot percussion revolver that won Samuel Colt a contract for 1,000 pistols for the Texas Rangers. The .44 caliber black powder revolver was the result of a collaboration between Colt and Texas Ranger Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker built upon the earlier Colt Paterson revolver. The pistol was manufactured in Whitneyville, CT, by Eli Whitney Jr. Image Credit: Public Domain/Metropolitan Museum of Art Arms and Armor Collection
Colt expanded his holdings and built his personal fiefdom, Coltsville. It included Armsmear, his vast mansion, with its many gardens, lagoons, lakes, fountains, and pathways. He also built housing for his workers. These included the Swiss Village designed to attract German workers to weave willow into wicker products. Sam had planted willow to anchor his dike and realized that its shoots could turn a profit. Coltsville had its own brass band, school, militia, and beer hall. Colt’s recruitment of European workers drastically changed the ethnic makeup of Hartford. He was a pioneer of diversity in Connecticut.
An old smoke stack bearing the Colt name still stands over the old factory building. Image Credit: Christopher Zajac
On June, 5, 1856, the steamboat Washington Irving left Vrendendale Dock bound downriver to Middletown. Aboard were Colt, his bride to be—Elizabeth Hart Jarvis, and their wedding entourage. They were married at the Episcopal Church. After an extended grand tour honeymoon, they took up residence at Armsmear. Elizabeth and Sam set about gathering world art. Their collection would later grace Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum. They had four offspring, but only one, Caldwell, survived childhood. Six years into their marriage, Sam Colt died of gout. Elizabeth became the caretaker of his industrial empire and carefully curated his legacy. Through shrewd hirings, and a sharp eye on the bottom line, she steered the company into the 20th century. She was active in charitable and cultural organizations and was called “The First Lady of Connecticut.”
In Sam’s memory, she commissioned the Church of the Good Shepherd in Coltsville. It’s architecture is infused with images of pistols and rifles. She was a doting mother to Caldwell (Collie). She hoped that he would take the helm of Colt’s enterprises. At twenty-one, he designed a double-barreled repeating rifle, now among the rarest of Colt collectibles. But Collie trod the libertine path favored by second generation sons of Gilded Age magnates. He devoted his life to sailing, hunting, fishing, fine wine, and other hedonistic pursuits. He raced his schooner Dauntless across the Atlantic and brought her to the Connecticut River every autumn to hunt rails and carouse. He died under mysterious circumstances in Florida at age thirty-five. His mother promptly built a memorial Coltsville parish house with maritime motifs throughout. She installed the Dauntless in Essex as a shrine to her son and would visit it every fall. It eventually sank, but Essex still has the Dauntless Club and Dauntless Shipyard.
Today, Coltsville is on its way to National Park status. Visitors to the Wadsworth Atheneum marvel at the art in the Colt art collection. In this time of cultural reflection, Sam’s legacy, especially as it relates to the subjugation of indigenous people and issues surrounding the Civil War, is under re-examination. He was certainly no saint, but his legend lives on. Firearms are still produced under the Colt name. The guns he created are among the world’s most sought after collectibles. Biographies of Sam are churned out regularly. Elizabeth’s beloved Armsmear is now a residence for “senior women of limited income,” the result of her generosity and foresightedness. The Connecticut River still reflects Sam’s blue onion dome as the River he loved flows past his heritage.
There’s a sailor superstition about changing a boat’s name. State of New York, largest and costliest steamer ever to run on the Connecticut River, was to be called Vermont. Few vessels had worse luck. State’s misfortunes began in 1871, when the 300-foot sidewheeler struck a large stone that had gotten away from workers building the Saybrook breakwater. (The principal run in those days was New York to Hartford through Long Island Sound.) Damage to her hull was minor, but State’s schedule was thrown off by a day. On her very next sailing, the steamer piled up on Pot Rock while negotiating Hell Gate. Over the next nine years, State of New York collided with a Brooklyn pier, a Norwich boat, and Joshua’s Rock just up from the mouth. But her worst accident was August 28, 1881, when the steamboat struck a hidden river snag off Salmon Cove, tearing a six-foot gash in her bottom. Harvey Brooks, the pilot on the steamer, wanted to run the boat onto the flats above Lord’s Island but could not prevail upon Captain Peter Dibble to do so. Dibble beached the big steamer quickly, driving her up on the west bank opposite Goodspeed Landing. This was also opposite the glittering Victorian Opera House, built a few years before by the steamboat magnate William Goodspeed.
The impresario tried to make the best of the situation, offering a twin bill of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a tour of the wrecked steamer, but it wasn’t enough. In the end, the wreck of the State of New York forced Goodspeed’s Hartford and New York Transportation company into receivership, and the businessman himself died a year later from illness brought on by overwork.
At 410 miles, the Connecticut River is New England’s longest waterway. Yet it is navigable for only 50 miles, from the wide river’s mouth at Saybrook to the now vanished State Street Landing at Hartford where the big side-wheelers used to tie up. For pilots in the heyday of steamboating, the trip upriver was fraught with danger. “It takes experience to pilot up the Connecticut River,” Captain William H. Hills, commander of the steamer Middletown once said. “You have to be alert, every minute. We used to get stuck on sandbars every now and then and there was nothing to do but wait until the tide rose. Fogs are a nuisance and a lot of trouble to a steamer. We were supposed to run on schedule and all the passengers wanting to know what time we’ll get to New York. If the fog grew too dense, we had to stop altogether, but usually we could keep going at a reduced speed. At that time, oil lanterns at the top of a stick were the only signals we had. Now, there are some towers with lights, but there still is improvement in the way of lighting up the river for boats.”
Meandering rivers like the Connecticut cut away their banks on one side and build them up on the other. The channel is constantly shifting. Boatmen had to learn to read the river and remember all the changes. They had to know it in sunlight as well as in starlight, in fog and blackness. They had to know that it appeared one way on the down trip, and another way on the up journey. “The river is deeper today and wider than it used to be, but still there are numerous sandbars and
shoal waters,” Hills said. “The Connecticut is seldom what you call normal. Fog or ice or high water or low water, and the channel keeps changing. Freshets change the channels. And here and there are fish piers that once were built of stone for the use of fishermen and nobody took them away. They’re not used anymore, and some got knocked down by ice, but you have to know where they are.”
The first European to navigate the Connecticut was the Dutchman Adriaen Block, who sailed up the waterway Native Americans called Quinatucquet, or “Long Tidal River,” in the spring of 1614. Block, for whom Block Island is named, had been gathering beaver skins on the Hudson when clashes with a rival Dutch fur company culminated in the burning of his ship Tyger. The resolute skipper built a new ship with timbers salvaged from the Tyger, a 44½-foot sloop he christened Onrust, roughly translated as “Trouble” or “Strife.” Piloting the vessel through the whirlpool currents of Hell Gate, Block sailed eastward along the coast of Long Island Sound, where he came upon the Housatonic River, which he called “River of Red Hills,” from the iron-stained basalt ridges in the distance. The wide Connecticut he named Versche, or Freshwater River, in contrast to the brackish Hudson. Block explored the Connecticut as far up as present-day Hartford, and a little beyond. As if to confirm his success at fur trading, the town of Windsor claims Block established a fur trading post there.
Onrust was a beamy, shallow-draft vessel, and Block slipped easily over the treacherous sandbar at the mouth of the river and the shoals above Middletown—hazards steamboat pilots would later know as Quarry Bar, Pistol Point shoals, Dividend Bar, Log Bar, Wethersfield Bar, the Clay Banks, and Hartford Bar. It was tricky sailing, to be sure, negotiating all the twists and turns against a headwind, but Block made his way as far as Enfield before the falls turned him back. In his log the navigator wrote: “The depth of water varies from eight to twelve feet, is sometimes four and five fathoms [24–30 feet], but mostly eight and nine feet. The river is not navigable with yachts for more than two leagues farther, as it is very shallow and has a rocky bottom.…This river has always a downward current so that no assistance is derived from it in going up, but a favorable wind is necessary."
Not long ago, a 40-foot sloop heading up the river to Portland grounded on a sandbar off Haddam, and a diver in scuba gear was sent down to work her free. In the age of sail, there was kedging—sending out some sturdy young lads out in a longboat with a ship’s anchor, which they ran out as far as they could before dropping it overboard. Then it was back on deck, hauling on the capstan and inching toward the deeper water, the chore relieved somewhat by a hearty capstan chanty:
Windy weather boys, stormy weather, boys
When the wind blows we’re all together, boys
Blow ye winds westerly, blow ye winds, blow
Jolly sou’wester, boys, steady she goes.
Steamboats need a deeper channel than sailboats. In many places above Middletown five and a half feet was the only depth that could be counted on safely. There was talk of improving the channel as early as the 1650s, but nothing much was done until the churning vessels came along in the early 19th century. In 1806, a ten-feet channel was dug between Middletown and Hartford, and a company granted rights to collect tolls for sixty years for this and other improvements.
The Experiment, first passenger steamboat on the Connecticut River, steamboat sign, 1824.
That was before Robert Fulton, the supposed inventor of the steamboat, chuffed up the Hudson in the Clermont, but Hartford folks had already witnessed Captain Samuel Morey (in 1791 or thereabouts) churn past the wharves in a steamboat of his own devising. Morey piloted his little stern-driven craft all the way to New York, the first long distance trip in a steamboat. However, because of the Fulton-Livingston monopoly, regular steamboat service between Hartford and New York did not begin until 1824 when the 127-foot sidewheeler Oliver Ellsworth, commanded by Daniel Havens of Norwich, “a gentleman of experience in the carrying of passengers and navigating the Sound,” splashed up the River in the spring of that year. A year later a slightly larger vessel was placed on the route, Macdonough, named for a Naval hero of the War of 1812, Commodore Thomas Macdonough, who had died recently and was buried at Middletown. In those days, steamboats also carried sails to help the steam.
From those crude beginnings evolved the Hartford and New York Steamboat Company, which maintained three palatial sidewheelers, City of Hartford, Granite State, and the largest, State of New York. The three boats maintained daily service between Hartford and New York, leaving both ends of the line at four o’clock in the afternoon—the Hartford boat docking at Pier 24 on the East River, Peck’s Slip, at about 5 a.m., and the boat which left New York churning up to the State Street Landing in Hartford at about seven in the morning—provided always the boat was not delayed by fog or grounding. In that case, William Goodspeed, manager of the line, would step out onto a balcony of the Opera House overlooking the river and swear at his captains for arriving at the dock at 8 a.m. instead of 3 a.m. as they should have done normally.
These big sidewheelers were difficult to navigate in the torturous reaches from Saybrook to Hartford. Four men were needed to swing the heavy rudders. Beacons or lights were few and far between in the old days, and a pilot had to know the reaches blindfolded. With the exception of Lynde Point Lighthouse, erected in 1839 to mark the entrance to the Connecticut River, a program of navigational aids was not established until 1856, when three lights were built on the river—one on Calves Island off Lyme, another at Brockway Reach in Joshuatown, and a flashing light on Devil’s Wharf in Deep River. The first leading lights or range lights, which when aligned provide a bearing, was placed at Divided Bar in 1889, and by 1953, there were twenty separate range light installations from Saybrook to Hartford, practically one at every corner.
“Today, you follow the course at night mostly by the government lights,” Captain Hills recalled in 1948, “although on a clear night you can see the banks fairly well and profit by past experience. The greatest difficulty is fog. Of course, there are lights in the towns along the shore. You would think they would help a great deal, but actually they are a hindrance. Brilliant electric lights glare in the pilot’s eyes and obscure his view of the banks. The lights may be some distance back from the shore but it’s still a problem. It’s hard to discover sometimes where the water ends, and the land begins. That’s where the danger lies.”
Snags of the sort that doomed State of New York were a constant threat. In 1870, City of Hartford struck a submerged log on her downward run and stove in her bottom. She began to fill rapidly. Captain Mills rang the engineer for a full head of steam and made for the shallows while the crew worked furiously to pull up carpets, bedding, and furniture and haul them up to the main deck. When her tender Silver Star reached the stricken steamer, City of Hartford presented a pitiful sight, sunk to her guards with her fine Brussels carpets, tapestries, rosewood settees, and marble-topped tables all piled in heap on deck. Six feet of water filled her lower cabins. Passengers, many uncomfortably soaked, were ferried back to Hartford to catch the midnight train for New York.
But City of Hartford’s worst mishap was May 17, 1876, when the 276-foot sidewheeler plowed into the new railroad bridge at Middletown while running at night. The impact of the collision carried away several of the fixed truss spans, draping one across the steamer’s foredeck. A passenger in the ship’s barroom was just lighting a cigar when the crash came. He was hurled several feet in the air and thought he had touched off an exploding cheroot. The pilot was killed.
Steamboat interests had bitterly opposed a crossing at Middletown, thus the railroad was convinced the crash was intentional. But Capt. Russell maintained that the draw span was not lighted as it should have been. Others believe he confused a light on shore with one on the bridge, both of which were white. The case would end in a draw, the judge ordering both sides to split the damages. The positive outcome was that the federal government ordered all drawbridges in the future to be marked with red navigation lights.
Erik Hesselberg has been writing about the Connecticut River for twenty years, first as an environmental reporter for the Middletown Press, and then as executive editor of Shore Line Newspapers in Guilford, where he oversaw twenty weekly newspapers. He lives on the river in Haddam, Connecticut, and is at work on a book about Connecticut River steamboats.
Moose
Moose comes from the Algonquin word Mooswa, meaning “the one who strips twigs.” To fulfill its life functions, the North American moose, Alces alces, requires some 10,000 calories per day, equating to between 50 and 100 pounds of food. But the large cow moose I saw deep in the woods of northern Vermont wasn’t feeding. She was running straight at me.
It was a warm November day, unusual for deer season in Vermont. Given the temperature, I was still-hunting even slower than usual, and it seemed like a good time to enjoy my apple and 3-decker peanut butter sandwich. Scaling the Volkswagen-sized granite boulder in front of me led to the perfect lunch seat. Sitting in sight of the 2,766-foot Wheelock Mountain, in awe of my surroundings, made my day whether I saw a deer or not. For those seeking solitude, this is the place to find it, west of the upper reaches of the Connecticut River in the beautiful Northeast Kingdom. Around me were 20,000 acres of unbroken forestland—mixed hardwoods mostly, with scattered red and white spruce and balsam. Hobblebush and striped maple comprise the understory, with the usual glacial debris of big boulders scattered about. The stubborn leaves of a few maples glistened from a recent rain.
A bull moose wanders through the woods of Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, in early fall.
Image Credits: Getty Image/UfimtsevaV (moose family). Duane Cross (moose photo).
The trembling ground was mild but discernable. I probably would have dismissed it except that it continued and seemed out of place. Earthquakes are rare is these parts of the Appalachian chain, and a sonic boom is just as unlikely. Being miles from any villages or roads, I ruled out a backfire or other traffic noise. Over my left shoulder came the sound of branches snapping. Twisting in that direction, I saw the bulky silhouette of an animal running towards me. In my experience, moose come in two sizes—big and bigger. This moose was in the former category—still, the 700-pound cow was twenty-five yards away and closing on me quickly. I didn’t have time to decide by a coin toss between fight or flight. And yet, something in the look of her eyes told me I was in no danger. The cow moose was not running at me but fleeing some other pursuer. Sure enough, maybe ten yards from me, she veered to my left and continued her gallop into the expanse of the forest. Before I could make sense of what happened, a calf, perhaps four months old, on awkward, spindly legs came galloping after its mother. Already this little moose understood the Game of Life. What had impelled the normally slow and deliberate moose to run for her life and that of her calf? Coyote? Black bear? A determined bull moose? I waited, hoping for an answer, but only the stillness of the forest replied.
This map shows the potential capability of the land of the Connecticut River Watershed to provide habitat for moose based on 2010 data.
Moose are the largest member of the deer family (Cervidae). In North America, the family includes the omnipresent white-tail (Odocoileus virginianus), the western mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), elk (Cervus elaphus), and the tundra-dwelling caribou (Rangifer tarandus). Moose, also being circumpolar, are found throughout temperate and boreal forested regions of the northern latitudes of North America, Europe, and Asia. The species has four recognized sub-species in North America.
The Connecticut River watershed is home to Alces alces americanus, the eastern moose. Its habitat is bounded to the north where northern latitudes transition from boreal forest to a treeless landscape. The limits of their southern distribution generally coincide with the northern habitat boundary of white-tail and mule deer. This is mostly due to habitat that favors the smaller deer, but also because of the presence of the tiny parasite, meningeal nematode, the brainworm. After passing through an alternate host such as snails, eggs of the brainworm are ingested by a deer or moose. The parasites hatch in the gut before migrating to the brain and spinal column. For some reason, deer experience no ill effects from the brainworm, but for moose the parasite is always fatal. They become disoriented and lethargic, display a lack of coordination, loss of appetite, and eventually die.
Like deer, moose are ruminants, with a series of four stomachs, allowing them to digest a wide variety of plants that comprise their vegetarian diet. Food selections range from the most succulent spring growth, such as the swamp dwelling false hellebore and pond lily, to their winter diet consisting of the most fibrous woody stems like those of striped maple and balsam fir. In between those extremes, moose eat a variety moist soil plants and the fruits and nuts of deciduous trees.
Locally, moose are common among the forests of the headwaters of the Connecticut River and its northern Vermont and New Hampshire tributaries. Biologists in New Hampshire and Vermont estimate their statewide populations to be 3,500 and 2,200 moose, respectively, the majority concentrated in the northern part of each state. As you travel the river downstream, moose habitat transitions from boreal (like pines) to deciduous along the Vermont–New Hampshire border to the cultivated and developed landscapes of southern New England. Moose populations decrease correspondingly along this gradient to where they become an anomaly. Massachusetts biologists estimate the statewide moose population to be around 1,000 animals, largely in the reach of the Quabbin Reservoir, while Connecticut has around 100 moose, concentrated near the Massachusetts border.
A bull moose in the summer with velvet on his antlers in New Hampshire.
Image Credits: Map and data by North American Landscape Conservation Cooperative, Kevin McGarigal, Bill DeLuca 2015 (map). Getty Image/Serz72 (moose tracks). Daniel Berna (moose photo).
In 1781, then-Minister to France Thomas Jefferson had a complete moose skin, including hooves, sent to him in Paris. He wanted to settle a dispute with the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who insisted that American mammals and people (i.e. Indians) were categorically “smaller and weaker” than their European counterparts. Jefferson was incensed. In characteristic American fashion, the future President declared that North American moose were in fact so large that a European reindeer could trot comfortably “under the belly,” which was probably an exaggeration. To settle things, Jefferson wrote to New Hampshire Governor John Sullivan to have a specimen sent to Paris. Upon seeing the moose reassembled in Jefferson’s apartment, Buffon is said to have exclaimed, “I should have consulted you, Monsieur, before I published my book on natural history, and then I should have been sure of my facts.” All this is to say that Sullivan had no trouble fulfilling Jefferson’s request as moose were plentiful in those days. They served as an important food source for the region’s wolf and catamount populations and for the Iroquois, Saint Francis, Pemigewasset, and Abenaki Indian nations. Moose hides were also an important source of clothing material for these peoples.
A moose calf in the East Inlet Wildlife Area in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Moose populations started to decline in part as a result of beaver trapping. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the soft underfur of castor canadensis was prized for hat making, and even Plymouth Pilgrims, who came to America in 1620, developed a profitable trade with local tribes, exchanging shell beads known as wampum for pelts. The fur trade also drew the first English settlers to the Connecticut River Valley in the 1630s. However, the European hat craze led to over-trapping in North America, and by the end of the 17th century, beaver populations in New England had been reduced to a remnant existence. This loss of beaver-based wetlands on which moose depend for forage, along with the clear-cutting of the forest for wood products as well as agriculture, resulted in a steep decline in moose populations, and by the early 1900s, these emblems of wilderness had virtually disappeared from New England. However, with the abandonment of family hillside farms following the Civil War, New England’s forests began to grow back. And with that came many of the extirpated wildlife, including deer, moose, and beaver. As the 20th century progressed, slowly and surely, moose and deer populations grew. First from remnant populations in Maine and Quebec. Then, spreading to northern New Hampshire and Vermont until late the 1990s when moose could be observed, in varying numbers, throughout the Connecticut River watershed.
When I began my career as a wildlife biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department in 1980, moose were still so uncommon that the biological staff recorded every moose encountered in the course of our field work. In those days, an annual total for me might be two or three moose. However, in the presence of abundant habitat and the absence of any native predator (e.g. wolves, catamounts, or First People), moose populations in northern New England grew quickly. So much so that the very habitat that fostered such growth was becoming deteriorated by hungry moose. A human impact was being felt too. Foresters complained young trees were being wiped out by the voracious cervids. Maple syrup makers complained that moose in their daily travels were readily walking through their expensive pipeline systems and the grim statistic of highway fatalities resulting from collisions with moose were increasing.
In response to this turning of the tide, wildlife agencies in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont established regulated moose hunting seasons in 1980, 1988, and 1993 respectively. Through diligent data collection and thorough analysis, each state’s biologists carefully honed their respective hunting seasons. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, moose populations had returned to an equilibrium with their habitat. But just as this over-population threat was resolved a new and dangerous threat emerged.
Shorter winters due to climate change may seem like a blessing. What is there to argue about lower home heating costs, less snow to shovel, and a longer growing season? Well, nothing, especially if you are a tick. The longer growing seasons are creating longer spring and fall feeding periods (questing) for the region’s tick populations. This turn of events is not only allowing tick populations to grow in size but also to expand their regional distribution too. As the now infamous and all too common black-legged, or deer tick (Ixodes damini), has wreaked havoc on the human population, the moose tick (Dermacentor albipictus) is seriously impacting New England’s moose population.
Unlike the multiple-host deer tick, dermacentor is a one-host tick. They will undergo all three of their developmental molts (nymph to larva to adult) on a single animal. Gravid (pregnant) females attach to their preferred host during their fall questing period. Once attached to the moose, they remain there for the entire winter nourishing their eggs with the host’s blood. As spring arrives, the females detach themselves and fall to the ground where they begin laying thousands of their fully developed eggs. Like all ticks, notorious for their blood sucking tenacity, the moose tick has been linked to poor over-wintering survival and poor neonatal development.
Moose infested with over-wintering ticks excessively lick themselves seeking relief from the irritation caused by what can be tens of thousands of individual feeding ticks. Persistent licking leads to loss of hair and the important insulating quality it provides. This in turn leads to excessive heat loss and an increase in the consumption of stored energy reserves (fat). Premature fat loss can lead to rapid body weight loss, hypothermia, and starvation. In the case of pregnant moose, calves are born underweight and likely receive poor post-natal nutrition as its mother attempts to recover her own body condition. Adult moose have been reported with having 100,000 winter ticks attached, and calves can host as many as 15,000 ticks at once. Research indicates a moose calf with a high tick load can lose approximately half of its total blood volume over two to four weeks. Poor physical condition also makes moose more susceptible to other debilitating parasites such as lungworms (Varestrongylus) and roundworms (Parelaphostrongylus). Fortunately, research by the states of Vermont and New Hampshire and the Province of Quebec is leading to a better understanding of this complex problem and to hopeful answers.
Despite the fact that moose sightings are down significantly from the late 2000s, there is hope. Data from independent studies reported by the wildlife agencies of Vermont and New Hampshire indicate that lower overall tick counts appear to correlate with current moose population densities. However, as climate change continues to impose shorter winters on the ecosystem, conclusive results will require much more study. Still, one can take a slow drive through the moose country of the northern reaches of the Connecticut River watershed during the low-light hours of dawn and dusk and have a reasonable chance to spot this endearing symbol of the wild northern forest.
A moose wanders through the fall woods in Easton, New Hampshire.
Image Credits: Daniel Berna (moose calf). Duane Cross (adult moose).
About the Photographers
Duane Cross is a photographer living in northern New Hampshire who began photographing local wildlife in 2008. His favorite subjects are black bears and moose. When he can’t find bears and moose, he photographs any wildlife that wanders in front of his lens, usually fox, loons, and other birds. His website is duanecrosspics.com.
Daniel Berna is a wildlife photographer based in Newbury, Vermont. Capturing close-up action shots is his specialty. Daniel worked as an appraiser of conservation lands for over thirty years, which allowed him to explore Vermont’s beautiful farmland, wetlands, and forests. Many of his earliest photos were taken “on the job.” Now retired, he spends hours at a time in his hunter’s blind and kayak waiting for the perfect shot. He isn’t afraid to get cold, wet, or dirty in the pursuit. His photographs have been featured in the Vermont Fish & Wildlife calendar for the past five years. More of his work can be found at danielberna.com or his Instagram account @danielberna5462.
ABOUT OUR BLOG:
In case you missed it, our luscious website (estuarymagazine.com) also features a blog—that strange information beast, a contraction between web and log, intended to add value to readers’ lives and to inspire action. In addition to offering back stories behind the magazine’s articles and features, the blog provides links to sources of activities and information, including past, present, and planned articles in the magazine related to the blog’s subject matter.
We identified in the inaugural blog four calls to action:
- Subscribe to the magazine to learn more about the River—its wildlife, recreational opportunities, science and conservation issues, important people, lifestyle and culture, and fascinating history. Tell your friends and relatives about Estuary.
- Go outside and enjoy the environment and recreational opportunities of the River and surrounding watershed; if this is not possible, experience the River vicariously through the features and high-resolution pictures in the magazine.
- Become involved in meaningful conservation activities for the River and watershed. These may range from advocating for sound environmental policies in your state and town to engaging in environmental monitoring studies, in creating synergies among like-minded organizations to leverage scarce resources, in the removal of invasive species, in community development projects involving the River, in habitat management, and in the reduction of your carbon footprint, to name some. The blog will promote important conservation projects that will benefit from community participation.
- Send us your ideas about the Connecticut River and its watershed in care of info@estuarymagazine.com. The same goes for your feedback about how to improve the magazine, including the topics that you would like to see in future issues and in its blog.
Several installments later our blog continues to be a learning experience for us, defined as the process by which we increase our capacity for effective action, that is, coaxing our readership’s involvement in the preceding activities. We are still learning in the blog how to facilitate navigation among topics with keywords, to narrate personal stories succinctly, to encourage participation, to provide evergreen (lasting) content, to use images, and to establish thought leadership by communicating influence and authority.
Looking ahead, we anticipate increasing the blog’s effectiveness by making it a greater team effort than it is today. Just as with the magazine itself, we will empanel a select team of competent contributors, with occasional guests, to brainstorm topics and to write, illustrate, and edit our blog’s content. What won’t change is our deep appreciation for your comments and feedback.
Gratefully,
Ralph T. Wood
Editor, Estuary Blog
From the Publisher:
This issue of Estuary contains our first article by a descendant of Indigenous people. These people inhabited North and South America for thousands of years, maybe 12,000 years, long before the word “America” existed. The “colonizers” from Europe, by contrast, have inhabited the Connecticut River valley for fewer than 400 years. The coexistence was rocky almost from the outset. The history has been told mainly from the standpoint of the so-called colonizers. At Estuary, we intend to alter that by working with storytellers who can represent the rich history of Indigenous people…with authenticity.
Julia Kelly at Omaha Beach June 5, 2019 (courtesy of Julia Kelly)
Speaking of that coexistence, the Connecticut River watershed has its own intense history since 1614 when the Dutch explorer, Adrean Block, navigated the River for some sixty miles from what is now Old Saybrook almost to the Massachusetts–Connecticut border. It is a story of friendship, cooperation, distrust, chicanery, treachery, and despicable conduct on both sides. It has been, in effect, a poignant clash of civilizations of great magnitude and intensity.
Indigenous communities had a quality of life that is enviable in many respects even today. They generally coexisted peacefully with one another. They knew how to get along. As we learn in this issue, many had two homes…a summer house and a winter house. They had an abundance of healthy food that they grew or caught. They traded extensively. They had a form of currency. They had private and public transport. They had a tradition of philanthropy. When they had to fight with one another, there were traditions of honor and respect. Women in certain tribes had veto power over decisions to go to war; after all, it was their brave sons who were going to risk their lives.
Today, Indigenous people have to lobby for many rights in a world that swamped them with its foreign laws, constitutions, cultures, weapons, military strategies, and overwhelming numbers. Reservations were created whereby Indigenous communities could exist and prosper…but only to a point. For example, they had to work hard to extract rights over minerals under their ground, or to exercise dominion over the forests and rivers on what was once their land.
To compensate for vast wealth taken from them, the western-style governments have authorized tax exemptions on products such as cigarettes and liquor. They are compensated with royalties on gas and oil produced on their reservations. They can build casinos.
Fairness has always been ill-defined and out of reach as so-called western traditions and culture have dominated.
Nonetheless, within the United States, the past two hundred years have marked a period of sincere, and arguably successful, effort to reconcile grievances. At the opening ceremonies of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, in 2004, many Native people who were veterans of the US military paraded proudly with flags of their tribal nation as well as the US flag. Native Americans have fought on the side of the US in every war since and including the Revolutionary War.
Much controversy and lack of understanding surrounds virtually every facet of the history of the United States and its relations with Native communities. We will not take sides at Estuary. We do plan to help tell the stories from the standpoint of Indigenous people who lived in the Connecticut River valley. This side has been too often overlooked, or biased toward the colonizers, in our history books. We will help set the record straight.
Dick Shriver
Publisher & Editor
The Elusive Bobcat
By Bill Hobbs
Photos by Paul Fusco
Meet the bobcat, an elusive, captivating animal that is prevalent in the Connecticut River Valley, yet one that many of us—myself included—have rarely seen in the wild. Maybe this comment explains why: “They have a behavior where if something is coming toward them (like you or me), and they don’t have time to walk out of the way, bobcats just lay down and stay still and let whatever it is walk right by them,” said Patrick Tate, a veteran wildlife biologist, who serves as furbearer project leader for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department.
“Their camouflage works extremely well, even when they’re out in the open,” said Tate, adding, “If you put a bobcat in the woods, with the shadows and the weeds and the brush, they disappear immediately.”
Tate is talking about an animal almost double the size of a domestic cat, cloaked in hard-to-see brown to brownish red fur, with a white underbelly, pointed ears, and a black-tipped, short, “bobbed” tail. Most measure only 26–41 inches long, weigh 13–30 pounds, and stand 21 inches high.
According to Tate, bobcats have powerful, long claws and strong jaws, enabling male bobcats, who are bigger than females, to bring down adult deer. Bobcats are also fast, maneuverable, and can change directions on a dime when pursuing preferred prey, like mice, voles, squirrels, and rabbits, Tate said.
For me, that begged the question: Are bobcats considered apex predators?
“That’s a very difficult question to answer,” Tate said, “because if you look at the definition of an apex predator, it can affect all wildlife. And the bobcat is certainly not affecting our moose or eastern coyote population.” Instead, Tate prefers to call bobcats “meso carnivores,” or medium-sized predators who eat strictly meat.
Despite their agility and hunting prowess, bobcats lead a surprisingly brief and challenging life. They live an average of 5–6 years in the wild but can live longer. “The oldest that I can recall was 13 years old,” Tate said.
Broken teeth, infections from fighting with other bobcats, and blindness, often caused by scratches or punctures sustained in these fights, take their toll on bobcats, Tate said. Road crossings are another hazard. For example, last year, 50–60 bobcats were killed by cars in New Hampshire.
“What about coyotes. Would they kill a bobcat?” I asked Tate.
“I don’t have any evidence of eastern coyotes preying upon bobcats, and I don’t think they’d be dumb enough to do it because a bobcat has four paws with very sharp claws and a strong jaw, whereas an Eastern coyote simply has a very strong jaw. It’s not going to win that fight,” Tate said.
Currently, there are 2,400–2,800 bobcats in New Hampshire, Tate said, and the population is increasing at a whopping 15 percent. I could not verify bobcat populations in neighboring states, but an internet search revealed the following comparisons: Vermont has an estimated population of 2,500–3,000 bobcats; Massachusetts, 3,500; and Connecticut, 1500.
“Given the success we have had trapping and the good number of photos we’ve gotten in our camera detections, bobcats are more common than I had anticipated,” added Tracy Rittenhouse, associate professor at UCONN’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.
Finally, I asked Tate what do you do if you encounter a bobcat in your backyard or out on the trail? Here is his advice: “Give the animal space. Know that they will display what people consider ‘brazen behavior,’ simply because the bobcat thinks they are hidden. They don’t realize they’re so visible,” Tate said.
If a bobcat approaches you, which would be extremely rare, Tate said a loud, deep-based voice, sounding gruff, will help move the bobcat out of the area. “But know that they are animals that will go into the brush and slink away at a slow rate of speed because they take advantage of their camouflage.”
Tate said bobcats are attracted to people’s backyards for two reasons: first, birdfeeders, which attract chipmunks and squirrels which are favorite food items for bobcats, and second, range-free chickens may be present. “Once the bobcat finds those range-free chickens, they’ll come in and take one per day, unless the chickens are cooped,” Tate said.
Tate admits, “The number one call I receive regarding what landowners consider a nuisance is the bobcat.” But he adds, “As a biologist, I don’t want to see a very charismatic, beautiful animal become regarded as a problem animal.”
“Bobcats matter,” Tate said. “They’re a wonderful predator, helping to control small mammal numbers.”
Bill Hobbs is a nature columnist for The Day in New London, CT. For comments, he can be reached at whobbs246@gmail.com.
Paul Fusco has been photographing wildlife for over 30 years in the habitats of Connecticut and beyond. His background in art, design, and natural history all come together in his photographic expression of our natural world.
What's for
DINNER?
Pekin Duck
(not Peking Duck)
Image Credits: Getty Images/TomFoldes
Pekin Duck and Peking Duck are wildly different! Peking Duck is the cooking preparation and presentation of a duck dish originated in Peking (Beijing), China, during the Imperial era and is still popular today.
The flightless, white feathered Pekin Duck is an American breed of domestic duck raised for meat and egg production. It was thought to have been brought from China to the US through San Francisco and then on to New York in the late 19th century and sold primarily to immigrants. Now, Pekin duck, most commonly referred to as Long Island Duck, is enjoyed worldwide. Annual production in the US is 31 million.
The Pekin Duck has gained other fame as perhaps the model for Donald Duck and the mascot of a certain insurance company. These white feathered friends have been domesticated and are often kept as pets with a lifespan of 9–12 years.
That being said…if you’d rather eat them than feed them…here are some surprisingly simple recipes!
- Duck breast, long considered a delicacy in French cuisine, is exceptionally moist and tender if prepared with a few simple rules in mind.
- Foremost, duck should always be sufficiently cooked to render off its fat, which can be reserved for other delectable uses. This will ensure a crispy skin.
- Cook between 125 degrees for rare and 130 for medium rare to give you a succulent pink delight. Of course, you can always cook it longer to your taste.
- Duck pairs well with fruit and citrus…enter the French standby Duck a L’Orange or Gastrique…still a fan favorite!
Duck Breast…2 Ways!
First the duck breast. Plan on one per person with leftovers, of Long Island Duck (less gamy than others and more widely available), boneless with skin on, 8oz each.
♦ Trim off any excess skin.
♦ Create a cross hatch pattern on the skin side by slashing through the skin and fat on the diagonal every ½", creating a diamond pattern, being careful not to cut the meat.
♦ Salt and pepper both sides and let it warm up to room temp…about 30 minutes.
♦ Pat off any moisture and resalt.
♦ Place, skin side down, in a cold skillet with a dash of olive oil to get things started.
♦ Cook on medium heat for 6–10 minutes. The idea is to slowly render off the fat which you will remove from the pan as it accumulates and save for future use.
♦ When skin is crispy, turn over and cook for 2 minutes.
♦ Place in 350° oven and bake for 4 minutes, until interior temperature is 130° for medium rare.
♦ Let rest at least 10 minutes before slicing. Slice at 90-degree angle across the grain about ¼” thick. Parfait!
Sauce #1…a L’orange
♦ Julienne the rind of 1 orange. Squeeze out the juice and set aside.
♦ Drop julienned pieces into boiling water for 2 minutes…to soften and take the edge off the pith. Drain.
♦ Heat ½ cup of sugar in a saucepan over medium heat without stirring until it begins to melt.
♦ Swirl the pan to redistribute sugar and evenly caramelize to create a uniform amber color, for about 5 minutes.
♦ Add ¼ cup of apple cider vinegar, being careful of the steam and splash back, and stir with a wooden spoon for another 5 minutes or until slightly reduced.
♦ Add the orange juice and zest and continue to simmer until foam forms on the top, about 5 minutes longer.
♦ Add 1 T of butter and season with salt and pepper.
♦ Fan out duck slices on a bed of wild rice and haricots verts or sides of your choosing and drizzle with sauce.
Sauce #2…avec Rutabagas and Pear Jus
♦ Using the empty skillet you roasted the duck in, retain 2 T of duck fat and add ½ lb. large chunks of rutabagas with salt and pepper, toss and roast in a 400° oven until browned on the bottom and beginning to get tender…15–20 minutes.
♦ Stir in 4 fresh sage leaves, 1 bay leaf, and 1 smashed garlic clove.
♦ Continue to roast for another 15 minutes or until tender.
♦ Transfer the rutabagas to a platter.
♦ To the pan, over medium high heat, add 2 diced pears, ½ C chicken stock, and 1/4 cup brandy…bring to a boil.
♦ Cook, stirring to loosen browned bits remaining in pan, until pears are soft and juice is slightly thickened, 5–10 minutes. Remove bay leaf.
♦ To plate, fan out slices of duck on top of a mound of turnips and spoon pear sauce over the top. Garnish with parsley. Serve with a frisée salad perhaps!
“Sunset Over the Connecticut River”
Photo by Susanne Hall
This dramatic photo was taken by Frank Dinardi, an amateur wildlife photographer from Connecticut. If you have a passion for nature and the art of photography, you can help Estuary magazine document the variety of birds and animals in their natural habitat along the Connecticut River and its tributaries. We would also like to see action sports and landscapes. Share your work with us and our readers. We will select and present the best we see in our future quarterly issues and on our website. You’ll be compensated beyond bragging rights.
Like a caged animal relegated to a spectacle,
the falls churn as tourists gawk, knowing the rumble
and spray are for their amusement. Painters
daub at easels beside the granite block dam
and photographers focus on the roiling white foam.
Fishers cast their luck into bouldery, turbulent riffles.
Once the muscular water spun wheels and turbines,
turned gears and drive shafts that drove slapping
leather belts, powering machines and jobs energizing
a village with cash. It whirled dynamos, sending
streams of electrons along wires that lit a brick
factory, homes, the bank, grocery and barber shop.
The river ground grain, sawed lumber, forged steel,
stamped machetes, and sharpened axes.
In deeper time, natives came with spears to where
the swift water slowed the salmon, blueback herring
and shad. They feasted, celebrated, and fed families
in this place of abundance.
The river’s business is now entertainment, drawing
trade to the village like a free lunch. Sightseers stop
for fuel and a quick bite, bait, a newspaper
or bottle of beer. But as sure as the river runs, it holds
us in thrall, mesmerizing with falling water reflecting
every face as it slides over the precipice.
David Leff is an award-winning essayist, poet, and former deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. His website: www.davidkleff.com
Thick growths of bullhead pond-lily, Nuphar variegate, with some pickerel weed, Pontederia cordata, scattered throughout make for a scenic view of Chester Creek, one of the many tidal wetlands along the lower Connecticut River. Thick mats of Hydrilla (note the inset photo) may grow earlier in the season and would potentially crowd out the native plants growing in the water column. Chester Creek is one of many tidal wetlands that help define what makes this place special and worth protecting.
in our Estuary Waters
By now, knowledge that invasive plants are bad news is pretty widespread. Numerous articles and agencies cite “billions of dollars” in damages annually to agriculture and fisheries; they are the “leading cause” of population decline and extinction in animals. Once established, invasive plants can seriously disrupt the natural communities and ecological processes that define the places we love—like the Connecticut River Estuary.
The arrival of the aquatic plant Hydrilla verticillata (also known as waterthyme) to the estuary was without fanfare. In fact, it has established itself so quickly and to such an alarming extent that it has taken those familiar with local coves and tributaries—and the conservation community—by surprise.
Fragments that contain as little as a single whorl of leaves are capable of drifting to other parts of a waterbody and starting a new colony. Hydrilla verticillata, also known as waterthyme, (top left) and the native waterweed (Elodea Canadensis).
Hydrilla was first found in the state of Connecticut in 1989 in a pond in Mystic; it was the first authenticated record of this plant, and the most northern locality known in eastern North America. When it arrived in the Connecticut River watershed is less clear, although the Connecticut River Conservancy sounded the alarm in 2018 with the observation of mats of Hydrilla in the Middletown area.
The concern over Hydrilla is well founded—there’s a reason why it takes its name from the nine-headed serpent from Greek mythology, Hydra. Once established, this perennial plant is known to completely displace native submerged plant communities. Hydrilla can alter fish populations, cause shifts in plankton communities, and affect water chemistry. Perhaps most insidious, Hydrilla, although generally growing from fleshy roots called tubors, is also capable of existing as a free-floating mat at the surface, and because the stems are easily broken off, they will float and establish downstream (and come back in with the tide). As if this were not enough, Hydrilla also produces reproductive buds at the base of branching stems, called turions. Both turions and tubors can remain dormant in undisturbed sediment for over four years—and can even survive “ingestion and regurgitation by waterfowl” according to one account. Stems of Hydrilla have been known to grow up to thirty feet long; they require very little light to succeed. It’s not difficult to see why the first discovery of this plant in the state raised concern.
Hydrilla has captured the attention of marina owners and recreational boaters concerned about the potential diminishment of the River’s recreational value. Pictured: Portland Boat Works.
Hydrilla grows completely submerged in the water. It has small, bright green pointed leaves that circle the stem in groups of five (generally) with serrated edges and one or more sharp “tooth-like” points under the center of the leaf. Hydrilla also tends to be stiffer than the native lookalike American Waterweed (Elodea Canadensis) and capable of maintaining its shape out of water.
How did it get here?
Hydrilla originated in Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Korea); today it is found on every continent except Antarctica. It was first discovered in the United States in the 1960s from two separate locations in Florida; it is documented in thirty states now, many in the southeast, but also four western states. It is likely that Hydrilla was intentionally brought to the states as an aquarium plant. Its introduction to natural waterways was assured once the goldfish died and the aquarium contents were emptied into a local waterway. Today this plant has many vectors for movement: attached to boats, trailers, recreational gear, in the treads of vehicles and machinery, and even on pet fur.
We Should be Worried
Knowing how robust this plant is, and that the Army Corp of Engineers has called it “the almost perfect weed,” it’s a good idea to sit up and take notice. The US Fish and Wildlife Service refers to it as “the world’s worst invasive aquatic plant.”
The Connecticut River Estuary region has received multiple environmental designations—state, federal, even global—that acknowledge its remarkably intact coves and embayments and system of healthy salt, brackish, and freshwater tidal marshes. The estuary is home to an extraordinary diversity of plants and animals. One of the lesser known drivers of this healthy aquatic ecosystem is the diversity of native submerged aquatic vegetation that provides food, refuge, and an oxygenated water column for many species—insects, fish, shellfish among them, that feed a multitude of other, more familiar species such as the iconic osprey and great egret.
Margot Burns, Environmental Planner with the Lower Connecticut River Council of Governments (RiverCOG) collects and tracts the location of Hydrilla samples to send for genetic testing. Transportation was provided by the Coast Guard, who maintains navigational buoys—including removal of fouling vegetation—in the Connecticut River.
Loss and replacement of these diverse underwater habitats not only threatens the myriad life in the estuary—it stands to threaten livelihoods and property values. Greg Bugbee, Associate Scientist with the Invasive Aquatic Plant Program at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) in New Haven, has worked with colleague Summer Stebbins on a two-year survey of the southern portion of the Connecticut River, mapping Hydrilla and other invasive aquatic plants. He has begun to field calls from marina owners who are worried about the impact on their businesses and the recreational value of the River. At least one of the local marinas has already lost business because of Hydrilla concentrations. As scenic coves and inlets begin to show signs of dense floating mats, homeowners of expensive (and tax generating) shoreline real estate may also sound the alarm.
What Can and is Being Done
In 2018 the Connecticut River Watershed Hydrilla Task Force was formed through the Northeast Aquatic Nuisance Species program (NEANS). This initiative corralled state and federal agencies and non-profits from five states—no small task, despite the relatively small geographic size of New England. A draft management plan has been generated, and a computer-driven dialogue has informed field work and helped zero in on where Hydrilla is prevalent in the watershed, namely in southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Momentum has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the roots of collaboration have been established.
The CAES survey in the lower River was initiated in 2019 through the efforts and funding of the Lower Connecticut River Valley Council of Governments (RiverCOG), the Connecticut River Gateway Commission, and Connecticut Resource Conservation and Development (RC&D). Plant samples collected in 2019 were sent to the University of Wisconsin for DNA analysis, which identified the Connecticut River plants as being genetically more similar to Hydrilla from Japan and Korea than what has previously been collected in the US, suggesting that the plants in the Connecticut River “might represent a significant new genotype for the USA.” While interesting, it’s not clear at this point what this means for any effort to control Hydrilla in the estuary. During the 2019 survey, it was noted that of the Hydrilla plants recovered, none appeared to have the characteristic tubor rooted in the sediment—perhaps good from the perspective of possessing one less means to reproduce?
The quest for a solution to the growing Hydrilla challenge in the estuary will be informed by actions taken elsewhere in the nation, and brought to light, in part, through the Hydrilla Task Force and the effort to survey the lower River. Tools include hand pulling, dredging, suction harvesting, use of floating booms and benthic mats, and biological control that includes snails, leaf-mining flies, and tuber-feeding weevils. None of these tools is without risk, and most can be expensive.
Persistence
As discouraging as this may seem, it is not the first time (nor will it be the last) that the estuary has been under siege. That this place has persisted through time, halfway between the urban centers of New York and Boston, is remarkable. We want to keep it that way.
Admittedly, Hydrilla—the nine-headed serpent—appears to be a formidable foe. But already, local individuals and organizations are rallying, and we’ve never had as much access to information and technology as we have today. If you want to help, remember that it only takes a one-inch fragment of Hydrilla to begin a new infestation: clean your boat—and your clothing, and your pet—before leaving the River. And tell others. The estuary is counting on us.
About 80% of Hydrilla’s biomass is in the upper two feet of the water column. Branching stems grow horizontally, forming impenetrable mats.
Moon over swans and geese on Barton Cove.
In March 2019, a flock of 20 tundra swans made an unexpected overnight visit to a historic canal at Turners Falls, Massachusetts, one of the Connecticut River watershed’s finest winter birding destinations. The swans, which breed in the Arctic and overwinter on the mid-Atlantic coast and other regions, delighted fortunate observers before departing the next morning.
Sightings of rare species are commonplace at Turners Falls, an industrial village in the town of Montague with a variety of attractions and features centered around the Connecticut River. In precolonial times, Native American tribes used the area as a gathering place and trade center, with bountiful harvests of salmon and shad at the rocky rapids of Great Falls. In the late 19th century, proprietors established a dam and canal network to facilitate passage by boats. After the canal closed, the infrastructure was rebuilt in 1869 to provide power for mills in one of the nation’s first industrial centers. Today the Turners Falls Dam, enlarged in 1970, is one of the hydroelectric facilities managed by First Light Power.
Picturesque Barton Cove, a broad still-water outflow above the dam, is renowned for diverse bird life and scenic views. Bald eagles established a nest on diminutive Barton Island in 1989, when the species was just beginning to recover after being extirpated from most of New England during the 20th century. This was largely due to widespread use of pesticides such as DDT. In Massachusetts, eagles were successfully restored at Quabbin Reservoir during the 1980s, and nearly 80 nesting pairs have been documented statewide as of 2020. Eagles are regularly seen stalking potential prey and soaring over downtown Turners Falls. Roughly 35 waterfowl species have been recorded at the cove, including uncommon winter visitors such as American wigeons, green-winged teal, lesser scaups, and greater white-fronted geese. A variety of gulls, including rare Iceland (or Kumlien’s), glaucous, and lesser black-backed gulls, also frequent the area. Viewing is especially productive when water is partially frozen and birds congregate in open water and along ice edges.
A mallard duck, left, and green winged teal, right, walk across the ice on Barton Cove in Montague, Mass.
The cove’s south shore, off Route 2 in Gill, is a finger-like peninsula of basalt bedrock where many dinosaur tracks were discovered in the 19th century. This land is also owned by First Light Power, which manages a nature trail and seasonal campground there. From the day-use entrance, where there are fine views, the trail leads to an observation platform atop a ledge before winding along outcroppings to the peninsula’s western tip. Here it meets the campground access road, which passes several partial views of the Connecticut River, where flocks of ring-necked ducks, mergansers, and common loons may be spotted. The round-trip hike is 1.7 miles with approximately 300 feet elevation gain.
On the west shores near downtown Turners Falls, Unity Park offers more open views and access to the north end of the Canalside Rail Trail, a 3.6-mile paved path linking the various historical sites and attractions. From parking areas on First Street, the trail follows the cove’s edge to the Turners Falls Dam, where short detours lead to views of rushing water and the nearby Great Falls Discovery Center, an educational visitor center with well-crafted exhibits featuring the Connecticut River watershed.
Canada geese on the power canal in Turners Falls, Mass.
Downstream from the dam, the canal extends for about two miles, passing by old brick factories and iron bridges. At its southern end is another birding hot spot, a wide reservoir near a power station. The warm, sheltered water serves as a haven for waterfowl and gulls, especially when nearby areas are frozen. Notable single-day winter observations include 4,100 Canada geese, 1,900 mallards, 800 herring gulls, and 400 common goldeneyes. Goose flocks often depart the canal around sunset, making for a striking spectacle. Snow geese, and even rarer Ross’ geese, periodically join the masses during migrations to and from Arctic breeding grounds. Scan the waterfowl flocks carefully for uncommon species such as Barrow’s goldeneyes, which are rarely seen inland.
Iceland gull (Kumlien's) on the ice in Barton Cove in Montague, Mass.
This section of the canal can be explored by foot or vehicle. Migratory Way, an access road for the USGS Silvio O. Conte Anadromous Fish Research Laboratory, parallels the west side. The Canalside Trail follows the east side from an iron bridge on 11th Avenue to a trailhead off Montague City Road. Snow and ice conditions vary throughout winter, but walking is usually easy. The lighting on the birds is generally best from the east side in the morning, and from Migratory Way in the afternoon.
At the nearby confluence of the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers, a long historical railroad trestle bridge, originally built in 1880 and now part of the Canalside Trail, spans the broad crossing. The fine open views afford opportunities to see flocks of goldeneyes, mergansers, and other ducks navigating the flowing water. The bridge is easily reached from a pullout at the trail crossing on Greenfield Road, or via an easy half-mile walk from the trail’s southern trailhead on McLellan Road in Deerfield (opposite the East Deerfield Railroad Yard).
A Ross's goose among Canada geese on Barton Cove, in Montague, Mass.
On the west bank of the Connecticut River in Greenfield, Rocky Mountain, part of the Pocumtuck Range (a long, wooded ridge that stretches south to Mount Sugarloaf in Deerfield), offers habitat diversity and opportunities to see a variety of forest species such as great horned and barred owls, and dark-eyed juncos. During winter finch irruption years, watch for flocks of pine siskins and white and red-winged crossbills in hemlock groves. The town of Greenfield manages a network of trails, including a segment of the long-distance Pocumtuck Ridge Trail, which traverses the crest of the range. Poet Seat Tower at the top of Rocky Mountain offers fine scenic views.
HOW TO GET THERE
Turners Falls
To reach Turners Falls, take Interstate 91 to exit 27 in Greenfield and follow Route 2 east for 2.9 miles to the traffic light at the Turners Falls Bridge. Turn right and cross the bridge to enter downtown Turners Falls.
Canalside Rail Trail, Unity Park, Connecticut River
The northern end of the trail and shoreline of the Connecticut River west of Barton Cove are easily accessed from the public parking lot at Unity Park on 1st Street in Turners Falls.
There is also public parking at Great Falls Discovery Center lot on 2nd Street in Turners Falls.
On the southern end of the trail, there is a small public parking lot at the southern end of the trail off McClelland Farm Road in Deerfield, MA.
Barton Cove Campground
Located on Route 2A at 82 French King Highway in Gill, MA. This recreation area on a peninsula in the Connecticut River forms the southern short of Barton Cove. It is run by FirstLight Power with day use parking, campsites, and canoe and kayak rentals available seasonally.
USGS Silvio O. Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center
The research center is located at 1 Migratory Way, Turners Falls, MA. Parking is available at the entrance gate at the end of G Street and at a pullout that also provides access to the adjacent Cabot Woods and a natural rock dam on the Connecticut River.
Rocky Mountain Park
Parking and access to Rocky Mountain Park is located at 70 Mountain Road in Greenfield, MA.
American wigeon and mallard ducks on the Ice on Barton Cove in Montague, Mass.