Notes from Avalonia: Updates in Preston
By Bob Chapin
It’s mid-May as I write this, and things are always busy for Avalonia in the spring. It’s certainly been true in Preston. Terri Eickel (a member of both Preston’s Sustainability Committee, and the Preston Town Committee of Avalonia) coordinated and led an incredibly productive work morning at Mitchell Preserve & Reed Woodlands over on NorthWest Corner Road. There was much cutting back of invasives and trail maintenance, blazing and general improvement. A huge “Thank You!” to Prestonians Katrina and Ted Spanos, Patti Monahan, Laurie Castronova, and David Gudbranson, who all came out to help, along with several brave and dedicated souls from other towns. Thank you all!!
We started monitoring the soundscapes out at the Preston Nature Preserve (affectionately known as the PNP) in late February, trying to determine if we could hear any screech owls who might be taking us up on our offer of some free nesting space. February and March are when they start to pair off and look for “suitable housing”…they need to start early in the year so that the young will be mature enough, come winter, to fend for themselves and have a decent chance of surviving the long cold season. We heard a number of barred owl calls, but no screech owls. Realistically, we’ll probably have to leave the boxes up for several years before a screech owl stumbles on them and moves in. And it doesn’t help that barred owls enjoy a nice, tasty screech owl for dinner, so having predators already there certainly doesn’t help.
The PNP has been closed to human visitors since April 15 to give ground-nesting birds a safe space to nest and raise a family. We actually heard a slightly different variety of species in our early-spring monitoring this year, compared to last year. Notably, no bobolinks showed up this year, but there was a woodcock who just sang his heart out and made many appearances in the recordings. In the 5 days that we recorded, we caught 3700 woodcock songs! Three weeks later, quite by accident, I spotted a large round head of a bird just as it ducked down into the grass in the middle of the field, while I walked along the edge of that field, retrieving our passive listening device. Although it was too far away for definitive identification, it sure did resemble the silhouette of a woodcock, so I suspect that we have a woodcock nest out there. We also heard hundreds of calls from the white-throated sparrow and the savannah sparrow. Both of these are grassland ground nesters, so I’m guessing that we have a sparrow nest or two out in the fields.
My wife asked a good question: “How will you know if you’ve actually got a nest of a threatened species?”, and I had to shrug and mumble. Suffice it to say that this will be one of the questions we will be trying to answer in the near future (I wonder if flying drones will be involved…).
We’ve had a trail camera set up at the PNP to monitor some of the trails and to see what wanders by. We’ve had a wide range of critters, all of whom were seen more than once in the first 6 weeks of monitoring: eventually a trio of deer, and also a pair of coyotes, a pair of turkeys (we also heard turkeys on the listening device, a reassuring confirmation), a black snake, a pair of raccoons, a rabbit, a bobcat, and a fox.
Thank you all for honoring the closure of the PNP for the nesting season. August will be here before we know it, and the preserve will re-open. You may see my vehicle parked outside the gate this summer. I’ll be adding blazes to trails in the woods, or tending the listening device at the edge of a field. We will also be taking advantage of the warm weather later this summer to replace the bridges in the swamp. You may be assured that we will be assiduously avoiding the fields as we do this work. As always, if you have questions or comments, I can be reached at bobchapin@access.net.