Corson's Brook Woods Today in the Times, in 1981 and in 1893

Do you read the nature column that Marielle Anzelone writes in the Times? Last fall she chronicled the progress of autumn in some woods she knew of in northern Manhattan. Now she’s following spring on Staten Island.

On Twitter yesterday, Matthew Wills (who tweets from Brooklyn as @backyardbeyond) noted that “we found two woodland wildflowers in bloom yesterday on Staten Island,.,,” I clicked the link and saw photos of spring beauties and trout lilies, and saw that he had visited the island with Marielle Anzelone and that she had also identified two other plants, Virginia waterleaf and blue cohosh.

As soon I read the names of those wildflowers, I DM’d Matthew (we’ve never met but we follow each other on Twitter and occasionally retweet each other) and asked him where they had found them. He confirmed: Corson’s Brook Woods.  

I haven’t been to Corson’s Brook Woods since 1982 but I know it well. In fact, I named it.

In the spring of 1981 I was working for a local Assemblywoman, Betty Connelly, whose district office was at Willowbrook (it's the College of Staten Island now but at the time it was Staten Island Developmental Center and was still a home for developmentally disabled people; when I was a kid it was Willowbrook State School, so we called it Willowbrook). A friend and I had become distressed at the destruction of Staten Island's natural areas, and we became friendly with the leaders of a group called Protectors of Pine Oak Woods, who were led by a terrific, friendly, dedicated naturalist named Dick Buegler.

In April 1981, Dick was in the final stages of conducting fieldwork for "A Comparative Flora of Staten Island 1879-1981,” a catalogue of the island’s plants that he and another naturalist, Steve Parisio, were working on for the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, which was celebrating its 100th anniversary.

One Saturday afternoon that month, Dick led a small group of us through Willowbrook, one of the few places he had yet to survey for the Comparative Flora, and we ended up in a small tract, maybe 20 acres, of rich, moist woods bisected by a brook. I was inexperienced in identifying wildflowers but Dick knew what was rare on the island, and he was tremendously excited by what we found.

For starters, there were three plants that grew nowhere else on Staten Island: wild leek, bladdernut (a shrub/small tree) and American sycamore. Later that summer we found a fourth, zig-zag goldenrod. There was wild ginger, blue cohosh, sweet cicely, baneberry, Virginia waterleaf, false hellebore, silvery spleenwort, spikenard, hop hornbeam and basswood. There were hundreds of sugar maples; the only other stand on the island had perhaps two dozen specimens. The 1981 Flora that Dick and Steve were working on eventually listed basswood as uncommon on Staten Island; all of the others were characterized as rare.

Dick was thrilled at the discovery. Because my office was at Willowbrook, and because I worked for a state lawmaker who was sympathetic to the cause, I became the official tour guide for a succession of naturalists and others who wanted a first-hand look.

Staten Island Developmental Center was slowly being closed in those days, as its residents moved into group homes. There was serious talk by New York State of selling it for development. We thought that was a bad idea and we thought the discovery – or rediscovery – of this small section of it, full of rare plants, was a good rationale for opposing the sale.

I wrote a piece for the Staten Island Advance, explaining what was there and why it was important, and calling on the state to keep it preserved, to make it part of the Staten Island Greenbelt, which was just coming into being at the time.

As part of my research I went to the archives at the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences and read some of William T. Davis's journals. Davis (1862-1945) was the grandfather of Staten Island’s naturalists and environmentalists, an interesting guy and a good writer. I found in the journals that Davis had been to these same woods in 1893 and had described almost precisely what we had seen in 1981.

I also found the area on a 1917 atlas of Staten Island, which identified the brook that flowed through the woods as Corson’s Brook. Hence, Corson’s Brook Woods. To my amazement, the name stuck.

The Greenbelt was dedicated as a New York City park-nature preserve not long afterward, but Corson’s Brook Woods was not included. So on that count we failed. On the other hand, public opposition to the plans to sell Staten Island Island Developmental Center led the state to drop the idea; instead it is now the home of the College of Staten Island.

The chances of CSI being sold and developed are slim. Let’s hope that the small section known as Corson’s Brook Woods will remain as wild as Davis found it in 1893, as we found it in 1981, and as Marielle Anzelone and Matthew Willis are finding it today.

Westchester Sewage Plant Upgrade Is Behind Schedule

Westchester County is behind its state-mandated schedule in upgrading the Mamaroneck sewage treatment plant. They need permission from Mamaroneck Village to work longer hours, to get the job done by year's end. Nice reporting by Sound and Town Report, here.

New York State Proposes to Allow Bobcat Hunting and Trapping in Westchester

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wants to allow bobcat hunting and trapping in Westchester County (Rockland too), at least if I’m reading a newly-released bobcat management plan correctly.

The reason seems to be not that bobcats are causing trouble or that there are too many but simply that there are enough to allow some to be killed.

In recent years, hunters and trappers have killed 400 to 500 bobcats a year. Under this new management plan, that would rise to 500 to 600. Wildlife managers think that the state’s bobcat population, estimated to be about 5,000 animals, could sustain 1,000 a year being killed.

It’s not clear to me when exactly the hunting and trapping season in Westchester would be, but it would be short and in the fall.

You can find a link to the plan on this DEC webpage. I read about it in the Adirondack Almanack (@adkalmanack on Twitter).

By the way, I find the word “harvest,” which is used repeatedly in the management plan (as in, “We believe that these harvest control measures will allow for a limited and sustainable harvest of bobcats ... ”), to be an insulting euphemism.

Bird Sighting of the Week

From the CtDailyReport of the Connecticut Ornithological Association:

01/23/12 - Cheshire -- 4 BLACK VULTURES leaving the Dragon Buffet Restaurant and crossing Route 10 to Radio Shack's roof, 2:30 PM.

An hour later they were hungry for carrion.

The Long Island High School Student Who Has Discovered How Mussels are Adapting to Asian Shore Crabs in the Sound

A terrific little story from the Times just dropped into my inbox. It’s about Samantha Garvey, a high school student on Long Island who is both a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search and (until very recently) homeless. Her area of research is ribbed mussels and Asian shore crabs from Long Island Sound. Here’s what the Times reported:

The mussel species, Geukensia demissa, or ribbed mussel, is native to Long Island Sound. The Asian shore crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus, is not. It is a predatory interloper that arrived in the waters near Cape May, N.J., in 1988, and has since spread from Maine to North Carolina.
The crabs like to eat mussels.
The scientific question was whether the ribbed mussels would just sit there and be eaten by the new predator, or had nature provided them with a means of defending themselves?
Ms. Garvey collected mussels from different parts of Flax Pond, a salt marsh on the North Shore of Long Island. She compared the shell length, width, weight and other measurements of those that lived where Asian shore crabs were prevalent with those that lived in areas with few crabs.
She found that the mussels that lived in areas where the crabs were prevalent had thicker shells. Was that because the Asian shore crabs ate the mussels they could pry open most easily, leaving thicker-shelled survivors, or were the mussels able to grow greater protection in response to the predators?
In a laboratory at Stony Brook University, Ms. Garvey put some young mussels in tanks with the crabs, although the crabs were in cages. In other tanks, mussels lived alone. After 65 days, she found that the mussels that shared their tank with the crabs had developed thicker shells than the ones that lived alone.
The finding suggests that chemicals released by the Asian shore crabs in the water set off a defense mechanism in the mussels: they produce thicker shells that fend off predators. When the crabs are not around, the mussels do not pad their shells.

And it sounds as if her teacher, Rebecca Grella, of Brentwood High School, has put together a large, impressive team of high school researchers.

Read it all here.

From the Advocate, Big, Big Problems at Stamford's Sewage Plant

This piece about the much-admired Stamford sewage treatment plant, by Angela Carella, an editor at the Stamford Advocate, is devastating. If what she asserts is true -- and I have no reason to not believe her, although I look forward to possible responses -- it rises to the level of a scandal.

Trouble at the Stamford Sewage Treatment Plant

The Stamford sewage treatment plant was exemplary for so long that it's a surprise to hear that there seems to be big trouble there.

First, a few months ago, there were complaints from a couple of shellfishermen in the Stamford-Greenwich area about how troubles with the plant's disinfectant system were forcing them to curtail harvesting oysters and clams and therefore costing them money.

Then a couple of weeks ago Stamford figured prominently in a story about how power outages at treatment plants caused sewage spills during the two big storms in the second half of last year.

Now today's Advocate has a long piece about how the cause of the problems might well be poor leadership at the plant and poor oversight in city hall. It's worth reading, here. My only quibble is that I would have liked to have seen a couple more paragraphs about how the administrative troubles have led to water pollution troubles.

Irene and the October Snowstorm Caused 47 Sewage Spills into Long Island Sound and Connecticut Rivers

You get a glimpse of the environmental havoc caused by Tropical Storm Irene and the late-October snowstorm from a story in the Courant over the weekend.

Reporter Dave Altimari took a vague statement that Connecticut DEEP Commission Dan Esty made to a state panel investigating the storms’ aftermath -- a statement that no one on the panel questioned -- dug a little deeper, and learned that failures in the backup power sources at Connecticut sewage treatment plants caused 47 sewage spills into Long Island Sound and the state’s rivers. A huge amount of sewage -- raw and partially-treated -- was discharged.

Here’s what the commissioner told the panel:

"In the course of the two storms, keeping these systems up and running emerged as a high priority — and a challenge, as backup power failed at a number of facilities, causing several discharges of untreated sewage into the environment,'' Esty said in his testimony.

Esty didn't go into detail about the discharges and the panel members did not question him....

Altimari did valuable follow-up work though. Here’s what he wrote:

… a review of DEEP's incident reports indicates the problem may have been far worse than officials said. The reports show:
--There were 14 spills in which more than one million gallons of sewage spilled.
--Sewage was discharged into 16 rivers across the state, including the Connecticut, Farmington, Housatonic, Quinnipiac and Willimantic.
--Untreated or partially treated sewage was discharged by plants in 26 communities, from the state's biggest city, Bridgeport, to one of its smallest towns, Norfolk.
--Of the 47 spills, 26 occurred during Irene and 21 during the October storm, records show.

And in what might be the understatement of the year, Esty told the panel:

"A better structure of backup [or primary] power for wastewater facilities should be explored.”

I would have liked to have seen Altimari compile some information about the consequences of all those sewage spills. The Sound’s shellfish industry was shut down for weeks, for example. Presumably beaches were closed as well.

Conservatively, the Sound contributes $5.5 billion a year to the local economy, according to EPA. If the businesses that rely on the Sound were shut down for a month because of the storms, you might be able to argue that the economic cost was one-twelfth of $5.5 billion, or $456,500,000.

That’s a lot of money to lose because backup power was inadequate. Here's Altimari's story; it's well worth reading.

Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff ... Prince, Conservationist

Back in 1990, after five years of research had made it clear that nitrogen in treated sewage was responsible for Long Island Sound's hypoxia problem, the U.S. EPA and the states of Connecticut and New York were taking their first steps toward doing something about the problem.

It was hardly a radical idea -- they would freeze the amount of nitrogen flowing into the Sound from sewage plants at 1990 levels. They called it a nitrogen cap. It wasn't a reduction. They weren't prepared to actually begin cleaning up the Sound yet. But they didn't want it to get worse either.

And yet that recommendation freaked out people in Westchester County, in particular real estate developers, the trade groups they paid to represent them, and elected officials who were beholden to them. They had influence in Albany and for a while it seemed as if they might stop the entire Long Island Sound cleanup effort.

Among the people who would not let that happen was Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff. He was the EPA administrator in the New York region, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, and he decided the nitrogen cap was important -- and he said so, publicly, in a way that made it seem completely sane and rational (which of course it was):

"I, at this point, think it would be wise to go ahead. I think time is of the essence. Why not take steps now if you know what you can do and it's doable?"

His EPA counterpart in New England, Julie Belaga, agreed, and their position became policy, as both EPA regions and both states approved the nitrogen cap.

I didn't know Connie Eristoff well. He was gentlemanly the few times I met him and when I asked him questions, either in person or on the phone, he answered them (which is how I got the quote above). There's not much more a reporter can ask for.

I was reminded by his obituary, in today's New York Times, that he also strongly fought to allow New York City to keep its drinking water clean by protecting its watershed rather than by building a filtration plant, a decision that seems as common-sensical now as it was controversial 15 years ago.

Connie Eristoff got his start in government under John V. Lindsay. He was actively involved in Audubon New York. And he was a prince "whose family nobility dates to the 15th century in the Eurasian kingdom of Georgia."

I always assumed he was a Republican. That matters only because we need more like him.

State of the Sound

Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound released its first "State of the Sound" report today (although in truth that's a bit of a misnomer: a more accurate name would have been "State of How We the People Who Live Near Long Island Sound are Doing in Protecting and Restoring It," but that's not quite as pithy).

They found that by some measures, we're doing OK and by others we're doing considerably worse than OK. All in all, the grade they assigned was a C-plus.

You can find a pdf here, and there's coverage by the Connecticut Post here and Patch.com here (Newsday also wrote about it but you have to pay to see it).

I wrote the foreword (several years ago, actually -- that's how long it took to publish the report.) Here it is;

     Long Island Sound was in bad shape back in mid and late 1980s, when I first started paying attention. If you think of the Sound as a big forest, it was as if all the air had been removed from a third of that forest, and all the warblers, thrushes, butterflies, spiders, bats, squirrels, cicadas, katydids, and deer suffocated or, if they were lucky, crowded into other areas. That's how bad hypoxia was in the summer. Virtually all forms of marine life were unable to survive in the western third of Long Island Sound.
    But that was 20 years ago. What's happened since?
    Lobsters have all but vanished. Oysters, carefully restored with infusions of money from taxpayers and the private sector, succumbed to two diseases and are only now starting to revive. Winter flounder disappeared. The water on average has gotten warmer; warm-water species are replacing cold water species. Salt marshes are dying. And hypoxia returns every summer -- sometimes bad, sometimes not so bad, sometimes critically bad.
    Last year I was on a conference call, planning a public forum with a handful of college professors who teach on the far eastern end of the Sound, and when I used the word "crisis" to describe the late 1980s, one of them interrupted and told me quite peremptorily that there is not now nor has there ever been a crisis in Long Island Sound.
    On the contrary. Long Island Sound exists now in a state of permanent crisis. That's my opinion, of course. But what other conclusion are we to draw? Twenty years ago the U.S government and the states of New York and Connecticut created what has become a permanent -- as well as knowledgeable and dedicated -- bureaucracy to manage Long Island Sound, and yet there's so much going wrong in the Sound we can hardly keep track.
    When I was in elementary school I tried to cover up a failing grade by dropping a strategically-located blot of blue ink from a cartridge pen onto my report card. Reading this "State of the Sound" report card, I see a lot of places where I'd like to drop blots of blue ink.
    After 20 years of anti-pollution efforts, we get a D-plus in raw sewage? Spill an ink blot there. C-minus in low oxygen? Ink blot, please. Adapting to the rise in sea level, and conflicts among the people who use the Sound -- a D in each? Blot, and another blot. A C-minus in keeping stormwater that is contaminated with dog crap and motor oil and chemical fertilizers away from our beaches and shellfish beds? A big ink blot there.
    But we must be doing well in something, yes?
    We get an A in fish ladders. Fish ladders open up rivers blocked by dams, letting anadromous fish swim upstream to spawn (although as the biologist in charge of Connecticut's program has said, swimming upstream is one thing; getting back down past the dams and ladders is another).
    We get a B in coastal habitat, for restoring 600 acres, mainly of coastal marshes.
    And we get a B in beach litter, although not because there's any less of it now. The amount of litter is about the same as it was a decade ago. We earn a B because more people are volunteering to participate in beach clean-ups -- in other words, more people are picking up other people's trash. 

     It takes an act of will not to feel pessimistic in the face of all this, and I'd be lying if I said that at times I don't. But those of us who care about Long Island Sound can't afford to be too pessimistic – or rather, we can't afford to let pessimism deter us from doing what needs to be done.
    What exactly is that? We need to make sure our elected officials know that Long Island Sound is a priority, and that they continue to provide money for sewage treatment plant upgrades and stormwater management, and for increasing and improving public access to the Sound. We need to help organizations like Save the Sound continue to promote the notion that what we as individuals do has an effect on what Long Island Sound is.
     When anyone – a municipality operating a sewage plant, a boat owner heedless about where he dumps his vessel's head, a multinational corporation that wants to industrialize the Sound, a homeowner with a bad fertilizer habit – damages the Sound, we need to take it personally. We need to remember that Long Island Sound is ours.
    And one more thing: although the state of the Sound seems grim, this "State of the Sound" report is excellent – read it, and do what it says.