In Cornwall, the newly conserved pastures are for the birds

CORNWALL – Jill Kilborn spent the morning of May 16 in tall wading boots, roaming the wet, grassy expanses of a newly conserved 110-acre parcel of land, looking for birds.

A rich assortment of songbirds made themselves known that morning in a chorus of clicks, chirps and more elaborate songs. Listening carefully, Kilborn deciphered the members of the symphony: a wood thrush, a yellow-throated common, a scarlet tanager, a Savannah sparrow.

“There’s the R2-D2 bird,” said Kilborn, who is the leader of the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife’s non-game bird project. She pointed to a black and white bird with a yellowish cap, fluttering above a meadow. “That’s that kind of bubbling ‘beloobeloobeloo’ noise – that’s the bobolinks.”

The Department of Fish & Wildlife purchased the property in March from Betty Lou Gorton and partnered with the Vermont Land Trust and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to preserve it. It now forms part of the more than 1,600-acre Lemon Fair Wildlife Management Area, which straddles the Cornwall-Bridport town line.

The land is open to the public for bird watching, cross-country skiing, fishing, hiking, hunting and wildlife viewing. It offers views of the Adirondacks and the iconic agricultural hills of Addison County. The big red barns sit on a hillside just beyond the boundaries of the wildlife management area.

But the property serves an important purpose beyond human enjoyment: Its preservation is part of a strategy to attract and protect certain grassland bird species that face increasing threats in Vermont.

Earlier that morning on the Cornwall property, Kilborn had spotted an Eastern Meadowlark perched on a fence. Listed as a threatened species in Vermont in 2022 — meaning its population is declining and, if not protected, could become endangered — the meadow lark faces a number of challenges in Vermont and across the country.

The New England and Mid-Atlantic quail population has declined by more than 95 percent over the past 50 years, according to the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.

A member of the blackbird family, the meadow lark is slightly larger than a robin, has a yellow breast marked with a dark V shape, and emits a slow, whistling call. It lives throughout the eastern United States and southeastern Canada, but birds that breed as far north as Vermont usually travel south for the winter.

Officials are still finalizing a recovery plan to help the meadowlark and four other grassland species on Vermont’s threatened and endangered list: the mountain weevil, the grasshopper sparrow, the wagtail and Henslow’s sparrow.

According to Kevin Tolan, a biologist with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies who authored the plan, much of this recovery depends on finding and properly managing habitat that supports the life cycle of these species. That’s where lands like the Lemon Fair management area fall.

The new parcel of state land includes a wide range of habitats – patches of forest, a river, bushland and active agricultural fields, which create different types of grassland. Crows prefer meadows that are actively grazed by cows because the grasses vary in structure.

“Many people don’t realize: Just as we manage our forests for diverse and complex structure, so are grasslands,” Kilborn said.

After European settlers cleared most of Vermont’s land in the 1800s to make way for farmland, grassland birds found a home in fields that had previously been forest. Although the state once had natural grassland habitat before it was logged, scientists have no clear records showing which grassland birds lived in Vermont back then, according to the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

In any case, the farmlands of Vermont have become an increasingly important refuge for them as similar habitats in the Midwest have been lost to more intensive, monoculture farming practices.

“We’ve lost so much in their range that at this point, every acre counts,” Kilborn said. “And Vermont can contribute to that because we have that rich agricultural history.”

Prairie birds are caught in a tough spot: Their success in Vermont depends on some kind of human management. If the work is not precisely timed, the birds are threatened by the very practices that create their habitat. In particular, grassland birds such as the grebe and bobolink nest in grass, and those nests are at risk of being destroyed when farmers fertilize fields.

Vermont has lost much of its farmland to development, and farmers are mowing more frequently and earlier in the spring, increasing the risk to nests, according to Tolan.

“People leave 10 days earlier than they used to, but because they base their annual rhythm around the sun and the solar period, the birds return at the same time,” Tolan said. “And so we’re starting to see a mismatch between how management happened in the past and how it’s happening now.”

Invasive plants have also crept into the fields, and their presence is likely to affect birds, although scientists don’t know to what extent, Tolan said. He is also concerned that birds could eat seeds coated with neonicotinoids, a pesticide used to protect crops such as corn and soybeans from pests. In Vermont, there is legislation that would ban certain uses of the seed, but farmers in many parts of the country use the pesticides, including some states where the birds spend the winter.

“And then, of course, as agriculture moves out of Vermont, you see a lot of these fields go back to forest,” Kilborn said.

Dedicating a field to pasture “could either be very good or very bad for a bird,” Tolan said. If it is managed in a way that harms the birds – for example, by cutting hay while the birds are nesting – it could act as a “sink”, attracting birds to the area only to harm their population.

The Department of Fish and Wildlife licenses ranchers who manage grasslands in the state’s wildlife management areas, said Will Duane, land acquisition coordinator for the department.

“It works well with people who are nearby and need pasture,” he said.

In Cornwall, farmer Eugene Ethier manages the land in the wildlife management area in partnership with the department. Ethier, whose farm abuts state land and whose family has farmed the land for generations, coordinates with the department to time his hay harvest so he doesn’t damage the nests.

Many grassland birds stay “very, very close to their birthplace,” Tolan said. “They come back to the same field year after year. So if you have a large field like this that is managed long-term in a bird-friendly manner, it will create a source population that will basically feed the entire area.”

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