Many wildlife species need young forest habitat

By Wiley Wood
Photographs by Bruce Frisch

The silence in Barbour Woods has been broken in recent weeks by the sound of heavy machinery. Its broad public paths and mature forest of mixed hardwoods have made Barbour Woods a favorite of birders, dog walkers and Sunday strollers. But a sign at the Shepard Road entrance currently warns visitors to watch out for large equipment, and the trailhead at Lover’s Lane is closed. The Norfolk Land Trust (NLT), which owns the 200-acre property, decided this fall to clearcut an 18-acre patch of woods below Beech Hill to create early successional habitat for wildlife.

Wildlife biologist Judy Wilson likens the devastation in a clearcut to the natural disasters that historically produced young forest habitat.

“When I go out to the cut in the morning,” says Ron Cranouski, the logger contracted by NLT, “I often see three or four deer browsing on the tops.” The leafy crowns, Cranouski explains, are left on the ground to return nutrients to the soil. He goes on to make a wider point. The mature forest with its closed canopy is dark and quiet, a relatively static environment, but when the trees are cut down and light is let in, the earth seems to come back to life.

“This is a good acorn year,” says Cranouski, “and right now the trees being dragged across the ground and the equipment passing over it are pushing those acorns down into the soil. Next spring, you’ll see a lot of them sprouting, a lot of small oaks coming up.”

On a sunny November day, we set off from the Lover’s Lane entrance, which now serves as a landing. The logs are piled according to grade and species: hardwood sawlogs, small-diameter logs for pulp, large stems of hemlock and pine. The skid road, newly cut into the forest, is half a mile long, and Cranouski points out spots where the ground is soft and he has corduroyed the road, layering branches and small logs across it.

The skid road from the cut to the road is half a mile long. Logs are carried out by a forwarder.

Easily straddling the ruts and stumps of the skid road, an articulated, six-wheeled log carrier, known as a forwarder, moves slowly toward us. Operated by Ron’s son, it will travel back and forth between the cut and the landing all day, its crane-mounted grapple picking up and self-loading logs, then offloading them into stacks at the road.

We stop at the edge of the clearcut to survey the devastation. Downed logs are everywhere, heaps of branches, the scattered litter of small trees, their fibers shredded by the passing equipment. Around the periphery are trees whose trunks are scrawled with a double line of red spray-paint. “Those are the safe trees,” says Cranouski. Marked by David Beers, the supervising forester, they indicate the outer boundary of the clearcut.

Brush piles will eventually dot the clearing, three to an acre, their base layers of logs carefully crisscrossed to serve as shelter for small creatures. Cranouski calls them “rabbit huts.” Among them will be 27 seed trees, mostly oaks and maples, left standing to help the hardwoods regenerate. Cranouski calls these “hawk towers,” for the hawks that perch there and dive toward any small animal that shows its face.

The Norfolk Land Trust, looking for ways to manage its properties to minimize invasive species and encourage wildlife,, learned a few years ago that the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) would give landowners incentive money and technical help for certain conservation projects.

The cost of the project is partly offset by the sale of logs and partly by funds from a federal conservation program.

An agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NRCS works with forest owners in the South to restore longleaf pine forests for the gopher tortoise; with ranchers in seven Western states to enhance sagebrush habitat for the greater sage-grouse; and with landowners in New England to create young forest for the New England cottontail.

Unlike the introduced eastern cottontail that we commonly see on the edge of lawns, the New England cottontail needs densely vegetated areas to survive. Its ancestral habitat was most likely coastal thickets, the shrubland along Connecticut’s rivers, beaver meadows and areas within forests that had suffered extensive windthrow or forest fire. Suburban development and the gradual maturation of Connecticut’s forests have fragmented and reduced the native rabbit’s habitat.

Now extinct in Vermont, the New England cottontail survives in isolated pockets in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and has its last stronghold in portions of Connecticut, including Litchfield County. When the Norfolk Land Trust applied for the habitat enhancement program in early 2015, the rabbit was a candidate for listing under the Federal Endangered Species Act. Later that year, because of the efforts made on its behalf, the rabbit was downgraded to a Species of Greatest Concern.

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) was instrumental in identifying the decline of the New England cottontail in the early 2000’s, determining its cause, and devising a program to restore the rabbit’s population. Because signs of the rabbit were found in the state-owned Wood Creek Flood Control Area next to Barbour Woods in 2006, the land trust’s parcel has a high priority rating on the New England Cottontail Initiative’s maps. The native rabbit may or may not be still present along Wood Creek, but the new cut is well within the cottontail’s one-mile dispersal range, as is a 10-acre clearcut made two years ago by landowner John Cox on the far side of Route 272, along the north slope of Haystack Mountain.

Logger Ron Cranouski will work next on a similar wildlife habitat project in Barkhamsted.

On an inspection tour of the Barbour Woods clearcut, DEEP wildlife biologist Judy Wilson smiles at the violent destruction all around us. “It’s big, isn’t it?” she says. “Almost on the scale of a natural disaster.” Wilson expects it to take four or five years for the bushes, briars, shrubs and seedlings to grow back densely enough to provide cover for the native rabbit. “When we can no longer walk through it, that’s when it’s good habitat for the New England cottontail,” says Wilson.

Two years ago, during the hard frost of the winter of 2015, Great Mountain Forest created a 35-acre patch of New England cottontail habitat on a section of its land along Mountain Road. Forest Manager Jody Bronson says that the regenerating vegetation is attracting many bird species not commonly seen elsewhere in Norfolk, including ruffed grouse and woodcock.

While the idea is to create a loosely linked patchwork of young forest habitat hospitable to the native rabbit, Wilson cautions against judging the success of the Barbour Woods project on whether or not the rabbit is attracted there, pointing to the many long-range benefits of diversifying the age of stands within the forest.

Ron Cranouski, more pragmatic, sees a clear benefit from the cottontail initiative already: “If that bunny had gotten onto the endangered species list, we’d all be in trouble every time we turned around!”

The work will be finished by the second week in December. The feller buncher, whose hydraulic grabbers clasp a tree while its radial saw slices through the trunk, will leave Barbour Woods, along with the forwarder and the grapple skidder. The skid road will be allowed to heal. Small mammals can creep quietly into the brush piles of the now silent clearcut, the acorns can prepare to germinate . . . and the hawks can stand watch in their towers.