What's Wild, page 12
Moose have continued to decline and there are three thousand remaining in New Hampshire in 2024. Our efforts to lobby for the Carbon Rule were not successful; however, the Clean Air Act is still active.
First published in 2012.
Downwind and Dirty: Living in the Shadow of a Coal-fired Power Plant Stack
I have lived in the shadow of the Bow, New Hampshire, Merrimack Station coal-fired power plant smokestack for thirty-five years. I first lived as a resident of Allenstown, where I moved in 1974, then in 1979 to the house I now live in overlooking the Suncook River in Epsom. The top of the smokestack at the power plant is visible not far from my house if I look across a nearby snow-covered cornfield. At a glance I can gauge the likely power output by the plume of smoke shooting my way from the snout of this ancient dragon. Yes, the Merrimack Station is over forty years old as is the technology on which it was built. Technology from the middle of the last century when clean water was of little concern, let alone clean air.
Now, in 2009, New Hampshire stands at a crossroad on how our future energy needs should be met. There are plans to develop a huge wind energy plant in the northern region of the state. At the same time Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH) is moving forward with plans to spend some say upwards of over a billion dollars to keep the Merrimack Station in operation another twenty years or more; all the while it will continue to spew tons of pollution into our air each day. We have faced similar challenges before when our rivers were no more than open sewers.
I grew up in the sixties in Londonderry just south of Manchester and I bore witness firsthand to how little concern there was about water pollution. I would fish the local Watts Brook for native and stocked brook trout but was always amazed at the filth of the Merrimack River, where the brook’s clear waters emptied into its chocolate-colored bowels. Yes indeed, the Merrimack was nothing more than an open sewer with confetti-colored toilet paper flowing by with all the human waste churning in the river’s current. It took the federal government to pass the Clean Water Act in the early 1970s to clean up the Merrimack River as well as the Suncook River I now live on. Folks here in town talk about the old days when the Suncook River ran different colors depending on what color dyes were in use at the tannery in Pittsfield. Decisions were made forty years ago to commit the federal, state, and local governments to clean up our rivers.
While we have made great strides in cleaning up our rivers and streams, we seem to be treating the very air we breathe like the rivers of the past. Did you know that the Merrimack Station is the single largest point of global warming gases in New Hampshire spewing out 3.7 million tons of CO2, about 20 percent of the state’s total, and 120 pounds of mercury per year.
Over my thirty-plus years as a wildlife biologist in New Hampshire I have come to know just how these numbers are impacting our fish and wildlife.
For instance, I happened to have a friend working at the Department of Environmental Services (DES). He was to begin an assessment of pollution in fish in northern New Hampshire but wanted to practice the testing procedure first and asked me, as a fisherman, if I could get him a couple fish to practice on. He needed predatory fish like pickerel or bass, which are at the top of the food chain. So I gave him a foot-to fourteen-inchlong pickerel from Little Durgin Pond in Northwood and a similar-sized largemouth bass from Beaver Pond in Bear Brook State Park. He called me a few weeks later in a rather excited voice: “Wow, those fish were off the charts!” he exclaimed. “These fish have the most mercury in them of any other fish ever tested in North America. Just one meal of one of these fish by a pregnant woman could potentially affect her fetus.”
And it is just not fish that I have been involved with testing. In another example, as a biologist for the Fish and Game Department I was involved with submitting pieces of moose livers for testing. Here too the pollution from our power plants has caused acid rain that has stripped heavy metals from the soil, causing moose to take up high levels of cadmium in their livers. Too high for human consumption these days, it seems; same goes for deer livers too.
In a very recent discovery, it appears that acid rain is stripping aluminum from the soil as well as sending it into the tributaries of the Merrimack River where we have a decades-long effort to restore Atlantic salmon. Studies suggest that aluminum is coating the gills of the juvenile salmon. This seems to be no problem in their two-year stay in fresh water. But as soon as they molt and migrate out to sea, they suffocate in salt water because of the aluminum. Each year one and a half million salmon fry are stocked into the Merrimack River system as part of a four-decade restoration effort. While the blame in the past has been placed on the unknown events at sea, the problem now seems to be right here in our own backyards. The plume of effluents from our power plants casts a huge shadow over much of the fish and wildlife that we are just now learning about.
I also collected mink carcasses from New Hampshire trappers and sent them off to the US Fish and Wildlife Services a few years ago as part of a study to look at mercury in both mink and otter. Here again mercury levels in the mink I collected were very high. According to my friend at DES, “The levels of mercury in the mink you submitted would be harmful to a human.”
In a recent proposal released by PSNH they are planning to spend a half billion dollars in adding a scrubber to the Merrimack Station to reduce mercury levels by 80 percent. Just two years ago this same scrubber was to cost only two hundred and fifty million dollars. In another outside estimate the cost of this scrubber will more likely be $1.2 billion. Just this February of 2009, the EPA has announced that they will issue at least a 10 percent tighter mercury control requirement for coal plants that will be effective in 2010. The current proposed scrubber does not meet the new proposal. Besides, how much mercury is “safe?”
New Hampshire senator Harold Janeway has introduced a bill to require the state’s public utilities commission to determine just what the costs will be to keep the Merrimack Station operating for another twenty years and whether there are better alternatives to spending potentially billions of dollars on a plant that in the best of condition will continue to spew vast quantities of pollution into New Hampshire’s air, the air you and your grandchildren must breathe.
In 2024, plans were announced to close the Merrimack Station coal plant by 2028.
First published in February 2009.
Clean Water and Air is a Must for Our Fish and Wildlife
It seems like we all take for granted our clean rivers and clean air. It wasn’t always that way. It was not that long ago things were very different. Yes, when I was a teenager growing up in Londonderry in the sixties, things were very different with our rivers. My best friend Rick and I would fish Watts Brook for beautiful brook trout, wading and splashing in the cool brook as we made our way downstream all the way to where it dumped into the Merrimack River in Litchfield. Here was a scene of a far different world. You couldn’t stand on the rocks in the river as they were covered in sewage. Yes, human waste filled the river as far as the eye could see. Pure raw sewage.
And the Merrimack was filled with sewage from not only Manchester but Concord too, and beyond. I remember going duck hunting on the Merrimack River on the north side of Concord with a college (UNH) friend in 1970 or so. Here too the river was full of human waste. Folks who I know here in Epsom remember a time the Suncook River that flows past my house used to turn different colors depening on what color die was used at the tanning plant upriver in Pittsfield. I remember all our rivers in this part of the state were pretty much to be avoided as far as fishing or swimming goes.
Thankfully, all this was to change thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972. This act gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to begin the task of cleaning up this nation’s waterways. As my good luck would have it, I actually paid for my college education by working construction, summers. Some of that work included installing sewer separation pipes in Manchester and later on sewer pipe construction in Hooksett. So the Clean Water Act actually helped me pay for college. Another clear advantage to cleaning up our rivers was that it provided good jobs.
The Clean Water Act worked just great at getting our rivers cleaned up and helped protect against further pollution. Except the definition of what “waters” meant came under dispute over the following decades. Originally the “waters” were described as “All waters with a significant nexus to navigable waters.” For over three decades most streams and rivers were considered protected under the act.
However, Supreme Court rulings in 2001 and 2006 muddied the waters, so to speak. Well, no, the new court definition actually did muddy some waters. The new court rulings took away the protection of the smaller tributaries. Mostly I think of them as our native Eastern brook trout waters. These are the flows that trickle through our forests much of the year, but in a hot dry spell much of the stream bed nearly dries up, leaving just the deeper holes carrying our native trout through the drought. These are the small streams that as a boy, I could leap across, and had ankle-biting cold water but held the most beautiful of trout. In fact, 60 percent of America’s streams are seasonal or temporary. The 2006 Supreme Court ruling defined “waters” as “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water forming geographic features as streams or oceans.” This would be the kiss of death for many of our local trout brooks.
Fortunately, the EPA has moved to restore the Clean Water Act’s protection of our smaller brooks. The new rules define “waters” as “any tributary showing significant features of flowing waters.”
This definition will clearly protect what most of us know are our native trout streams. But we must ask our congresswomen to support this definition and not overturn the EPA’s effort to protect our smaller tributaries.
Secondly, we know that moose numbers are down significantly in New Hampshire due to climate change. Thankfully, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan is set to curb the release of carbon over the next three decades by some 32 percent. Just like the Clean Water Act, this too will bring jobs in the clean renewable energy and energy conservation fields. Just recently Fish and Game biologist Kris Rines said, “If we don’t wrap our arms around what we need to do to reduce climate impacts, we need to recognize that our entire world will change.” Kris has been tormented as she has monitored a nearly 50 percent reduction in moose numbers over the last decade and a half as our New Hampshire winters have shortened. As she has frequently said, “We need snow on the ground in April when the female ticks fall off the moose if we are going to maintain our moose population.” The trouble is our winters have warmed some four degrees on average over the last forty years, according to a recent UNH study.
Here again it is up to us to make sure we are contacting our senators with a request for them to support the Clean Power Plan.
The warming trend continues as of 2024; the winter and summer in 2023–2024 had record-breaking heat.
First published in 2008.
Do Bears Hoot? Bear Myths and Medicine
Bears have been animals of myths, mystery, mystique, and medicine for millennia. All across the northern hemisphere, native peoples revered bears as the holders of great powers. Indeed, bears were believed to die each fall (when they denned) only to be reborn each spring. They were the “keepers” of the earth.
Scandinavian legends speak of the ability of some people to assume the characteristics of a bear. Our English word “berserk” comes from this legend. It was thought that if a warrior donned a bearskin (called a bear-sark), he would be given the power, strength, and stamina of a bear. Native Americans had similar legends.
Did you get lost? Have you got your “bearings” straight? This is a word also related to the bears. The North Star, the tip of the Little Dipper’s handle, and the tip of the tail of the Little Bear has guided travelers for centuries. Interestingly, the Big Bear, in which the Big Dipper appears, points the way to the North Star.
Bear parts and bear grease have long been used for medicinal powers. The early American settlers regularly applied “bear grease,” the rendered fat from bears, to all sorts of ailments, such as arthritis. Some still believe in its use today.
The bile from bear gall bladders has been used as a “stomach medicine” for hundreds of years. In the early 1980s, two doctors from South Korea were doing research on the bear gall bladder as a medicine while at a hospital in Boston. The call went out for bear gall bladders. Well, frozen in the Fish and Game freezer in Concord was a whole cluster of road-killed bears. We used to sell them at the department’s annual auction of road kills. After the bears were thawed a little, the doctors came up and removed the gall bladders. Their research found that indeed, bile from a bear, especially one near hibernation, could effectively dissolve gallstones. The acid, named after bears, is now synthesized and used to prevent gallstones.
Indeed, bears are good medicine for the body and the soul.
By the way, there is a long-held belief in New England that bears “hoot” in the spring to communicate with each other, especially during breeding season. This is a legend only common to the Northeast and does not seem to be supported by scientists.
First published in 1991.
Go Take a Hike … at Night
I just love to be in the woods day, or night. Yes, I have hiked and worked in the woods at night much of my life.
I think nighttime is the best time to really get to know the woods and your ability to sense things in the woods. Let’s face it, 99 percent of what we sense during a daytime hike is with our eyes. We really limit the use of our senses with a day hike. I liken it to the difference between learning a pond by taking a canoe paddle across the water or diving in and swimming across to learn how it feels.
Night hiking frees up all your senses and gets your blood flowing to them to feel, hear and smell your surroundings.
It is amazing how acute your sense of feel becomes in the dark. Now you can sense each step as you walk along. All good practice for those fall days when you want to sneak up on the bedded buck. And the sense of feel blossoms across your body. You can actually feel a slight breeze on your face or other exposed skin. Here again training yourself to keep track of the wind while deer hunting by day.
And do your ears perk up to the slightest change in sound? It’s like you can sense the woods around, how close to the vegetation you are hearing it as you approach it. Let alone distant sounds that are amplified in the dew-filled night air. Sounds abound at night.
And let’s not forget your sense of smell, now ever more acute in the dark. Yes, your nose actually can be used to your advantage. I have picked up the smell of moose, deer, bear, and fisher before in the woods once I “learned” what they smelled like. Yes, I have had the advantage of being a wildlife biologist and have learned these fragrances while handling live animals, but any deer or moose check station offers ample opportunities to sample your own. Fisher have a distinctive sweet musky smell that is easy to learn. You might check with a trapper to get a whiff of one.
Now to take a hike at night I don’t suggest you blunder into the wilds without a flashlight. By all means have one along. And a compass and map should be handy … just in case. Yes, night woods can be very confusing. I suggest you start out in woods you are very familiar with already and stick to the main woods roads and trails. Why not take that GPS along and don’t forget to click in your starting point. I find not using them and just relying on your good wood sense will keep you safe and headed in the right direction. After all, using them requires light and your eyes prefer a day hike. But you are on a night hike.
I have found myself in some of the wildest parts of New Hampshire at night while working as a wildlife biologist for Fish and Game. For instance, I worked on Long Island on Lake Winnipesaukee on a deer removal project in the eighties. Biologist Henry Laramie and I removed twenty-five deer over a two-week timeframe one fall. We tried several trapping attempts with some success, but the most efficient was when we used our tranquilizer guns with a radio-fitted dart. Yes, I got to hunt deer at night. Generally, we were driven around the island by a conservation officer until we got close enough to hit one with a dart. Work commenced at dusk and we worked into the night, sometimes all through the night. The darts at that time were made of aluminum and flew like a rock. So you had to be pretty close and kind of lob them into the deer’s butt. And that was the easy part. My job was to find the hopefully sleeping deer fifteen minutes later when they were down. But any light or sound might trigger them to get up and run off. So I listened to the beep of the dart with headphones as I slowly and quietly stalked the downed deer in the dark.
Once, I had just put a rope around a deer’s neck, but before I could tie it off, it ran off trailing the rope like a noose. I waited again, and unfortunately had already pulled the radio dart out, so I had to crawl in the dark on my hands and knees until I felt the quarter-inch rope on the forest floor.
I had this same duty while radio collaring moose in 1986 and 1987 in Pittsburg. I was the “moose finder” once we had a dart in one. I spent hours in the dark in Pittsburg stalking downed moose, over forty of them in two falls mostly without shining a light. Yes, I am very comfortable in the dark without a light pretty much anywhere. And you can be too. So get out at night for a hike. Maybe let someone know where you will be and when you plan to return, just in case. But nothing trains all your senses like a night hike. I bet you’ll be a better deer hunter for it.
First published in 1998.
New Hampshire Stripers Are for the Birds!
New Hampshire stripers are for the birds! A cloudy but warm wonderful day on Great Bay recently sure proved it to me. You see, my lifelong friend and frequent fishing partner, Rick Hamlett, and I spent the day chasing birds around Great Bay all the while hooking stripers. In fact, we brought at least a hundred stripers to my boat during the five-hour marathon bird and striper chase.
