| July
was even easier than June! All Water Chestnut
removal in the Alewife watershed is now complete
for the year. Areas harvested last year definitely
showed improvement this year.
I waited until
July 8th to harvest Alewife Brook, Little River,
Perch Pond, and Little Pond. This was the same
date I began harvests there last year. number
of plants dropped from 194 to 24! locations
dropped from 76 to 14! pounds dropped from 40
to 4!
A repeat trip two
weeks later found an additional 19 plants last
year. This year zero additional were found!
This is likely attributable to the elimination
of upstream sources this year, since the majority
of plants found on the second sweep last year
were snagged fragments drifted from upstream.
Alewife Brook and
Little Pond had NO water chestnut plants at
any point this year!! Part of this MUST be natural
variability in the population - The largest
patches seen in 1999 outside of Blair Pond were
in these two locations.
Blair Pond looks
much better as an open water body. Without chestnuts
clogging the surface, additional problems of
duckweed and other tiny floating plants don't
get to build up but are quickly washed down
Wellington Brook. Only four additional chestnut
plants were found in Blair Pond this month!
The July total
weight harvested was merely 18 pounds. June
was 114, and May was 652 for 784 pounds total
this year. Compared with over 12,000 pounds
in Y2K, this has been a breeze.
|
Photo below
was taken a year ago, and the photo above one
day before I harvested this year. These show
an increase over one year when harvests did
NOT occur. Both were taken with the same camera
from the same site on the T garage, with identical
zoom settings - so size and shape of patch is
directly comparable. 2000 was September, 2001
was July, which partly explains the variation
seen in surrounding vegetation. Imagine if this
year's plants had grown another two months!
They were already dropping seed in July!!
|
Special
thanks to Mark Shea, and to the Arlington DPW
for providing a disposal location for my harvests
this year.
The new locations
of Yates Pond and Spy Pond were successfully
harvested, though Yates Pond had fully-formed
seeds on the harvest date. I will harvest Yates
earlier the next two years to ensure this doesn't
happen again. Two herbicides - Reward and KT
- were applied to Spy Pond on July 12th which
may have helped demolish any chestnut plants
left after the two June harvests there.
In the Alewife
Brook subwatershed, I only know of one more
location with a water chestnut infestation.
I will attempt to get permissions to add Blacks
Nook to the locations harvested next year. This
is by the North shore of Fresh Pond, on the
Fresh Pond Reservation, and only recently has
formed a Reservation advisory committee to decide
such matters.
With this subwatershed
heading towards eradication, and Arlington Reservoir
being seriously addressed by Arlington and Lexington,
I believe that now is a good time to begin lobbying
for MDC mechanical removal of water chestnuts
from the Mystic River in Medford. With volunteers
integrated to follow up after mechanical harvests,
I believe complete eradication in the Mystic
River Watershed to be a realizable goal by 2005!
Towards this, I
have logged locations and quantities seen in
the Mystic River last year, and will repeat
the exercise this year and provide the information
to the MDC this fall. |
