New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff
Turkeys have come home to roost; and where's winter?
Wednesday 02/01/2006
The turkeys have come home to roost, literally. Like so many other things in my 30-year career as a wildlife biologist with the NH Fish and Game Department, another circle closes. For much of the last several months the local turkey flock, 16 hens, has been roosting at night within a couple hundred yards of my house. I can watch them march across a filed and fly into a block of tall white pines from several windows in my house. It is a sight I so enjoy.
You see twenty plus years ago, I happened to release the great, great, great......... grand parents of these birds. The departments turkey biologist, Ted Walski, would capture some of the newly established wild turkeys in the Connecticut River valley and ship them to Concord for me to release. This was all part of the early efforts to restore turkeys in New Hampshire. While my part was simply to release the birds, with Ted doing the bulk of the work capturing them, I still felt very much a part of the project. I released turkeys in a number of sights here in the eastern part of the state including the closest to here, in Loudon. I'm sure I could thumb through my diaries and get the exact date, and even probably the exact time. I have kept a daily journal every day of my career. So, it warms my heart just a bit to see the results right at my house of something I was part of over two decades ago.
While there is some snow here in Epsom, there isn't very much. Likely the temperatures predicted to be in the 40's the next few days, and the rain predicted for this weekend will leave us with bare ground again. The Suncook River has dropped back to a normal flow and remains completely ice free. Sunday I had three common mergansers on the river below my house. The last couple of mornings I have stood on my deck to listen for a red winged black bird. These conditions sure make me think it is spring, but no doubt the birds are smarter than me again and will not return until real spring. It is the length of day and the sun reaching higher in the sky that sets their clocks to spring, not a false spring.
And speaking of birds, I had a very unusual winter visitor on Monday. When I got home from work I discovered a northern shrike stuck on my screened in deck. The door is left open for the winter for the dogs, and I only feed the birds away from the deck so they don't get trapped, but almost weekly a bird gets trapped on the deck. I can count on one hand the number of shrikes I have seen in my life. And can they bite! They have a wicked hook in their top bill.
I went to Exeter yesterday morning to check on a large group of wintering ducks. I stopped by some of the Fish and Game properties to check them as I normally do when I am near them. The Connor Farm in Exeter was transferred to Fish and Game as part of the highway construction wetland mitigation project. Right near-by the farm is a bridge built over a wetland to allow for a wildlife crossing through the wetland the highway now goes over. This bridge I'm sure cost millions of dollars. But the land on the north side of the highway had a big "Commercial Land For Sale" sign. So the wildlife corridor now connects protected land south of the highway to...a commercial building on the other! In fact I drove into the newly completed structure and toured the parking lot. The whole perimeter of the driveway, building and parking lot had signs say " This is a Designated Wetland for the town of Exeter." Obviously this area is a wetland, and a very expensive bridge was built to connect it under the highway, but it was NOT protected! Our state laws are just too poorly enforced to even protect a wetland that millions of dollars was spent on connecting it to other land. It is now a bridge for wildlife to a parking lot!!
Yesterday my travels took me to the coast just about at high tide. This is an unusually high tide for the year and came during a strong northeast storm. All the coastal marshes looked more like lakes. I stopped for lunch on a road in Hampton and watched the surging tide flood a drive way out to a yacht club. The sea was roaring. Route 1-A in Rye was half under water as I made my way north along the coast. The power of the sea always enchants me and pulls me near at it's most awesome times.
