Quabbin: The Accidental Wilderness PDF
Preview Quabbin: The Accidental Wilderness
title: Quabbin, the Accidental Wilderness author: Conuel, Thomas. publisher: University of Massachusetts Press isbn10 | asin: 0870237306 print isbn13: 9780870237300 ebook isbn13: 9780585217376 language: English Quabbin Reservoir (Mass.)--History, Reservoir ecology--Massachusetts--Quabbin subject Reservoir, Natural history--Massachusetts-- Quabbin Reservoir. publication date: 1990 lcc: QH105.M4C66 1990eb ddc: 508.744/2 Quabbin Reservoir (Mass.)--History, Reservoir ecology--Massachusetts--Quabbin subject: Reservoir, Natural history--Massachusetts-- Quabbin Reservoir. Page iii Quabbin: The Accidental Wilderness Revised Edition Thomas Conuel The University of Massachusetts Press Amherst Page iv For my mother Copyright © 1981 by Massachusetts Audubon Society Introduction to the Revised Edition copyright © 1990 by The University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved LC 90-11048 ISBN 0-87023-730-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conuel, Thomas. Quabbin, the accidental wilderness / Thomas Conuel.Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-87023-730-6 (paper) 1. Reservoir ecologyMassachusettsQuabbin Reservoir. 2. Natural historyMassachusettsQuabbin Reservation. 3. Quabbin Reservoir (Mass.) I. Title. QH105.M4C66 1990 90-11048 508.744'2dc20 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available. Page v Contents Introduction to the Revised Edition vii Acknowledgments xix 1 1 Meeting of the Waters 2 6 The Lost Valley 3 17 The Accidental Wilderness 4 31 The Nature of the Place 5 44 The Waters of Quabbin Epilogue 59 Index 63 Page vii Introduction to the Revised Edition Some fifty years ago the gates were closed on Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike, and the waters of the Swift River began filling the valley behind those gates with what was to become Quabbin Reservoir. In subsequent years the reservoir, like the towns that preceded it, was a quiet place untroubled by change and known to only a few. In many ways, that was how it remained in 1981 when the first edition of this book was published. But since then new challenges have arisen and the accidental wilderness has continued to evolve. In the past decade, eagles and coyotes have flourished at Quabbin, acid rain and ozone pollution have become worrisome, water shortages and the Connecticut River diversion have continued as topics of discussion, increased recreational use of the watershed has stirred further debate, and deer have come to represent a problem that nobody talked about a decade ago. The eagle nesting project is perhaps the best known Quabbin success story. Eagles are shy birds, quickly spooked and afraid of humans. They need space and deep solitude to flourish. Jack Swedberg, godfather of the eagle restoration project at Quabbin and former chief photographer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, likes to say that the best way to find eagles is to first find people and then go in the opposite direction. Eagles need clean water and tall pines for nesting. Quabbin Reser- Page viii voir is one of the few places in New England to provide these necessities. Jack Swedberg first started thinking about establishing eagles as permanent residents of Quabbin in 1975. He had attended a seminar at the University of Wisconsin on hacking as a method of reestablishing native birds. Hacking involves removing young eagles from their nests and placing them in artificial nests at a site where they are likely to flourish. The eagles grow and fly away but the memory of the hacking site is imprinted, so that when the time comes to nest, the eagles return to what they remember as their first home. It took several years for Swedberg's idea to become reality. The Quabbin eagle project began in 1982 when two eaglets were shipped from Michigan and donated to Massachusetts through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Betsy and Ross, as they were named, were between six and eight weeks old when they arrived at Quabbin. They spent the next seven weeks in a cage atop a hacking tower on Prescott Peninsula, where they were fed fish by University of Massachusetts graduate student David Nelson. Betsy, when released, crash-landed in the reservoir and had to be fished from the water, but on her second try she managed to stay aloft and she kept right on going. She flew north, moving gradually out of range of the radio transmitter attached to her tail feathers. Ross proved a homebody and remained. In the spring of 1989 he mated with a Quabbin eagle who had been released in 1985. These two became the first pair of bald eagles to nest in Massachusetts in almost a century. A second pair also nested in 1989. The two pairs of bald eagles fledged three eaglets. After seven years and forty-two transplanted eagles, the Quabbin eagle project became an official success. Quabbin will not support a large number of eaglesperhaps two or three nesting pairs, according to Jack Swedberg. "It's a deep water lake and not full of easy food. It has good winter feeding with the deer carcasses on the ice, but for nesting birds you need a year-round food supply. Quabbin doesn't have the marsh animals, nor the carp, which are really just big goldfish, and the easy picking of some other places." Page ix Nevertheless, the eagles are nesting in the Swift River Valley. Coyotes are also back, though you can spark a good argument among wildlife experts by suggesting they never really left. Coyotes seem to be everywhere in Massachusetts. They have been killed by cars on Route 128, spotted in the Boston suburbs, and tracked through the Berkshire Hills, but nowhere are they more prevalent than in the 87.5 square miles that constitute the Quabbin Reservation. Paul Lyons, a wildlife biologist with the Metropolitan District Commission, estimates there are six or more coyote family groups at Quabbin with as many as seven or eight animals in each group. The reason that coyotes flourish, according to wildlife biologists, is elementary. The coyote is adaptable. Coyotes can run at thirty miles an hour, sometimes faster; they can leap up to fourteen feet. Coyotes are strong swimmers and excellent hunters with superior vision, smell, and hearing. But perhaps the greatest thing they have going for them is their varied diet. They are opportunistic feeders, able to eat anything from grasshoppers to carrion. Dietary staples include rabbits, deer, squirrels, mice, birds, snakes, frogs, insects, fruits, berries, and green plants. Other large North American predators, such as the wolf and the mountain lion, were unable to drop down the food chain and eat foods that were not their preferred prey. Because of its flexibility in diet, the coyote has survived and prospered in an ecosystem that has destroyed other predators. Not everybody welcomes the return of the coyote. Farmers tell tales of livestock lost to coyotes; homeowners recount details of the untimely demise of family pets that may have crossed paths with a coyote; and parents in the vicinity of Quabbin complain that coyotes have been lurking near the school bus stop. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to feel a thrill and an almost primordial chill when a coyote howls at night in the woods at Quabbin. They are perhaps our greatest wildlife survivors. Water is always an issue at Quabbin, which is, after all, a reservoir. The complexities of managing and distributing water have led to some changes. The original Metropolitan District Commission has been split Page x in two. The MDC still manages the water stored in Quabbin Reservoir, and a new agency, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), distributes the water to 2.5 million residents in forty-four communities. During the 1980s there was both good and bad water news for Quabbin. The rains of 1989 ended a long dry spell and refilled the reservoir to near capacity for the first time since June 1984. In the mid-1980s, Quabbin's water level sank as a result of an increased demand from the Boston metropolitan area and the lack of rain. There were also fears that the water would fall so low that its quality would be compromised. That didn't happen, but it nearly did. In mid- February 1989, the state declared a water emergency for the forty-four communities in the MWRA district. Quabbin was down to 67 percent full, reviving memories of the mid-1960s drought when the water level fell to 45 percent full. By the end of 1988, the MWRA system was drawing 330 million gallons a day from the reservoir, which has a safe yield of only 300 million gallons a day. The rains came in the spring of 1989, just in time to avert a water crisis, and continued until autumn. Weather that was bad news for parents with small children was good news for the water district. Quabbin began to refill and water restrictions were removed. But one good year doesn't solve the problem. If the MWRA district goes back to overdrawing the safe yield of Quabbin, the reservoir will be vulnerable. What is needed is continued water conservation and, perhaps, additional water sources. Everyone is in favor of water conservation, but starting a discussion on the need for additional water resources generates more debate than proposing a toast to Benedict Arnold on the Fourth of July. The MWRA is pushing a water conservation program that includes repairing leaky pipes and urging conservation, and this seems to be working. In 1989, the average daily water usage was 288 million gallons, a figure that represents the first time in twenty years that
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