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TODAY Tuesday 29 July 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Herons and Frogs

Here are some mixed messages from Massachusetts, both headlines in regional newspapers of the last two days: "Majestic Herons Make Comeback," read the Springfield Sunday Republican; "Widespread Frog Abnormalities Stump Scientists," says this morning's Boston Globe.

According to the AP's Trudy Tynan, Massachusetts has seen a renaissance of the gorgeous Great Blue Heron. In the past five years, the number of heronries has increased 78 percent; there are now 716 in Massachusetts, mostly in the state's western half. Even Connecticut, our effete little neighbor to the south, is hosting something of a heron comeback.

There are two reasons for the turnaround, report local scientists. Massachusetts has unusually strict and strictly enforced wetlands-protection laws, which preserve the hill swamps and upland ponds that the Great Blues favor. The numbers of these wet high places are actually increasing, thanks to the less heralded comeback of a less majestic animal: the beaver. Beavers have been their busy engineering selves all through western Massachusetts, damming streams and flooding forest bottoms that leave tall spires of dead trees, just the kind of place to raise the kids if you have a seven-foot wingspan.

So beavers are back, herons are back, and Black Bears are way back. Deer and porcupines are ubiquitous. The other day the paper ran a photograph of a wolf, the first documentation of a number of Massachusetts sightings. Wolves! Now we're talking.

Curiously, this spurt in animal populations comes at a time of human population growth in the area. Most of the hilltowns of western Massachusetts have doubled their residents since 1970; when you calculate smaller family size and spread of vacation cabins, the number of occupied structures has probably quadrupled. Still, we're not talking density: Worthington, Massachusetts, is a typical hilltown in size (one-and-a-half Manhattans) and population (1,200). Worthington is also typical in that the number of large parcels of cleared land is way down (the big potato farm went bankrupt) and that the new inhabitants tend to like the beaver ponds and the scenic megafauna more than the old Yankee farmers did. Right before the Civil War, about 75% of Worthington was open land, mostly for sheep grazing. Today forest has recaptured at least 90% of the terrain, almost all of it private property. Bears and people coexist perfectly well if the people leave the woods alone and are prepared to provide garden products on demand.

There is a melancholy aspect to all this, of course. A once-secure, always colorful, American sub-culture -- upcountry New England Anglo-Saxon agrarianism -- is in its death throes. Think of the people in Robert Frost poems, or in "Ethan Frome". Calvin Coolidge. Vermont still has its dairy farmers, and you can find a Yankee or two growing crops in the lee of the White Mountains, but in the hills of Massachusetts, they're truly an endangered species. In Worthington, the Mollinsons still run their dairy-and-maple operation, but otherwise it's gentlemen farmers and weekend vegetable growers.

And, for reasons that elude scientific consensus, the New England amphibians are having a tough time. The numbers of frogs and newts and salamanders seem down throughout the country, but recent news from Massachusetts and Vermont is especially remarkable. According to Scott Allen in this morning's Globe, there's been an outbreak of deformities: three legged frogs, five legged salamanders. Quebec has also reported a number of recent cases. What's going on? Ozone layer depletion? Endocrine-disrupting chemicals? Some parasite? Investigators are stumped. Are the deformities part of a general North American amphibian crash or just an ill-understood anomaly?

So it's good news with bad (again), encouraging and deflating, rise and fall. What's hard is not knowing whether we're witnessing immutable cycles of nature or poignant examples of preventable decline.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

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