The Fruits of Our Labor
For a land manager, there may be no greater compliment than seeing plants and wildlife respond to your management work. At Mount Grace, most of our stewardship work is focused on improving forest health and diversity or otherwise enhancing habitat for wildlife. But increasingly, we are challenging ourselves to answer the question: Is our management actually achieving the results we intend? Thankfully, with the support of dedicated volunteers and powerful new tools, we’re beginning to answer that question with greater clarity and confidence.
Back in early 2024, Mount Grace completed a bird-friendly forestry project at the Guiney Memorial Forest in Royalston, that involved creating a 3-acre forest opening and conducting forest thinning on another nine acres. The goal was to inject some age and species diversity into the forest to support a broader array of birds and other wildlife. Since then, we have used eBird (an online database for bird observation data managed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology) and a group of dedicated volunteer birdwatchers to survey the area to monitor what birds are using the forest, especially during the breeding season. To date, we’ve observed 56 species, including 7 of Massachusetts’ Species of Greatest Conservation Need. It’s thrilling to be able to go for a walk through the woods and find everything from Eastern Towhees to Black throated blue warblers to Black throated green warblers. Each of these species depends on different parts of the forest, and their presence in our management area indicates that we’re maintaining a healthy variety of habitats that support a wide range of wildlife.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes we want to know what happens when we keep wildlife out of the woods. In this case, I’m referring specifically to white-tailed deer—and to an ongoing experiment at Song Memorial Forest in Warwick.
Overabundant deer populations are capable of seriously impacting forest regeneration and composition. In 2023, Mount Grace completed a 7-acre slash wall composed of tree crowns and other unmerchantable timber associated with a 13-acre harvest conducted at the same time. The wall – measuring 8-feet tall – effectively keeps deer out of the area, allowing tree species, such as oak, birch, beech, and hemlock to regenerate. Repeated site visits have shown no evidence of deer activity inside the wall. In fact, the only wildlife tracks we have found so far are porcupines which love denning in the slash wall! We expect to see noticeable differences in forest regeneration inside and outside the wall in coming years. But sometimes we don’t have to wait years to see the benefits of our good work. In June, MG volunteers and staff spent a rainy Saturday morning planting 250 native shrubs and wildflowers to create our new pollinator garden at our headquarters in Athol. Not even two months later and we have an assortment of moths, butterflies, bees and flies visiting our garden for nectar and pollen. Using another great online tool, iNaturalist, staff and visitors can take pictures with their phone and use the iNaturalist app to ID plant and insect species.
If you would like to be a citizen science volunteer with Mount Grace or want to learn how you can visit any of the habitat projects described above, visit our volunteer page here.