Burning trash and breeding birds

An incinerator's landfill that also hosts uncommon birds + plant of the week (a fern!)

Yvonne Abraham of the Boston Globe has an excellent column on the Wheelabrator incinerator in Saugus, north of Boston, which is contemplating another expansion of its landfill. For decades, the plant has burned trash, released toxic fumes, and buried the resulting poisonous ash in a huge landfill adjacent to a salt marsh. Apart from unpleasant sounds and smells (considerable on their own), the plant has also had to settle with the state for a lawsuit alleging violations of the Clean Water Act, Wetlands Protection Act, and the Hazardous Waste Management Act.

I’ve seen the place up close. Last summer, I participated in surveys of breeding birds at capped and restored parts of the landfill which comprise Bear Creek Sanctuary — an area which Wheelabrator has had to restore to compensate for previous damage. We found dozens of bobolinks and savannah sparrows, as well as a single singing grasshopper sparrow—a tantalizing sign that perhaps future years could bring more. As Soheil Zendeh writes in the Bird Observer, Bear Creek provides habitat for breeding grassland birds thanks to the management that Wheelabrator has undertaken.

But it also has to be said, as Zendeh points out, that not all of the management actions have been ideal. Eastern meadowlarks, a rare breeder in the state, nested at Bear Creek (16 pairs in 2006!) until 2012, when Wheelabrator turned a large area in the middle of the sanctuary into a golf driving range to improve relations with the town of Saugus. And expanding the active landfill would run counter to both bird habitat quality and environmental quality for residents.

The big picture, observes Abraham, is that the state opted to burn trash after failing to use less harmful methods to deal with it — reduction, recycling, composting, and newer alternatives outlined in a feature in Commonwealth Magazine. For that reason, it’s hard to change the trajectory at this point when one solution is right there in front of us: continue using the incinerator and the landfill we already have rather than creating entirely new systems.

The even bigger picture is that despite Democratic majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, intense business lobbying and the governor’s veto tend to defeat climate and environmental initiatives in Massachusetts with disappointing consistency, writes Phil McKenna for InsideClimate News. If you thought Massachusetts is particularly progressive on climate or restrictive about pollution, think again. Many other states have closed their incinerators. Yet here we are.

Anyway, I have a lot more to say about Bear Creek for my long-paused series on local grasslands. Stay tuned.

Plant of the week: Rock polypody

Between you and me, I thought it would be harder to find plants to write about in the winter. I was fully prepared for a series of tree bark photos week after week. I’m sure both you and I are glad this didn’t come to pass, thanks to the diversity of evergreen flora out there.

Rock polypody (Polypodium virginianum) is named for its knack for growing on stones and thin soils. Like other ferns that stay green all year, it does so in order to start photosynthesizing in earnest after the first thaw and rake in a large percentage of its annual energy production before deciduous trees have regained their leaves and closed the canopy.

It’s a life cycle designed around hard winters and low nutrients: a reflection of rock polypody’s ecological niche, which Priya, two friends and I saw up close as we scrabbled up an icy Mt. Wachusett the other day. Most of the trails had an inch or more of ice on them, and our hiking boots weren’t giving us much traction. Sometimes our falls brought us (me) into close contact with an unknown fern with rounded lobes.

At the time I took its greenness for granted, but later realized that all the other ferns I was aware of had lost their fronds in the fall. In that way I’ve become aware of yet another group of winter-hardy plants. Keeping its leaves all year is a risky strategy, because unfavorable weather conditions such as a short spring could spoil the plan. But when it does work, last season’s fronds are able to drink in the light after thaw and then transfer some of their stored nutrients to the newly emerging leaves. Nothing goes to waste; over the years, organic matter accumulates on the stones; and finally, other plants begin to grow on the rockface.

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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.