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Making Space: Encouraging Bat Habitat at Great Mountain Forest
Often maligned and feared, bats are actually helpful to humans and serve important ecological functions. Insect-eating bats make summer life more tolerable for people by consuming mosquitoes, black flies, and other nuisance insects and agricultural pests. Fruit-eating bats assist in the agricultural process by dispersing seeds, while other bats pollinate plants. Even without these ecological services, bats need support as the threat of disease and habitat loss caused by forest conversion grows.
In the past few decades, bat populations in the eastern United States have been devastated by an invasive fungus, Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Commonly known as white-nose syndrome for the distinctive white growth it leaves on their muzzles, this disease infects bats during hibernation, damaging their wings and disrupting critical physiological functions. Since its discovery in New York in 2006, populations of little brown bats, northern long-eared bats, and tri-colored bats have declined by more than 90%.
To support bat population growth and resiliency, Great Mountain Forest is working with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)—an agency of the United States Department of Agriculture—to help create and promote bat habitat on the property.
During the summer, bats rely on roost trees, to raise their young, or “pups.” Ideal roost trees are characterized as large and having peeling or shaggy bark; however, bats also use standing dead trees with cavities to shelter their pups. In the fall, GMF staff began collaborating with NRCS staff and biologists to identify prime roost trees along GMF’s Iron Trail, marking them with blue dots.
With its shaggy bark, this ideal roosting tree has been identified according to NRCS guidance and GMF preliminary research. Photo by Kate Regan-Loomis.
This winter, to support these roost trees and prevent disruption to the bats’ roosting cycle, trees within a 15-foot radius of the marked trees were removed. By reducing competition from surrounding trees, the selected roost trees have more room to grow their canopies and access light and nutrients. This allows them to increase in size, develop more exfoliating bark, and remain healthy for longer.
Clearing smaller surrounding trees also allows more sunlight to warm the tree trunks, creating more comfortable roosting conditions for bats. Additionally, this work increases structural diversity in an otherwise relatively homogeneous forest, thereby developing more foraging opportunities for bats.
From left to right: Foresters Kate Regan-Loomis and Jody Bronson managing the forest and improving bat habitat. Photo by Kate Regan-Loomis.
The larger trees removed during this process are put to good use by GMF staff. Higher-quality logs are milled and used in current projects and future structures, while lower-quality wood is used for firewood to heat buildings and boil maple sap. Smaller trees and limbs are left in the forest, where they provide temporary shelter for wildlife and return nutrients to the soil as they decompose.
So while certain areas of GMF might look a little less tidy than usual, that apparent mess is creating more habitat for an endangered group of species, improving the health of large, old trees, and supporting the use of local wood by an organization dedicated to forest stewardship.
What Happens When We Lose the American Beech?
Less than a decade ago, beech leaf disease was unknown to New England’s expansive beech canopies.
But now? “In Connecticut, every single beech tree has beech leaf disease,” said Elisabeth Ward, a forest ecologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES).
Ward is one of several researchers working on a long-term study in Great Mountain Forest – and across Connecticut – to gather data on this rapidly spreading pestilence in order to forecast what might happen to New England’s woodlands if – or rather when – the beeches are gone.
“This project isn’t about preserving existing beech,” said GMF Forester Kate Regan-Loomis, who helps coordinate and support research projects in the forest. “The question is how is the forest going to respond to beech leaf disease?”
“What is going to come back when the beech are gone? And how does our management affect that?”
Beech leaf disease, often referred to as BLD, was first detected in Ohio in 2012 and jumped to Connecticut in 2019. Caused by an invasive nematode – a microscopic worm – the disease infects the leaves, causing a noticeable “banding” effect, then crinkling the leaves as the disease progresses, ultimately defoliating the tree. Without leaves, the trees cannot photosynthesize, which means they cannot grow and will eventually die.
Ward, who coordinates Connecticut’s forest health program, a joint effort between the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said that BLD is an invasive disease that stands out even in New England’s increasingly-diseased woodlands.
“The northeastern U.S. has a long history with lots of different introductions of forest pest pathogens and diseases from around the world… but an invasive foliar nematode is not something we’ve seen before,” she explained. “Foliar” means that the pest targets the leaf.
“It’s just not something that’s ever been dealt with in terms of a forest health issue.”
This fact, along with the unprecedented speed with which the disease spreads, means that “scientific research hasn’t really been able to keep up with what to do,” Ward said.
Ward’s own work on BLD seeks to fill the gap formed between the disease’s swift takeover of northeastern forests and the relative lag of peer-reviewed scientific research. She is part of a collaborative, multi-discipline study using eight sets of large forest plots across Connecticut, including some nearly 70 year-old plots within GMF, to examine how beech trees of various age, size, and other variables are responding to the disease.
“We’re calling it a rapid assessment,” she explained, noting that the goal is to survey a large sample size “to get some really robust, good initial data about beech leaf disease and its impacts.”
Her work continues that of Jeffrey Ward (no relation), former chief scientist at CAES and GMF trustee, who began monitoring the GMF plots specifically for BLD when it landed in Connecticut. The project, which is ongoing, tracks 2,500 trees across the research sites, and so far, the scientists have found “pretty much complete stagnation of growth amongst all tree size classes,” she reported.
Interestingly, the researchers have not found a notable uptick in mortality in beech yet, but Ward warned that this isn’t cause to rejoice. Beech are clonal, meaning that in a stand, many stems are connected to the same root system. This enables healthier, larger trees to subsidize sicker ones for a time. When this reservoir runs out, though, possibly due to a co-stressor such as drought, “we’re going to see stand level die back,” Ward said.
While the situation is dire, Ward emphasized that much is still unknown. “We’re kind of limited by our lifetimes and what we see happening,” she said, noting that in Japan, where the nematode is suspected to have originated, beech have “completely co-evolved” with the nematode and live alongside it.
Regan-Loomis said that forest management can help play a role in giving the species a chance at survival: “Evolution is just luck… we can try to direct that in selecting management trees [to protect] that we hope have a good shot.”
Ward is working with GMF to explore another project that would test a potential treatment that could help preserve a sampling of healthier beech trees. Over the summer, she plans to test a phosphite bark spray at sites across the state including GMF. While not a landscape-scale solution – “I wouldn’t recommend spraying anything over the entire eastern United States” – it could save some trees, which is important, Ward explained:
“At least we’ll be doing something to preserve some beech genetic diversity across Connecticut rather than just waiting for them all to die.”
Other researchers are tackling BLD from other angles at GMF. Ecosystem ecologist Jonathan Gewirtzman, who just defended his PhD thesis at the Yale School of the Environment and is moving on to a post-doc at Stanford University, is part of the same collaborative, state-wide project that Ward is working on, but his focus is on what’s happening below the bark.
Researcher Jonathan Gewirtzman takes a core from a small beech to search for nutrient uptake. Photo by Kate Regan-Loomis
Gewirtzman studies non-structural carbohydrates – sugars and starches – in the outer part of infected beech trunks. In other words, he researches tree food. “Do these trees run out of sugar and die? Is that what’s going to lead to their mortality?”
He explained that his lab takes samples twice a year to get maximum and minimums, as trees build up stores throughout the leaf season to sustain them over the winter – “like a hibernating bear.” The research group expects results from the first batch of samples within the next several months.
Another upcoming project comes from Akshay Patel, a first-year Master’s student at the Yale School of the Environment. Patel is currently in the planning stages of a study on whether the disease can be accurately monitored using drone technology.
“In a lot of my research,” he said, “I’ve seen that a common pattern of diseases that run away from us is that we’re not able to keep a consistent and spatially explicit record of where they are.” He explained that more efficient tracking of the disease’s progress will aid forest managers and researchers in myriad ways as the scientific community deepens its understanding of this devastating pathogen.
Despite hints of progress, the story of New England’s beech trees is a sad one, and not just for humans, Regan-Loomis said. She noted that while the tree has often been regarded as a nuisance and of low-value among foresters, it provides vital nutrition for wildlife. “Beech nuts are important especially where there aren’t oak trees around,” she said. “It’s just a very useful, very fatty food for, like, everything, especially larger animals like deer and bear.”
“I always want to defend the beech,” emphasized Loomis.
Following the Forest GMF Style
Great Mountain Forest’s 6,300-acre expanse is, in a sense, one of Connecticut’s broadest highways. Save the rare maintenance vehicle or Sunday stroller, though, it is no conduit for humans, but rather the fast lane – or a rest stop – for the abundant flora and fauna of the New England woodlands.
That highway is not isolated to Norfolk and Falls Village. It is part of an ecological interstate that runs from the uplands of the lower Hudson Valley to the northern forests of Quebec. The Follow the Forest initiative, a collective effort between the Housatonic Valley Association, the Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative, and many other regional groups, seeks to connect and protect this dark green thoroughfare, and GMF is a vital junction on a route that carries moose, bears, bobcats, salamanders, seed pods and beyond across an increasingly fragmented landscape.
The project recently received $30,000 in grant funding to further its mission, which combines citizen science, expert input, and regional partnerships to aid in wildlife mobility along a “corridor” that follows protected forests from the Hudson Highlands through the Berkshire and Taconic ranges before connecting with the Adirondack and Green Mountains and ultimately Canada.
Windrow Road approaching the GMF Visitor Center in early December. Even quiet roads like this can pose an obstruction to wildlife mobility between large forest cores. Photo by Alec Linden.
“Connectivity” is the concept of keeping “core” habitats bridged through “linkages” – sites where animals are able to traverse an anthropogenic boundary from one core to another. Many animals depend on mobility for vital reasons, such as seeking food or water or mating and reproduction, but the isolation of habitats from one another impacts humans downstream as well. According to the World Wildlife Fund, habitat fragmentation stemming from development has impacts beyond local ecosystem collapse, including degrading soil health and polluting fresh water.
Large and connected refuges of wildland that enable animals and plants to move freely are considered havens of “resilience” amid increasing pressures from climate change and development, which is an ecosystem’s ability to survive and thrive amidst disturbance. The corridor that runs up the highland spine from southern New York state to Canada connects an extensive swath of North America’s eastern woods, regarded to be the largest stretch of intact temperate mixed and deciduous forest in the world, according to Follow the Forest.
GMF’s territory makes up what the Follow the Forest initiative identifies as “core forest habitat” – a tract of protected woodland, 250 acres or greater, that is not disrupted by human alterations like roads or farmland. In addition to GMF’s conserved lands, thousands more acres of protected state-owned highland forest spread across the Canaan Mountain massif. Far exceeding the size qualification, the extensive, contiguous, and diverse forest contained within and directly abutting GMF’s boundaries is part of a “key stronghold” of climate resilience, according to HVA Conservation Director Julia Rogers.
During a recent interview, Rogers addressed the value in GMF’s longstanding commitment to conserving forestland. “Without that legacy,” she said, “I would predict that there is a strong likelihood that parts of [the forest] would be developed and we would have a much smaller core forest.”
Big cores, she explained, are fundamental as they are able to withstand disruption and damage more so than smaller tracts of land. “Larger cores are going to be more resilient to all the impacts of climate change,” she said, including more extreme and unpredictable weather patterns, which may topple trees that have less protection.
Plus, GMF has elevation on its side: “As we think about species who are going to need to move either north or upward in elevation as a response to climate change, Great Mountain Forest is going to serve as a key climate refuge.”
“That connectivity with the protected lands further south and lower in elevation is so critical to Great Mountain Forest serving as a key part of the Follow the Forest initiative,” Rogers added.
The property lines of GMF, outlined in red, with the surrounding wildlife linkages to other core forest habitat demarcated by purple ovals. Shaded ovals indicate sites that have been assessed in person by a community scientist. Map courtesy of Stacy Deming/Housatonic Valley Association.
Not just a stronghold, GMF is also surrounded by linkages to other protected habitats. These sites, identified by purple ovals on the Follow the Forest map, were initially identified by computer modeling, but many have been visited by volunteer citizen scientists who contributed their own observations to the data pool.
Stacy Deming, HVA’s GIS manager who is behind Follow the Forest’s intricate and user-friendly story map, also joined the interview. She spoke with pride about the collaboration with locals. “I’d say we’ve really done a lot of work with community scientists to come up with these,” she said of the map tags detailing each linkage. “I feel like they’re a better display of what the linkages really are.”
Rogers echoed Deming’s sentiment: “What’s really cool about getting community scientists out there is that they have information that we can’t gather from a computer.” Plus, involvement begets interest, she said, noting that the project promotes engagement with the idea of wildlife connectivity as volunteers inspect these linkage sites firsthand.
Both Rogers and Deming agree that a communal approach to preserving connected wildlife corridors is essential in southern New England, a region abounding with roads, property lines, and town borders.
“None of us can do it alone,” said Rogers. “We need each other. And what’s fun about Follow the Forest is that it unites all of us under something that’s exciting, right?”
Future Forests in the Making: Climate-Smart Thinning at Great Mountain Forest
As New England experiences increasingly extreme weather, including hotter and wetter summers, keeping forests healthy and resilient to pests and disease is an ongoing challenge. Work has begun implementing Connecticut Land Conservation Council’s (CLCC) Climate Smart Land Stewardship Grant at GMF! Great Mountain Forest recently began a pre-commercial thinning project, which is a forest management practice that involves removing trees from a young, dense stand before they reach a size where they can be commercially harvested.
Managing Competition
In areas at GMF where trees were harvested 20 years ago, young trees have grown back fiercely, racing to become the future forest. Most of these new trees will end up being shaded out underneath their stronger brethren or succumbing to damage or disease. By applying management methods that support a diversity of tree and animal species and provide more resilience to pests and other disturbances, our foresters are controlling that competition to enhance traits we hope to promote.
We start by marking a “pre-commercial thinning,” or PCT, in three stands that are approximately 20 years old. “Thinning” means removing the trees that are competing with those we want to keep strong and healthy. “Pre-commercial” means that we are implementing this treatment when the trees are too small to be sold as wood products, which is where funding directed by CLCC comes in to support this work. We chose trees spaced on average 10 feet from one another, giving them the light they need to grow quickly when they are “released” from competition by this treatment.
Stand marked before treatment (note very high density of stems).
Stand after thinning treatment (only marked individuals remain standing).
Shaping the Future Forest
In selecting which trees to keep, there are a few things we keep in mind. The first is health and form. We choose trees that are going to last: those that aren’t suffering from disease, that have stable trunks and full crowns, and that have no obvious wounds.
Unfortunately, we have to remove most of the beech in these young stands. American Beech, or Fagus Grandifolia, is currently under a dual attack from beech leaf disease and beech bark disease. Nearly all of the beech in our forest are succumbing to one or both of these diseases. While we save any individuals that seem to display resistance, we know we cannot count on the majority of them as our future canopy.
The other factor we consider is species composition. Presently, these stands are almost entirely beech and black birch (Betula lenta). We therefore want to promote the other species within the stand to make it as diverse as we can. Tulip poplar, white, yellow and grey birch, ash, cottonwood, and oak are growing in these stands too, and we select for them to prevent the stands from becoming near-monocultures of black birch. While there’s nothing wrong with black birch, aiming for as much diversity as possible helps to increase stand resilience and support additional non-tree species in the forest. We’re also making sure to leave species like serviceberry and highbush blueberry. While these species won’t be our canopy trees, the fruits they produce are important food sources for birds.
Looking below the canopy, the effects of this treatment will also be seen on the forest floor. In this stage of competition, the amount of light that can reach the ground is quite limited. The trees are so densely packed that nearly nothing can grow beneath them. But by thinning the trees, we are allowing that light back in.
Forester Emeritus Jody Bronson inspired this project through his implementation of a similar PCT on a smaller scale over many years. What he saw after thinning was an understory full of not only herbaceous plants, but a new cohort of tree seedlings, particularly oaks, a group of species that has wonderful ecological value but can be difficult to regenerate. Now, should an ice storm come through and knock out the canopy trees, that young cohort is waiting in the wings to take off and swiftly become a forest again instead of having to compete for establishment.
Great Mountain Forest’s 2025 summer interns got to mark this treatment, selecting which trees to cut and which to leave. From the first week, they started thinking like foresters, making decisions that they would not see the full effects of for decades.
We are so grateful to CLCC for funding this work, which has provided young foresters with unique learning opportunities, added resilience to our forest, and created an excellent demonstration of sustainable forest stewardship.
Funding for this project was paid for by the Climate Smart Farming: Agriculture and Forestry Grant. Funding awarded and administered by the Connecticut Department of Agriculture and the Connecticut Land Conservation Council.
GMF’s 77th Cohort of Forestry Interns
Ren Cattafe
Hello! My name is Ren Cattafe, and I am an undergraduate student at UMass Amherst studying forest ecology and conservation. I grew up in eastern Massachusetts, spending a lot of time in forests, which fostered my love of nature early on and influenced my decision to pursue a career in natural resources. I’m interested in sustainable logging practices, promoting forest resilience through silviculture, and increasing community accessibility and knowledge of forested areas. During my studies I have also had the opportunity to participate in active hemlock woolly adelgid research, which I plan to continue in the coming academic year.
I feel extremely grateful to be working with GMF this summer. Not only has it been an incredible learning opportunity, but a chance to do work that serves a real purpose.
Within the first week, my fellow interns and I supported research that involved marking 30+ acres of trees with the goal of strengthening the dominant cohort and the understory. This experience has enhanced my ability to perceive and interpret forested landscapes in a manner that can’t be achieved in a classroom setting. I am thrilled that such research is supported here, and that both industry and science can coexist within the same space.
Will Watkins
Hello, my name is Will Watkins. I am a rising senior at North Carolina State University studying forest management with a concentration in ecology and a minor in environmental education. I first got into forestry as a degree because I grew up participating in boy scouts and spent a lot of time outdoors. The summer before I started my freshman year at college I was able to go on a special backpacking trip out in New Mexico where I learned about and helped with some forestry and conservation efforts. This inspired me to pursue forestry at school. Now that I have had some schooling and this internship, I know I made the right choice.
I was born and raised in North Carolina and had never heard of Great Mountain Forest, nor did I know much about the northwest corner of Connecticut. But as soon as I ran across this opportunity online I was excited and applied immediately. It checked all my boxes, plus it was in a part of the country that I have never been to? That’s great! Even now, after working here for a month, I am still slowly learning more about both GMF and the area.
So far, we have marked stands of trees for a pre-commercial thinning and we have made some plots in a stand of barberry to get an inventory of the understory. That is only a small bit of what we have done so far and what we will eventually get to do later in the summer. I am very much looking forward to the rest of the summer.
Ronald Law
Hello, my name is Ronald Law, and I am a 2025 summer intern at Great Mountain Forest. My interest in forestry began quite late in life as I was originally studying computer science. After some time however, my disinterest in the field became apparent to me and I decided I had to quit.
Six months later, I started working at a lawn care company, eventually becoming a tree and shrub specialist. Though I enjoyed my time there, I slowly came to realize the elements in our environment that were changing dramatically, resulting in the death and weakening of numerous plants under my care. As unusually warm winters became the norm, and invasive pests became more prevalent, I realized I wanted to work in a position that was more proactive than reactive when it came to the health of our environment. So I decided to return to school and pursue environmental studies, which eventually led me to my internship at Great Mountain Forest.
An afternoon in the Pleistocene
Peeking around the berry bushes into the Tobey Bog’s central clearing
The oft-maligned swamp, despite holding a persistent legacy in the cultural imagination as a place of decay with little utility or aesthetic appeal to humans, has garnered several famous fans over the years. The animated ogre Shrek, famed for his protectiveness over his marshy homeland, comes to mind as a recent example, though bogs have another, arguably more eloquent devotee: Henry David Thoreau.
“Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp,” the Transcendentalist thinker wrote in his 1851 treatise to wildness, “Walking.” In that lecture, Thoreau waxed poetic about replacing his cultivated front yard with “a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,” romanticizing the rawness of the bog in comparison to the orderliness of human landscaping.
Before I embarked on an afternoon visit to the bog on a gorgeous day in early June, GMF trustee, forester, and founding member Star Childs told me that he’s always identified with that particular fantasy of Thoreau’s. In fact, he’s been lucky enough to have lived much of his life with a swamp in his figurative front yard – namely, Tobey Bog in the “North Forty” region of GMF.
Tobey Bog is no ordinary wetland, at least not in Connecticut. In his as-yet unpublished paean to the forest, the late naturalist-poet David Leff, whose lifelong love affair with the GMF landscape began with an encounter with the bog, described it as “a subarctic fragment stranded about as far south as possible,” and, “a world unto itself where the usual ecological rules did not apply.”
A glimpse of Tobey Pond from beneath the hemlocks
Paddling out
Aided by the convenience of a canoe (courtesy of the Childs family), I took advantage of some rare good weather to ferry myself across Tobey Pond for my first visit to the bog. Paddling across the pond’s dark, serene waters, fringed by drooping hemlock boughs and tall stands of white pine, the experience felt more North Country than southern New England.
Tobey Pond, like the bog with which it shares a namesake, is a specter of the ice which once weighed heavily upon these hills. When the glaciers retreated at the end of the ice age, they left behind chunks of ice lodged in the ground, which created holes known as kettles that filled with meltwater. While Tobey Pond became a lake, suitable for things like canoeing and town beaches, Tobey Bog was poorly drained and poorly fed by water sources, eventually filling with a thirty foot thick bed of sphagnum moss from which now sprouts a strange array of conifers, berry bushes, and carnivorous plants. As I would soon find out, it was, in Thoreau’s words, “the jewel which dazzled me.”
A pocket of the cold north
Parking my canoe in a shady cove of the pond, I ambled by Skinner cabin and down a gravel road to a thin boardwalk leading through a claustrophobic tunnel of highbush blueberry, huckleberry, and invasive buckthorn shrub. Eventually, the brush parted to reveal a panoramic view of the bog which Leff described as resembling “a shag carpet of the 1970s” due to the mosaic of “heathered green and reddish highlights.” I agreed with Leff that the amphitheater-like space conjures the feeling of being within a “huge oculus in a massive rotunda.”
Ecologically, it recalls imagery of the boreal peat bogs of high latitude North America and Europe. Scrubby conifers perch upon a squishy bed of sphagnum moss that compresses at depth to form peat, a thick mat of organic material that is used as a fuel source in many parts of the world, or as in Scotland, to flavor liquor. Trees like red maple, larch, and white pine dominate a patchy overstory, while scrubby black spruce mingle with the berry bushes in the shrub layer, reminiscent of the landscapes of northern Maine or Atlantic Canada.
“It’s a little mini-ecosystem all of its own that attracts these northern species,” Star said.
One of the only deciduous conifers native to the US, the eastern larch, also known as the tamarack, thrives in boggy soils
These trees and shrubs can survive in the nutrient-poor, acidic soils that the bog provides, as can a much stranger, smaller, and hungrier flora: carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants. While the tiny sundews eluded my layman’s eye, the purple pitcher plant – the only species of its kind that tolerates cold weather – was obvious, with deep green and magenta leaf furls curling into the eponymous pitchers that trap prey to provide the valuable nitrogen the bog itself cannot provide. In little hollows beneath the shrub branches, the fleshy, bulbous blossoms of the plant, just opening at the time of my visit, stood from the moss like troupes of elves in dappled, emerald sunlight.
While this bog took thousands of years to form, it feels like a vestige of the Pleistocene era, when the land had just shaken itself free of its icy burden. The effect is amplified by the drone of frogs echoing through the larches and the thrum of dragonfly wings beating past my ears. It’s easy to grow fanciful here. Michael Gaige and Yonatan Glogower’s 2016 field guide to the forest recommends that readers should “go [to the bog] when you need to find some peace in your life, albeit of the soggy, acidic variety.”
The bulbous blossoms of the purple pitcher plant looking very Dr. Seuss among the moss and sedge
Timeless – but vulnerable
Tobey is “a true quaking bog,” said Star before I embarked. And quake it does. While the two-plank boardwalk feels solid enough underfoot, a subtle bounce under each step suggests the true nature of the gelatinous substrate beneath.
This shake, just a hint of unsteadiness, reflects the fragility of the ecosystem itself, no matter how ancient and timeless it may feel to a human visitor in this strange blip in geologic time. The existence of a peat bog is defined by the input of water outpacing its loss through evaporation and plant respiration, which makes them particularly susceptible to changes in temperature and precipitation.
Bogs further north, known as ombrotrophic bogs, receive the entirety of their water from precipitation, and are reliant on cool temperatures to keep from drying up, which is why they don’t occur as far south as Connecticut. As abnormally warm summers increase in frequency, disproportionately impacting arctic and boreal regions, these bogs are at risk. A 2020 study conducted in the Black Forest region of Germany (which somewhat resembles the rugged but low hills of Northwest Connecticut) found that biodiversity in temperate bogs has already been impacted by climate change, and remains threatened due to rising temperatures and decreased precipitation. The study maintains that there are few management options available to combat these trends.
When these bogs dry up, they can also burn. There has been ample research conducted in recent years on the environmental impacts of smoldering wildfires on peatlands, which can quietly burn in the soil for years, overwintering deep in the peat layer. Peat bogs contain a large percentage of the world’s terrestrial carbon stores, similar to the amount held in the atmosphere, and fires can release massive amounts of the gas. A 2021 study on northern peat fires reported that arctic wildfires are on the rise, and have been contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. If warming temperatures continue unmitigated, the study predicts that annual carbon loss from peat souls could total almost 550 megatons per year.
As this carbon is released, it contributes to global warming which is already disproportionately affecting northerly regions. This warming in turn melts more permafrost and dries out the soil, thus allowing more fires to ignite, which as a result puts even more carbon into the atmosphere. It’s what climatologists call a positive feedback loop.
Tobey Bog is minerotrophic, meaning it receives supplemental water through ground seepage. Due to its limited size it is not a great carbon store itself, and its moisture content is supported by the additional groundwater it receives. It too, however, is at risk from rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns, as decomposition rates can increase “dramatically” with warmer weather, penetrating the deep peat layers of preserved organic material, according to Gaige and Glogower. Its reliance on peripheral water sources also puts it downstream of any impacts to those resources.
A window to the north
Connected futures
Former GMF director Hans Carlson ran a column in the “Norfolk Now” contemplating the natural and cultural history of the region’s landscape in the late 2010s, including an article on Tobey Bog, a place which he said has largely remained on the outskirts of Western interest. Now, though, the bog is no longer able to sustain an existence separate from the human behavior, even as it gains value in the eyes of conservationists and nature-lovers. Carlson’s words on the subject, written nine years ago, are more potent now than ever: “We will continue to leave Tobey Bog to its own processes and life cycles, preserving it as a rarity in Southern New England, but it is no longer a place on the margins of our choices.”
Many of our leaders and decision-makers could benefit from a trip to the bog. It captivates and enchants, and thus, perhaps may encourage the right choices. Gaige and Glogower reference a 1991 master’s thesis by Erica Hamlin in which she told the story of Tobey Bog’s ecology through creative scientific prose and charcoal drawings. “It is a good reminder that strange ecosystems like bogs have the power to inspire people across disciplines and cognitive frames,” they write.
Or, as Thoreau said: “Hope and the future for me are not in the lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”
