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NEW NATURAL RESOURCE CONCERNS ON AGRICULTURAL LEASES
Restrictions on the Blue Ridge Parkway’s agricultural leases used to be aimed exclusively at soil conservation. Today, natural resource protection issues – water quality and habitat for threatened, rare and endangered plant and animal species – are becoming a factor in lease requirements. In May, when parkway agricultural leasing specialist Tom Davis and resource management specialist Bob Cherry took farmer Jim Brown up to look over an open lease on a hayfield at Moses Cone Park, the lease requirements they wanted to discuss involved something brand new: timing the mowing to protect wildlife habitat for butterflies and grassland birds.
The 37-acre field is divided into three sections – two large and one small – by a carriage road that leads to a nearby mountaintop and a side road to the gravesite of Moses and Bertha Cone. Concerns about grassland bird species – grasshopper, Savannah, Henslow’s and field sparrows, and meadowlarks and bobolinks – who nest in fields like the one on the Cone Estate and whose numbers are declining prompted the action. What Cherry and Davis are requiring of the lessee is to stagger mowing in the three sections.
The smallest was to be mowed by early June and left unmown thereafter, to allow summer wildflowers to regenerate and flower – for butterflies, who drink their nectar. Of the two large sections, one carries no restrictions. But the other can’t be mowed until August, to allow nesting grassland birds to fledge their young. Earlier mowing can destroy nests and kill nestlings. The restrictions are an experiment and may be lifted or changed next year.
“We have to balance farmer needs with natural resource protection, and sometimes they conflict,” Davis acknowledges.
Sometimes, however, they coincide.
Such appears to be the case with grazing cattle and bog turtles, the smallest and rarest freshwater turtle species in the United States. After a 1992 biological survey of the parkway’s 1,500 acres of wetlands and bogs revealed the presence of bog turtles in some wet pastures, grazing leases on them were abruptly cancelled. But woody vegetation, kept in check by browsing cattle, quickly moved in. Some former wetlands dried out, destroying bog turtle habitat.
Biologists now believe that light to moderate cattle grazing benefits bog turtles because it reduces woody growth and prevents stream channel formation. Biologists from Virginia Tech are studying the role cattle play in maintaining bog turtle habitat. They’ve constructed 15x15-foot exclosures in wetlands on some parkway agricultural leases and will analyze how wetland soils and vegetation change when cattle are no longer present. Davis says the study should help the parkway determine optimal grazing densities to maintain – and even improve – bog turtle habitat.
The parkway has also been working with farmers to mitigate impact of cattle on riparian areas. In the past five years, Cherry says, “there’s been a big push, by us, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state agencies to get cows out of streams.” The parkway has begun building fences that will keep cattle 25-50 feet from stream banks, providing them with limited access – or water troughs – to slake their thirst. “We started with long stretches, where there is a half mile to a mile of stream running through pasture, because that’s where the impact is greatest,” he says. “But it all takes time and money.”
Additionally, the National Park Service has launched an initiative to inventory all plants and animals in all its units, including the Blue Ridge Parkway.
“The goal is to get 80 percent of plants and animals inventoried,” Davis says. “For the past two years, we’ve had a variety of contract biologists working all up and down the parkway inventorying plants, reptiles and amphibians, and small mammals. Vegetative plots have been established, some of them on agricultural leases.” The goal is to come up with up-to-date species lists for all NPS units that are based on “sound science.” What these inventories turn up is likely to affect the way future agricutural leases are written.
—EH
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