[CT Birds] WOODMONT BEACH

[ORCHIDS]

Is in Milford.  Oyster River is on the town line Milford/West Haven.   
There is a picture of the cove of the mouth of the Oyster River in his  
1920 Vegetation of Depositing shorelines by George Nichols - one of  
CT's best ever Plant Ecologists.  What today is unusual about this  
photograph is that the Cove was dominated by eelgrass.  I compiled all  
available historic data about the distribution of eelgrass (it grew  
throughout LIS) but by the late 1980's - was no longer found east of  
Clinton.  I presented these findings to the former Living Resources  
Workgroup (now defunct) of the Long Island Sound Study and suggested  
that this decline was likely due to nitrogen enrichment.  I then knew  
what those sailors felt like when they suggested the world was not  
flat.  Manh of you have heard about the eelgrass blight of 1931 -  
which did cause a decline in eelgrass but beds had recovered fully in  
eastern LIS by the mid-1940's.  Recovery was poor or non-existent in  
central and western LIS - suggesting a water quality problem in the  
Sound.  A few of you may remember the wildlife biologist Phil Barske -  
Phil helped to plant 4 eelgrass beds in 1947 with donor plants from  
the Niantic River.  Only one of those survived in front of the house  
of CT state wildlife biologist Beckley!  This bed was last seen in the  
early 1980's.  Today we know that climate change has caused an  
increase in the amount and frequency of African dust events - these  
make landfall in the Caribbean in the summer and New England in the  
spring.  This dust carries pathogens that cause crop mortality in the  
caribbean, asthma, reputedly sea fan dieoff in the caribbean.  The  
famous black blizzards began in 1931 - could the source of eelgrass  
wasting disease - a slime mold - be the US mid-west?  The chief group  
concerned about eelgrass declines of the 30's were wildlife biologists  
for then Brant fed almost exclusively on eelgrass.  The brant adapted!

Ron, Ashford