Pond and dam management inventory underway
AYER — With the aim of cataloguing and eventually managing all of the town’s ponds and dams, the Dam and Pond Management Committee held its inaugural meeting Monday night to begin consideration of a vital component of Ayer’s ecological profile.
Selectmen charged members with coming up with an inventory of the town’s dams and ponds, an assessment of their conditions and maintenance needs, and the compilation of a dam and pond management plan that would address issues requiring attention.
Imagine an entire committee in charge of monitoring all the dams and ponds in a city! I can’t even fathom what that might look like, but that’s the job of this Massachusetts team who are now tracking every beaver dam and pond in the area. Mike Callahan says he recently installed a flow device there and did a presentation a few years back, so maybe his message sunk in. Or maybe this bit of dramatic stupid made the town aware that beaver dams are important.
Adding to the board’s concerns about Flannagan’s Pond, one of a half dozen major bodies of water that are inter-dependent, was an important beaver dam recently breached, possibly by an explosion deliberately set by a person or persons unknown. The result of the dam’s destruction caused massive flooding that left hundreds of acres under water.
Yeah, you really shouldn’t blow up beaver dams. Aside from all the fish and birds you disrupt, its bad news for your down stream neighbors.
In opening their discussion of the issues last Monday night, members began to realize the challenge they faced when presented with a list of the dams in town including the Balch Pond Dam on Cold Spring Brook owned by the town, the Ice House Dam on the Nashua River owned by Ice House Partners, Inc., the Upper Flannagan Pond Dam owned by Linda and John Wesley, the Lower Long Pond Dam owned by Sandy Pond Real Estate, the Plow Shop Pond Dam owned by G.V.M. Realty, Inc., the Plow Shop Pond Dike owned by the town, and the Long Pond Dam on Upper Long Pond also owned by the town.
With the scope of the issue somewhat identified, members decided that for their next meeting, they would need certain informational material at hand in order to begin planning including an exact inventory of dams and topographical maps, sample management plans from other communities to review, and local environmental reports
Other concerns raised by members over the course of the Jan. 30 meeting included liability and enforcement issues, the town’s relations with the owners of private dams, the disposal of yard waste by abutters to the town’s ponds, the role if any of the state in oversight of the ponds, and beavers.
Oh to be a fly on the wall at the next meeting! Well, good luck ‘dam posse’! Feel free to call on us if we can be of any help or assistance!
More good news comes from the Midwest Beer Collective in Milwaukee where efforts to improve the watershed have lead to returning salmon and [incidentally] beavers!
It was a big surprise when salmon stopped their annual river run in the Kinnickinnic River, one of Milwaukee’s most ecologically strained waterways. Imagine people’s surprise when the salmon started coming back: The revitalized salmon population comes as a direct result of Milwaukee’s watershed cleanup plan. City officials have been constructing green roof, setting up rain barrels and buffering watersheds to stop toxic runoff before it pollutes the freshwater. These techniques have allowed the river ecosystem to reestablish itself, and the wildlife is returning. Very simple cleanup plans like these are finding success across the nation.
The author, Anthony Cefali offers the tale of beaver and salmon primarily as a way to re-introduce a new [old] word “Umwelt” which he describes as, ‘A German word, umwelt came about in the 1920’s. It poorly translates to “self-world,” or the observable world of an organism occupying a certain habitat.’ What he never quite acknowledges is that the Umwelt of the beaver dramatically becomes habitat for salmon, birds, mammals and amphibians. This is why the beaver was counted as an indicator for multiple species in the award winning Mannahatta project. This was the central thesis of Dietland Muller-Swarze’s Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer.
The beaver requires only food and water, but if those needs are met he can produce ideal conditions for an increased riparian border, salmon, things that eat salmon, stream channelization, silt removal, water quality improvement, bird population increase and diversity, water table raised, change vulnerability to drought all the while creating conditions that create more beavers to do it all over again.
Thanks for the new world and the positive article. But here’s what Mr. Cefali should have mentioned:
