A WELLSPRING OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS
Date: 040926
From: http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/
9,400 ACRES OF NEWLY PRESERVED PINELANDS YIELDS A UNIVERSE OF
EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
By Alexander Lane, Star-Ledger, September 24, 2004
Deep in the Pine Barrens last week, beside a white sand road, a
botanist named Kerry Barringer saw a flower so blue it startled him,
and so rare he had never seen it alive before.
"Burn it," he told the property owner.
Barringer was a guest researcher on the 9,400-acre property the New
Jersey Conservation Foundation bought last year, in the largest land
purchase by a nonprofit in state history.
Nine months later, the $12 million price looks downright reasonable,
scientists inside and outside the foundation said.
Barringer and other experts from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden
expected to find 150 plants on the property. They're at 350 and
counting. Every endangered Pine Barrens animal lives there, too.
The secret of the property's bounty: loving care, coupled with
violence.
The cranberry farmers who owned the land left most of it pristine. But
they also carved out bogs, slashed out roads, scooped out reservoirs
and otherwise abused some sections, unwittingly mimicking the chronic
wildfires that helped give the Pine Barrens its unique collection of
plants and animals.
The conservation foundation intends to preserve the pattern, by
burning that patch of blue flowers - called Pine Barrens gentians - to
ensure the roots get fertilized and come back next year, for example.
"The place needs to be beaten on," said Emile DeVito, the foundation's
manager of science and stewardship.
The foundation is scheduled to officially dedicate the land, called
the Franklin Parker Preserve, today. Just last week they finished
raising all $12 million. About $3.5 million of it came from the state,
which changed a previous decision not to contribute after the
importance of the property became clear.
Foundation fund-raisers are now working on accumulating a $3.5 million
endowment with which to manage the land.
The property contains virtually all that is precious about the Pine
Barrens, a unique, million-acre region of white sand, pure, dark
rivers and vast forests of oak, cedar and pine. A mere few hundred
thousand years ago the entire region was ocean floor.
Which is fitting, because today its acidic, white, sandy soil
functions not unlike a coral reef. Neither environment offers much in
the way of nutrients. So creatures adapt, each as creative as the
next. Nothing dominates. A remarkable diversity develops.
The Franklin Parker Preserve is like an untouched section of a reef
otherwise frequented by boats, divers and fishermen. State-owned
sections of the Pines nearby are beautiful, but they're also camped
on, canoed on and carved up by off- road vehicles. Decades of private
ownership have left the preserve more ecologically pure.
Some 600 acres of untouched Atlantic white cedar swamps protect
creatures like the threatened barred owl, and the Pine Barrens version
of the timber rattlesnake, New Jersey's rarest vertebrate.
Botanists have found a half-dozen types of orchids, and expect to find
a total of at least 10 - more than there are anywhere in the
continental United States except Florida.
There is an array of carnivorous plants. The pitcher plant traps
flies, beetles and midges in tubular leaves, the sundew catches them
with sticky glands, the bladderwort dissolves them with thousands of
tiny globular structures.
Then there are those disturbed areas. The false asphodel, a rare,
delicate white flower, grows on a bare patch that probably served as a
loading dock for pallets of cranberries. DeVito described an old
blueberry field as "snake heaven." Man-made reservoirs that hold water
once used to float fields of cranberries attract eagles, peregrine
falcons, migrating hawks and all sorts of water fowl.
That gentian grew on a grassy roadside.
"I'm really thinking the ability to adapt and use disturbance is
almost a characteristic of the Pinelands," said Barringer, a curator
at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.
Historically wildfires did the disturbing. But in recent decades
they've been extinguished too quickly to do much damage. Cranberry and
blueberry farming, it seems, approximates the effect in some places.
"It's not that I'm espousing agriculture. I'm not," said DeVito, no
fan of fungicides. "It just happened to mimic wildfires."
The cranberry farming family - led by the famous Burlington County
political figure Garfield DeMarco - built an elaborate system of dams,
canals and pipes. The conservation foundation intends to use them to
re-create 1,200 acres of wetlands, digging up and flooding bogs that
had been cut flat as pool tables and carefully drained.
They intend to court diversity.
"If we can manipulate the water table just right, we can make sure it
doesn't grow up into just pine and cedar," DeVito said. "We can make
it grow up into maple and gum."
Public access is a delicate issue, given its effect on surrounding
state forests. The foundation allows some hunting. Vehicles will not
be permitted, but in the spring the property will be opened to hikers.
There may be a link to the 60-mile Batona Trail.
For now, though, it is the province mainly of scientists. A dozen or
so have worked on the property this year. Barringer said he intended
to visit about once a month, but it has turned into more like once a
week.
"Every time I go down I find 20 or so things I haven't found there
before," he said.
* * *
Alexander Lane covers the environment. He can be reached at
alane@starledger.com or (973) 392-1790.
Copyright 2004 The Star-Ledger.
Date: 040926
From: http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/
9,400 ACRES OF NEWLY PRESERVED PINELANDS YIELDS A UNIVERSE OF
EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
By Alexander Lane, Star-Ledger, September 24, 2004
Deep in the Pine Barrens last week, beside a white sand road, a
botanist named Kerry Barringer saw a flower so blue it startled him,
and so rare he had never seen it alive before.
"Burn it," he told the property owner.
Barringer was a guest researcher on the 9,400-acre property the New
Jersey Conservation Foundation bought last year, in the largest land
purchase by a nonprofit in state history.
Nine months later, the $12 million price looks downright reasonable,
scientists inside and outside the foundation said.
Barringer and other experts from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden
expected to find 150 plants on the property. They're at 350 and
counting. Every endangered Pine Barrens animal lives there, too.
The secret of the property's bounty: loving care, coupled with
violence.
The cranberry farmers who owned the land left most of it pristine. But
they also carved out bogs, slashed out roads, scooped out reservoirs
and otherwise abused some sections, unwittingly mimicking the chronic
wildfires that helped give the Pine Barrens its unique collection of
plants and animals.
The conservation foundation intends to preserve the pattern, by
burning that patch of blue flowers - called Pine Barrens gentians - to
ensure the roots get fertilized and come back next year, for example.
"The place needs to be beaten on," said Emile DeVito, the foundation's
manager of science and stewardship.
The foundation is scheduled to officially dedicate the land, called
the Franklin Parker Preserve, today. Just last week they finished
raising all $12 million. About $3.5 million of it came from the state,
which changed a previous decision not to contribute after the
importance of the property became clear.
Foundation fund-raisers are now working on accumulating a $3.5 million
endowment with which to manage the land.
The property contains virtually all that is precious about the Pine
Barrens, a unique, million-acre region of white sand, pure, dark
rivers and vast forests of oak, cedar and pine. A mere few hundred
thousand years ago the entire region was ocean floor.
Which is fitting, because today its acidic, white, sandy soil
functions not unlike a coral reef. Neither environment offers much in
the way of nutrients. So creatures adapt, each as creative as the
next. Nothing dominates. A remarkable diversity develops.
The Franklin Parker Preserve is like an untouched section of a reef
otherwise frequented by boats, divers and fishermen. State-owned
sections of the Pines nearby are beautiful, but they're also camped
on, canoed on and carved up by off- road vehicles. Decades of private
ownership have left the preserve more ecologically pure.
Some 600 acres of untouched Atlantic white cedar swamps protect
creatures like the threatened barred owl, and the Pine Barrens version
of the timber rattlesnake, New Jersey's rarest vertebrate.
Botanists have found a half-dozen types of orchids, and expect to find
a total of at least 10 - more than there are anywhere in the
continental United States except Florida.
There is an array of carnivorous plants. The pitcher plant traps
flies, beetles and midges in tubular leaves, the sundew catches them
with sticky glands, the bladderwort dissolves them with thousands of
tiny globular structures.
Then there are those disturbed areas. The false asphodel, a rare,
delicate white flower, grows on a bare patch that probably served as a
loading dock for pallets of cranberries. DeVito described an old
blueberry field as "snake heaven." Man-made reservoirs that hold water
once used to float fields of cranberries attract eagles, peregrine
falcons, migrating hawks and all sorts of water fowl.
That gentian grew on a grassy roadside.
"I'm really thinking the ability to adapt and use disturbance is
almost a characteristic of the Pinelands," said Barringer, a curator
at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.
Historically wildfires did the disturbing. But in recent decades
they've been extinguished too quickly to do much damage. Cranberry and
blueberry farming, it seems, approximates the effect in some places.
"It's not that I'm espousing agriculture. I'm not," said DeVito, no
fan of fungicides. "It just happened to mimic wildfires."
The cranberry farming family - led by the famous Burlington County
political figure Garfield DeMarco - built an elaborate system of dams,
canals and pipes. The conservation foundation intends to use them to
re-create 1,200 acres of wetlands, digging up and flooding bogs that
had been cut flat as pool tables and carefully drained.
They intend to court diversity.
"If we can manipulate the water table just right, we can make sure it
doesn't grow up into just pine and cedar," DeVito said. "We can make
it grow up into maple and gum."
Public access is a delicate issue, given its effect on surrounding
state forests. The foundation allows some hunting. Vehicles will not
be permitted, but in the spring the property will be opened to hikers.
There may be a link to the 60-mile Batona Trail.
For now, though, it is the province mainly of scientists. A dozen or
so have worked on the property this year. Barringer said he intended
to visit about once a month, but it has turned into more like once a
week.
"Every time I go down I find 20 or so things I haven't found there
before," he said.
* * *
Alexander Lane covers the environment. He can be reached at
alane@starledger.com or (973) 392-1790.
Copyright 2004 The Star-Ledger.
