What an abandoned airfield means to birds
Local grasslands part 2, flower of the week, and more
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Local grasslands part 2: South Weymouth Naval Air Station
Here’s part 1 if you missed it.
When I went to look for grassland birds at South Weymouth Naval Air Station early this summer, the first movement that caught my eye was not a bird but a land windsurfer, something I’d never seen before.
The former air base, closed in 1997, attracts runners and walkers, but also people who want a big, open space to fly model airplanes or drones, let their dog run around, or cruise on a stiff breeze down a deserted runway.
Grassland-breeding birds are drawn there for similar reasons. These ground-nesting species are sensitive to the scale of their habitat. This is why you don’t see meadowlarks nesting in your small yard no matter how generously high your grass is — there’s a greater predation risk in a small grassland with nowhere to hide. But at a place like an abandoned airfield — and for that matter many active airports — there’s a large enough expanse of grassland habitat for ground-nesting grassland birds to feel relatively safe.
The South Weymouth airfield is one of the few spots in Norfolk County, which also includes Quincy, that features breeding eastern meadowlarks and grasshopper sparrows. The numbers aren’t huge — just a couple breeding pairs for each species — but their presence is an important sign, since they simply won’t occupy most other sites in the county. There are also considerable numbers of savannah sparrows, a less picky ground-nesting species.
Outside the breeding season, birds are also drawn to airports in regions with few grasslands. Norman Smith of the Blue Hills Trailside Museum has relocated around 800 snowy owls over the years that were drawn to Logan Airport’s grasses. The South Weymouth airfield has seen bobolinks, orchard orioles, dickcissels, and more during migration, making me wonder if some of those species might ever try setting up a nest here. During winter, short-eared owls, snow buntings and Lapland longspurs have stopped by. All of these signs point to the potential of the place as a grassland. I’d love to hear upland sandpipers whistling away here one day.
The future of the spot as bird habitat is not exactly secure, though. A complicated development scheme which has faced several setbacks now estimates that the spot will have nearly 4,000 residential units plus commercial space by the 2030s. Part of the issue is that the airbase’s landfill has toxins including PCBs and arsenic. There are water aquifers below the landfill and wetlands beside it. EPA-guided remediation work on the landfill is ongoing. The development project has completed a sports complex north of the airfield, but for now the tarmac, grass, and forest patches remain. In the meantime, the developers and local conservation groups have set up walking trails through the area, and the community effectively treats it as a unique kind of park.
It’s fascinating to see what birds make of the place. It’s the first spot I’ve gotten a good look at an eastern meadowlark since living in Nebraska. The meadowlark songs (“spring of the year!” is the mnemonic) were higher-pitched and more ascending compared to the ones I had grown used to in the Midwest. That could be a quirk of these particular birds (there’s lots of variation in individual meadowlark songs) or it could reflect some regional patterns — not enough birds around here to be sure.
This June, I saw two meadowlarks squabbling over territory boundaries. They called out and displayed at each other in the grassy median of a large runway with shipping crates and rubble not far off. Maybe it didn’t look like much to a human observer, but to a meadowlark it was worth fighting for.
Flower of the week: Common mullein
Before I dive into our fall asters and goldenrods, I wanted to take a moment to appreciate something that happens with summer-blooming flowers in early fall. In spots disturbed during the growing season by mowing (or in pastures, grazing), sometimes flowers will make a late attempt to rapidly bloom and produce fruit. They flower at a much smaller height, conserving energy and time. That’s what I found this common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) doing in a nearby patch of grass. Someone working on a utility pole dug right around the resurgent mullein stalks, suggesting they’re folks with a sense of subtlety. Mullein growing uninterrupted in the summer can reach 7 feet in height. These stalks are completing flowering and fruiting on an advanced timeline, growing just 2-3 feet.
European colonists introduced mullein to North America because of its history as an herbal remedy — mullein tea is said to be soothing. Colorado and Hawaii consider it a noxious weed. It hasn’t seemed too aggressive in most places I’ve seen it. In Nebraska, it was a favored perch structure for dickcissels, which often used a set of several mullein stalks to mark out their breeding territories. Be careful if you harvest a blooming stalk for a wildflower arrangement, because as I found out when I did so, a whole food web of pollinators and their predators lives in the densely-packed blooms.
Seeing mullein make a go for it in September in a small patch near the apartment is the kind of energy I’m looking for right now.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.