Table Of Contenttitle: Quabbin, the Accidental Wilderness
author: Conuel, Thomas.
publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
isbn10 | asin: 0870237306
print isbn13: 9780870237300
ebook isbn13: 9780585217376
language: English
Quabbin Reservoir (Mass.)--History,
Reservoir ecology--Massachusetts--Quabbin
subject
Reservoir, Natural history--Massachusetts--
Quabbin Reservoir.
publication date: 1990
lcc: QH105.M4C66 1990eb
ddc: 508.744/2
Quabbin Reservoir (Mass.)--History,
Reservoir ecology--Massachusetts--Quabbin
subject:
Reservoir, Natural history--Massachusetts--
Quabbin Reservoir.
Page iii
Quabbin: The Accidental Wilderness
Revised Edition
Thomas Conuel
The University of Massachusetts Press Amherst
Page iv
For my mother
Copyright © 1981 by Massachusetts Audubon Society
Introduction to the Revised Edition
copyright © 1990 by
The University of Massachusetts Press
All rights reserved
LC 90-11048
ISBN 0-87023-730-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conuel, Thomas.
Quabbin, the accidental wilderness / Thomas Conuel.Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-87023-730-6 (paper)
1. Reservoir ecologyMassachusettsQuabbin Reservoir.
2. Natural historyMassachusettsQuabbin Reservation. 3. Quabbin
Reservoir (Mass.) I. Title.
QH105.M4C66 1990 90-11048
508.744'2dc20 CIP
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.
Page v
Contents
Introduction to the Revised Edition vii
Acknowledgments xix
1 1
Meeting of the Waters
2 6
The Lost Valley
3 17
The Accidental Wilderness
4 31
The Nature of the Place
5 44
The Waters of Quabbin
Epilogue 59
Index 63
Page vii
Introduction to the Revised Edition
Some fifty years ago the gates were closed on Winsor Dam and
Goodnough Dike, and the waters of the Swift River began filling the
valley behind those gates with what was to become Quabbin
Reservoir. In subsequent years the reservoir, like the towns that
preceded it, was a quiet place untroubled by change and known to
only a few. In many ways, that was how it remained in 1981 when the
first edition of this book was published. But since then new challenges
have arisen and the accidental wilderness has continued to evolve.
In the past decade, eagles and coyotes have flourished at Quabbin,
acid rain and ozone pollution have become worrisome, water
shortages and the Connecticut River diversion have continued as
topics of discussion, increased recreational use of the watershed has
stirred further debate, and deer have come to represent a problem that
nobody talked about a decade ago.
The eagle nesting project is perhaps the best known Quabbin success
story. Eagles are shy birds, quickly spooked and afraid of humans.
They need space and deep solitude to flourish. Jack Swedberg,
godfather of the eagle restoration project at Quabbin and former chief
photographer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and
Wildlife, likes to say that the best way to find eagles is to first find
people and then go in the opposite direction. Eagles need clean water
and tall pines for nesting. Quabbin Reser-
Page viii
voir is one of the few places in New England to provide these
necessities.
Jack Swedberg first started thinking about establishing eagles as
permanent residents of Quabbin in 1975. He had attended a seminar at
the University of Wisconsin on hacking as a method of reestablishing
native birds. Hacking involves removing young eagles from their
nests and placing them in artificial nests at a site where they are likely
to flourish. The eagles grow and fly away but the memory of the
hacking site is imprinted, so that when the time comes to nest, the
eagles return to what they remember as their first home.
It took several years for Swedberg's idea to become reality. The
Quabbin eagle project began in 1982 when two eaglets were shipped
from Michigan and donated to Massachusetts through the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service. Betsy and Ross, as they were named, were
between six and eight weeks old when they arrived at Quabbin. They
spent the next seven weeks in a cage atop a hacking tower on Prescott
Peninsula, where they were fed fish by University of Massachusetts
graduate student David Nelson. Betsy, when released, crash-landed in
the reservoir and had to be fished from the water, but on her second
try she managed to stay aloft and she kept right on going. She flew
north, moving gradually out of range of the radio transmitter attached
to her tail feathers. Ross proved a homebody and remained. In the
spring of 1989 he mated with a Quabbin eagle who had been released
in 1985. These two became the first pair of bald eagles to nest in
Massachusetts in almost a century. A second pair also nested in 1989.
The two pairs of bald eagles fledged three eaglets. After seven years
and forty-two transplanted eagles, the Quabbin eagle project became
an official success.
Quabbin will not support a large number of eaglesperhaps two or
three nesting pairs, according to Jack Swedberg. "It's a deep water
lake and not full of easy food. It has good winter feeding with the deer
carcasses on the ice, but for nesting birds you need a year-round food
supply. Quabbin doesn't have the marsh animals, nor the carp, which
are really just big goldfish, and the easy picking of some other
places."
Page ix
Nevertheless, the eagles are nesting in the Swift River Valley.
Coyotes are also back, though you can spark a good argument among
wildlife experts by suggesting they never really left. Coyotes seem to
be everywhere in Massachusetts. They have been killed by cars on
Route 128, spotted in the Boston suburbs, and tracked through the
Berkshire Hills, but nowhere are they more prevalent than in the 87.5
square miles that constitute the Quabbin Reservation. Paul Lyons, a
wildlife biologist with the Metropolitan District Commission,
estimates there are six or more coyote family groups at Quabbin with
as many as seven or eight animals in each group. The reason that
coyotes flourish, according to wildlife biologists, is elementary. The
coyote is adaptable.
Coyotes can run at thirty miles an hour, sometimes faster; they can
leap up to fourteen feet. Coyotes are strong swimmers and excellent
hunters with superior vision, smell, and hearing. But perhaps the
greatest thing they have going for them is their varied diet. They are
opportunistic feeders, able to eat anything from grasshoppers to
carrion. Dietary staples include rabbits, deer, squirrels, mice, birds,
snakes, frogs, insects, fruits, berries, and green plants. Other large
North American predators, such as the wolf and the mountain lion,
were unable to drop down the food chain and eat foods that were not
their preferred prey. Because of its flexibility in diet, the coyote has
survived and prospered in an ecosystem that has destroyed other
predators. Not everybody welcomes the return of the coyote. Farmers
tell tales of livestock lost to coyotes; homeowners recount details of
the untimely demise of family pets that may have crossed paths with a
coyote; and parents in the vicinity of Quabbin complain that coyotes
have been lurking near the school bus stop. Nevertheless, it is difficult
not to feel a thrill and an almost primordial chill when a coyote howls
at night in the woods at Quabbin. They are perhaps our greatest
wildlife survivors.
Water is always an issue at Quabbin, which is, after all, a reservoir.
The complexities of managing and distributing water have led to some
changes. The original Metropolitan District Commission has been
split
Page x
in two. The MDC still manages the water stored in Quabbin
Reservoir, and a new agency, the Massachusetts Water Resources
Authority (MWRA), distributes the water to 2.5 million residents in
forty-four communities.
During the 1980s there was both good and bad water news for
Quabbin. The rains of 1989 ended a long dry spell and refilled the
reservoir to near capacity for the first time since June 1984. In the
mid-1980s, Quabbin's water level sank as a result of an increased
demand from the Boston metropolitan area and the lack of rain. There
were also fears that the water would fall so low that its quality would
be compromised. That didn't happen, but it nearly did. In mid-
February 1989, the state declared a water emergency for the forty-four
communities in the MWRA district. Quabbin was down to 67 percent
full, reviving memories of the mid-1960s drought when the water
level fell to 45 percent full. By the end of 1988, the MWRA system
was drawing 330 million gallons a day from the reservoir, which has a
safe yield of only 300 million gallons a day. The rains came in the
spring of 1989, just in time to avert a water crisis, and continued until
autumn. Weather that was bad news for parents with small children
was good news for the water district. Quabbin began to refill and
water restrictions were removed. But one good year doesn't solve the
problem. If the MWRA district goes back to overdrawing the safe
yield of Quabbin, the reservoir will be vulnerable. What is needed is
continued water conservation and, perhaps, additional water sources.
Everyone is in favor of water conservation, but starting a discussion
on the need for additional water resources generates more debate than
proposing a toast to Benedict Arnold on the Fourth of July.
The MWRA is pushing a water conservation program that includes
repairing leaky pipes and urging conservation, and this seems to be
working. In 1989, the average daily water usage was 288 million
gallons, a figure that represents the first time in twenty years that
