Contributed by Lucie Lehmann
Header image: Golden-winged Warbler, Fernando Corrada
The Vermont Land Trust (VLT), in partnership with the Charlotte Park and Wildlife Refuge in Chittenden County, won a $25,000 grant from Cornell University’s Land Trust Small Grant Program to increase habitat connectivity and shrubland breeding habitat for Golden-winged Warblers. The award, which will be supplemented with $15,000 from local donors in Charlotte and an in-kind contribution from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, complements similar work done in 2020 on an adjacent Charlotte property, the former Nordic Farms, and also funded by Cornell.
Vermont’s land trust and conservation community has a long history of collaboration to support bird conservation, particularly for declining shrubland and grassland species like Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers, Bobolinks, and Eastern Meadowlarks. Western Vermont, with the largest Golden-winged Warbler (GWWA) population in New England and as the northeastern reach of the GWWA breeding range, has a critical role to play in the species’ survival regionally. The Western Vermont Golden-chain Collaborative (WVC) is a coalition of Audubon Vermont, VLT, other land trusts, Regional Conservation Partnerships (RCPs), other conservation organizations, and Cornell that works to increase connectivity for GWWA in this area. This grant will strengthen that collaborative. Click here for more information on the Western Vermont Golden-chain Collaborative.
The funds will be used to clear 11 to 14 acres of invasive species in the park and replant native trees, shrubs, and forbs on land that abuts a parcel already being managed and monitored for the critically endangered GWWA. Vermont Land Maintenance (VLM), an experienced firm specializing in land restoration efforts, will implement invasive removal. VLM has worked with Audubon Vermont on a number of GWWA habitat restoration projects, including with VLT at Nordic Farms.
The grant offers the first opportunity for the park to work directly with VLT, which is expanding ecological restoration efforts on conserved properties throughout the state. The award will allow the park to advance the goals of the WVC by increasing connectivity and expanding the Golden- and Blue-winged Warbler habitat. The park hopes to have the work done by the end of this calendar year.
The expansion area is abandoned pastureland and is currently densely overgrown with tree-sized bush honeysuckle and European buckthorn. Removing these invasive species will allow existing native trees and shrubs, including gray dogwood and nannyberry, to thrive, and it will open the area to reestablishing native forbs like goldenrod and Joe-Pye weed, as well as sedges and grasses. It will complete another major, contiguous segment of managed restoration in the park.
As part of the conditions governing the award, Audubon Vermont will conduct pre- and post-monitoring on the site. VLT and the CPWR will hold two workshops, one in August of this year and the next in 2024, to educate the public and local conservation organizations about the grant and to report on the monitored changes once the work has been performed. The park will also erect signage to enlist birders to record on eBird any observations related to their sightings of Golden-winged Warblers in the park.