By Lisa Romano

It’s a town with only a handful of families living in it, but Rowe, up in the northern part of the state, has at least one great amenity for that handful. Pelham Lake Park, the town’s centerpiece, is a 1500 acre piece of land and lake that is much loved by the residents.

Offering ski and snowmobile opportunities in the winter, and a host of summer activities—from swimming, fishing, and hiking, to educational programs for kids and adults—Pelham Lake was founded after Percy Whiting Brown generously donated 500 acres, including the lake, to the town of Rowe in the 1950s. Since that time, town leaders have been gradually adding to that acreage, and building trails and recreation areas throughout as they go.

For the past six years, the management of Pelham Lake Park has been left in the hands of Sean Loomis, town park ranger and Rowe native. A lot of property for one person to be responsible for, Sean has been kept busy maintaining the park’s trails, lake shore, and other amenities. With volunteer AmeriCorps help in the summer for the big jobs, Sean maintains his trails in excellent condition, with sturdy bridges and good signage along the way. The swing sets don’t look too shabby either.

This spring, Sean attended UMass Extension’s Keystone training, having been encouraged to apply by the son of Percy Brown. The Keystone Program (www.masskeystone.net) is a three-day training session that covers ecology, sustainable management, wildlife habitat enhancement, and other related topics. The goal of Keystone is to educate influential and active community members so that they may share their new understanding of conservation with their community. In Sean Loomis, the Keystone Program found a great cooperator (as Keystone members are called) who is ready to put into action much of what he learned at the training.

“There has never been any management done on the park property,” explained Sean. “The 500 original acres are under a special covenant that prohibits any cutting, and that philosophy has for the last 50 years carried over to the additional park acreage as well. Until I went to Keystone,” he continues, “I had the same philosophy, that the woods have been doing their thing forever so what’s the point of touching them.” At Keystone, however, Sean learned that there is often real value to managing a woodland.

Nearly all of Massachusetts was cleared of trees for agriculture in the 19th century, and decades later many of those farms were abandoned at the same time, when industry and agriculture moved farther west. The result is a heavily wooded state, which has great ecological value, but one that is nearly all the same age, thus lacking in certain key ecological characteristics that many species evolved to depend on. Forests of all the same age often lack the dead wood that cavity-dwelling birds and ground-dwelling amphibians require. Forests of the same age also lack the overall biodiversity found in old growth forests, which means they don’t support a great a variety of species as they once did.

What got Sean excited at Keystone was learning that, while the Pelham Lake woods aren’t old growth, there is simple management that can be done to attain an old growth structure to the woods, and thus restore those characteristics that have been lost over a couple centuries of land use history. Trees may be cut or girdled (so they become standing dead snags) to add woody debris to the forest, while other trees may be left as so-called legacy trees, which remain to grow old and die naturally. Single or small groups of trees may also be harvested to create gaps in the canopy, which will allow new trees to regenerate, thus creating new age classes in a previously single age system.

 “We get some wildlife here in the park,” says Sean, “but I know we could get more if we used some of these management techniques.” He’s also excited about the possibilities in the park for establishing some grassland habitats. At Keystone, he learned that grasslands are an endangered habitat type in Massachusetts as farm fields are abandoned or fragmented and as modern farms become increasingly monocultural. A variety of birds and small mammals depend on open, unmowed grasslands for nesting, breeding, and feeding and those species have been on decline as their habitats dwindle. With some fields already open in Pelham Lake Park, Sean sees a good opportunity to adjust his management of them in order to better accommodate the woodcocks, bobolinks, and other birds that once inhabited the area.

Not short on enthusiasm or ideas, Sean knows he may find some resistance in the town. Just a few months ago, Sean says, he probably would have responded to such management plans apprehensively, believing the best management is no management. It’s only since his “eyes were opened” to the reasons why active management can really benefit an ecosystem, does he now see what opportunities the park provides. Having seen parcels of land that were responsibly and sustainably harvested at the Harvard Forest, site of the Keystone training, Sean is confident that it’s possible to cut trees and not devastate a landscape. “We would never harvest trees to make money for the park,” he says, “but the cutting involved in the management could end up paying for the work itself, so it wouldn’t have to come out of the park’s budget.”

Sean knows his next tasks will be no easy or quick ones. His hope is to get a forester out to walk the property and give him a report on exactly what options there are for wildlife habitat enhancement. Once he has that in hand, it’ll be up to him to convince park commissioners and the townspeople that what he’d like to do will only improve the park and will not negatively impact the public’s enjoyment of the property. With no similar management projects underway other town land, Sean expects he’ll need to do some outreach and education in Rowe to get wary community members on board a new plan. But, he’s confident that, if Keystone was able to enlighten him, then he’ll be able to do the same for his town. The key is that Sean and the park commissioners and the town all have the same goals…to continue to have a beautiful town park for all the community to enjoy. Sean merely wants to make it a more enjoyable place for the wildlife as well.