Checking the Fence Row

I take a weekly walk along the fence row to see how the plants are responding to my clearing efforts of last winter.  Invasive plants are far from eliminated, but at least they have been knocked back to a point where they are not so obvious.

The visual screen has been reduced enough to make it possible to see through to the next field, but it’s still enough of a barrier to keep open field animal species from moving through.  I’m still evaluating the health and desirability of those native species left in the fence row to determine where I should make openings to help connect the neighboring fields.  I believe a 50 foot wide pathway through the old fence row should be adequate.  I’m basing this on the fact that I have several small prairie openings that measure about 50 feet across and these seem to contain a wide variety of prairie associated fauna.  If an animal can live in an area 50 feet wide it should feel comfortable enough to travel a corridor of similar size from one area to the next.

The ridge containing the fence row has not fared well during the drought.  Ground cover has not done much growing at all. 

Christmas Fern is thriving under the conditions we’ve had this year.  It is benefiting from the open conditions created by removal of the non-native invasive plants.  Its leathery leaves help it to retain moisture in dry conditions and it was in perfect condition to utilize the scattered showers we’ve been having.  This is probably the most vigorous species in the fence row right now.

There may be a lack of ground cover, but this is much better than having the ground shaded by Autumn Olive and Multiflora Rose.  Prior to the clearing, the view from this point ended about three feet in front of your face.  All of that open space was filled with rose canes and olive branches.  Now, instead of giving all of my attention to discouraging non-natives, I can begin thinking about encouraging native plants to grow.

Some of the native trees and shrubs still have to be removed.  In most cases, those individuals are obvious.  The stress of growing in a crowded fence row with a gang of aggressive invasive species has left many of the trees with deformities that make it impossible for them to persist.  Wind storms have helped identify many of those.  My goal here is to thin the fence row growth until I’ve created an openness similar to a prairie savanna.  There will be shade, but with the area open enough to allow unrestricted air movement.  I’ll leave any rare species and high quality specimens.  The weak, deformed and common are all candidates for removal.

I found this worn Red-banded Hairstreak on the edge of the fence row area.  This is the first Hairstreak I’ve seen in about four weeks.  Their numbers are definitely down this year, but I hope there have been a few out there busily laying eggs for next year’s crop.

Spraying Invasive Sprouts in the Fence Row

Invasive sprouts have begun to grow in my fence row clearing area.  In a typical year, you have months through the winter when you can cut and mark invasive shrubs, but you only have a few weeks during the spring when you can successfully apply herbicide to the resulting sprouts.  The warm weather has accelerated the growth of most exotic plants and considerably shortened the possible spray window.  Instead of coming on in succession, almost all of the species have developed together and many native species have joined the rush.  Weeks may seem like plenty of time to get the spray job completed, but you can’t spray when it’s raining or when it’s windy or when the plant is covered in dew.  Finding a time when none of those three conditions is present can sometimes be tough.

Cutting a shrub causes the plant to respond with multiple sprouts.  This Autumn Olive is at the perfect stage for spraying.  There is a large mass of leaves concentrated in a small area.  The Autumn Olive leaves are easily covered with herbicide with minimal risk to surrounding vegetation.

Multiflora Roses are actually growing too rapidly this year.  They normally sprout in cool weather and produce a tight cluster of dark green leaves.  The warm weather is causing the stems to elongate into a taller, less dense cluster of leaves.  Roses that shoot up too quickly must be pruned back before applying spray.  This adds quite a bit of extra time to the job, but it’s necessary to avoid killing a lot of the surrounding plants.

New growth on the Japanese Honeysuckle makes it easy to see the vines that avoided being cut by the mower. 

I’ll eventually cut all of the aerial Japanese Honeysuckle vines.  For now I’m just cutting those that are threatening particularly valuable or vulnerable trees.  I just remove the lower couple of feet of vine so it’s obvious that it has been treated.  I used to just cut the vine off at the ground, but then I couldn’t tell the difference between those that were cut and those still growing.

There’s still a lot of Japanese Honeysuckle growing at ground level.  That is something I’ll be dealing with later.

Of course warm weather also increases the tick activity.  I managed to collect a dozen American Dog Ticks in just a couple of hours.  Actually, I made it easy for them by laying in the field while trying to get pictures of a butterfly.  This handsome specimen is a male.

Fence Row Clearing - The Final Push

I’m getting near the end of my fence row clearing project.  I’ve moved into an area about 100 feet long that is a tangle of fallen trees, rough ground, Multiflora Rose bushes and Japanese Honeysuckle vines.  As I worked my way to this point, I was hoping that I would discover a way to make this job a little bit easier.  Unfortunately, I was struck by no such brilliance.

The number of rose bushes was not great, but the density of canes was daunting.  Vertical canes rose 25 feet into the trees and 20 foot horizontal canes wove together with neighboring bushes to form an almost solid mass.  The whole arrangement was like one of those ecosystem web diagrams.  Pulling on a single cane caused the whole thicket to respond.  I think I got snagged by rose thorns every time I moved.

There was no way to get the mower in there, so I waded in with Big Loppers and started taking out one bush at a time.  Each extraction was a tug of war with the Japanese Honeysuckle.  After pulling a few bushes free, I would take JR in to cut the honeysuckle down close to the ground.

I take a lot of before and after photos, but those don’t always convey the degree of difficulty experienced in getting from one condition to the other.  I think I was constantly tangled in rose canes the entire time I spent working in this one small area.  If I’d lost any more blood to rose scratches, it probably would have been necessary to stop for a transfusion.

Several pounds of mulched honeysuckle vines were left on the ground.  In order to have a chance at eliminating the Japanese Honeysuckle, I’ve got to get it out of the trees and on to the ground.  By spraying glyphosate herbicide in late fall when just about everything except the honeysuckle is dormant, I’ve been able to completely eliminate Japanese Honeysuckle and leave the native plants.  So far, I’ve only done this on small plots.  In the next year or so I’ll begin to try it out on larger areas.

In a few places, I cut the honeysuckle off at the ground, but couldn’t get the vines to come out of the tree.  After the vines dry, they’ll more easily come loose.  If I can’t get them down in the next couple of weeks, I’ll cut them off as high as I can reach. That way I’ll be able to see any invasives growing up around the base of the trees when I go out to spray sprouts this spring.

This fence row segment now opens into last year’s Multiflora Rose control area.  I think I’m going to be happy with the results of this project.

Fence Row Work Continues

The section of old fence row that I’ve been clearing measures approximately a quarter mile in length and with varying widths, has an area of roughly three quarters of an acre.  Recurring rain and snow storms have made it difficult to maintain a continuing effort on this clearing project.  It seems that by the time the ground dries up from one precipitation event, I only have a couple of hours to work before the next event occurs.  Despite the interruptions, I’ve managed to work my way into the heart of the fence row.

I’ve tackled several large Autumn Olive shrubs that have been out of reach for many years.  The branches cover quite an area when they are all laid out awaiting their trip to the brush pile.  After seeing all of the branches, it’s easy to understand why the fence row was so difficult to see through. 

The super sized Autumn Olive that once stood atop this stump took up quite an area.  With it gone, you can see down into the woods below and on across to the far field near the road.

Other areas are more a tangle of medium sized Multiflora Rose.  This situation calls for a mixture of hand cutting and mowing.

With all of the non-native material removed, the fence row is quite open.  The next job here will be the evaluation of the native species that have been left and the determination of which individuals will be left in place and which must be removed.  The ultimate in this fence row clearing is to make corridors that join this field with the two in the distance, so that there can be some interaction between the prairie ecosystems occurring in each area.  That doesn’t mean the complete removal of what’s left in the fence row.  It just means a few well positions gaps and some thinning.

No matter how nice a February day is, you know that as evening comes, the temperature is going to take a sharp drop.  The worst thing that can happen is to find yourself soaked with sweat when those temperatures begin to fall.  A clue that I’m out working is a trail of clothing hung on branch stubs along my route.  No matter how warm you get while working, it’s really nice to have something dry to put on when the sunlight and warmth disappear.

I used blue flags to mark the boundaries of the fence wire laying on the ground, so I could work in close with JR without catching the wire on the blade.  In some places the fence slumped down on top of itself and the horizontal wires are in a narrow band.  In other places, the fence fell over sideways so the wire is occupying an area four feet wide.  Some of the wire is buried, some attached to trees and some is entangled by growing trees and shrubs. To go in and start removing all of the downed wire is a project for another time.

Much of the time I spend working on a project is not actually spent on activities that result in progress toward the completion of that project.  I spend a lot of my time just looking at things I find within the work area.  I’ll study what I’ve done and what still needs to be accomplished.  I’ll study the plants, animals and ground features that I see, plus anything else I find of interest.  I was happy to find this spent Cecropia Moth cocoon.  It’s been several years since I’ve seen an adult Cecropia on the property, so it’s nice to see that they are still around.  The exit hole from the inner chamber is typical of a successfully emerged adult moth.

It’ll be a lot of fun this summer to watch the native plants reclaim this old fence row area.  The summer view from this point on the field trail has just been the fence row.  There were never any breaks that afforded a view of what lay beyond.  It’ll be interesting to see what type of view develops when the trees put on leaves.

Fence Line Work

I’m pulling the trash out of the fence row in preparation for completing my invasive plant removal in that area.  This collection of junk was obviously brought from the farmstead years ago and deliberately deposited in the fence row.  I don’t know why it wasn’t placed in one of the already established dump sites.  An abandoned barrel is cause for concern because you don’t know what it might have contained when dumped.  In this case, both ends of the barrel had been removed prior to dumping, so the chance of toxic contamination is slight.

A roll of old woven wire fence indicates that someone had begun the process of removing the fence.  This is a roll of standard field fence; the type typically used for holding livestock.  Since this has been rolled, there is a stretch of fence row that does not contain the hazard of old wire on the ground.

The fence roll is held in place by several shrubs that have grown up through the wire.  It would be easy enough to cut the shrubs and remove the wire, but a couple of the shrubs are dogwoods that I would like to save.  I’ll have to come back later with a pair of wire cutters.

The dogwood trunk was resting against one of the fence wires.  The damage appeared to be minimal, but the bark coloration and growth pattern of the dogwood differed above the scar.  It almost appeared to be a graft scar, but that’s not something that would have happened out there in the fence row.  It’ll be an interesting tree to watch.

I never know what I’m going to find when I start pulling on a half buried piece of metal.  There were strands of fence wire running beneath the metal, so I was pretty sure I was seeing most of what was left here.

Looks like part of a sheet of roofing metal.  This could have come from a long way off and been dropped here by natural events.  I’ve seen wind storms rip pieces like this from barn roofs and carry it up and out of sight.  It could have been dropped directly into the fence row or left in the field and then carried to the fence row by a farmer who found the metal in the path of his farm equipment.

This is why I mowed a strip outside of the fence row.  The short grass gives me a place to stack trash and cut brush for later removal.  I could very easily lose stuff like this in the tall grass.

A thick piece of black plastic looks like it’s been here for a while.  This is another piece of junk that probably blew in with a storm.

Beneath the plastic is bare ground.  There were a few tunnels made by mice or voles and many insect sized chambers.  Looks like the plastic provided some good shelter.

A shallow pocket formed by the plastic accumulated a healthy mass of roots. 

I used the root mass to cover some of the bare spot.  I think most of the roots belonged to fescue and Japanese Honeysuckle, two invasive plants that I would like to eliminate.  I hesitated leaving the plants intact, but the surrounding area is full of both plants, so this little bit isn’t going to make any difference.

When I looked back at the plastic I had thrown into the grass, it had the appearance of a dessicated lizard head.  I may have inadvertently changed trash into art.  That takes care of all the junk except for the fence wire that’s strung along the ground.  The wire will take a little more time to gather up.

Fence Row Work - The Other Side

For management purposes, I break a fence row into three parts.  There are two sides and then there’s the strip that contains the fence wire.  Land use history is rarely identical on both sides of the fence.  Past land use affects current conditions, so it’s possible to have wildly different management issues on one side of the fence versus the other.  Prior to my ownership, the field on this side of the fence was primarily used for annually cultivated crops.  The other side was used as hay and pasture.  My work experience on this side of the fence is generally more pleasant.  At least there are fewer thorny shrubs tearing at my skin.

Most of the Autumn Olive and Multiflora Roses have been eliminated on this side of the fence. My primary objective here is to trim things down so I can easily work in close to the fence wire.  Roses may be absent, but Blackberry canes can cause just as many wounds. 

Now I can get in close to the wire and remove the few invasives that have managed to survive there.  The Blackberry canes will quickly grow back this summer.  I like to cut the Blackberries every few years to keep them from developing a tangled thicket.

The corner at the back end of the field has developed a nice collection of Flowering Dogwoods. 

Flowering Dogwoods also grow thickly along the edge of the field.  This dogwood collection produces the most attractive blooming display on the property.  These are all relatively young specimens.  The large dogwoods that used to grow at Blue Jay Barrens all died out around 20 years ago when the anthracnose infection spread through the population.  Dogwoods are still absent from the woodland understory, but individuals in the protected fields and field edges are thriving.

Encroachment of trees into the field was kept to a minimum because of farming activities.  It’s much easier on this side to clear right up to the fence wire.

I used the field trail as my other mowing boundary.  The trail stays fairly close to the field edge except where it bows out around a large patch of Goldenrod.  The Goldenrod shares its space with Blackberries, so I mowed the whole area to keep the Blackberries from taking over.

I usually find a few Chinese Mantis egg cases in the Goldenrod areas.  I would love to eradicate this predatory alien species from Blue Jay Barrens.  I destroy the egg cases by using my hand pruners to snip through the egg mass.  I manage for native species and consider it unacceptable for any native species, rare or otherwise, to be destroyed by an alien.