Eye on the Air, September 4

Eye on the Air, Live 1-2 PM, WESU 88.1 FM (wesu.org)

Guests: Barry Chernoff, professor of marine biology at Wesleyan University and expert on the Coginchaug-Mattabassett estuary, and Earle Roberts, member of the Middletown Common Council and independent candidate for the council.

From the Orinoco to the Coginchaug

(City snowpile in Veteran's Park. For an indication of scale, my five year old son climbs on the opposite side of the pile in a blue coat.)


Barry Chernoff arrived for our interview at Klekolo Coffee on two wheels.

He entered the coffee house with his helmet still on, face ruddy from his motorcycle trip from Haddam on a nice, but nippy Winter day. His legs were swathed in leather chaps. Not the entrance one would expect from the Robert Schumann Professor of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan.

Behind the counter, Rick (a WESU colleague of mine, known as Psychedelic Rick), knew Chernoff's poison, and refilled his refillable traveling coffee mug.

I set up the meeting with Chernoff to discuss the Coginchaug River, which has headwaters in Guilford and flows through Durham, Middlefield and Middletown, where it empties into the Mattabessett just before that river empties into the Connecticut.

The Coginchaug is a river Chernoff is passionate about, and that's a bit of a surprise from a biologist who has spent much of his life examining fish, ecology and the evolutionary history of fish, in the tropical fresh waters of the Amazon and other parts of Central and South America, and later in Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin. For many years, Chernoff held an esteemed position as the curator of the Department of Zoology at the Field Museum in Chicago, and was responsible for building spectacular collection of tropical specimens. To read Chernoff's own account of his early collecting years, check out this Discover Magazine account. Or listen to this expedition recorded by NPR.

In fact, it's the mention of Louisiana that sets us off on a 40 minute digression about Cajun cooking, and eating in the rough in the swamps, and on the prairies of Louisiana. After trading gumbo tips, our discussion returns to the health of rivers.

Chernoff is worried about the health of the Coginchaug, and by association, the health of the wetlands where the Cocinchaug and the Mattabessett meet.

"We simply don't have many river systems intact in Connecticut," Chernoff explains. "And with the Coginchaug we have a beautiful stretch of lowland river with forest boundaries. The lower end of the river helps preserve a large bottomland meadow ecosystem.

Chernoff rattles off a long list of aquatic life he's catalogued in the wetlands, including rock bass, smallmouth bass, shiners, suckers, alewives, lampreys, eels, darters and tesselated darters.

"If you think about other Connecticut tributaries, the Farmington and the Salmon, we have developed and channelled these wetlands out of existence."

While I've known about Chernoff for years (he's a regular listener to my WWUH radio show, and a musician himself), it was on a summertime kayak tour through the floating meadows of the Mattabessett, and that I began to understand Chernoff's passion for the local ecology, and his worry that we might, yet, ruin a good thing.

On that trip, Chernoff explained about a dead spot in the Coginchaug river, where, for a stretch of several hundred yards, the bottom was coated with a thick bed of muck and sand, and now sign of aquatic life.

"You couldn't wade through it, because you'd sink up to your knee in muck, and only then would you feel the old river bottom," Chernoff explained. "And we'd catch nothing in there."

He brought his concerns to the DEP, and to the Inland Fisheries department, for which Chernoff reserves great respect.

"These are great scholars, and they know their ecosystems," Chernoff declares. "They have all the necessary academic rigor, but on top of that they have a passion for their work."

But when he returned to the dead spot in the river later in the summer, Chernoff was in for a surprise of his own.

"The system had flushed itself out," he noted humbly. "We found a bunch of insect and fish life there. The DEP guys must have thought I had no idea how to take a sample. What I think now, is that the dead spot was a remnant of an old beaver dam above the riffle that had been taken down, and the river cleaned itself out."

That's the good news.

The bad news is that Chernoff's recent examinations have found the dead spot reemerging. Chernoff believes there are a few possible causes but he hasn't been able to do the complete the studies to verify his suspicions.

"As of November, the dead spot has reappeared," he said. "The river in that area above the riffle is filled with sand again, and it occurred just after the completion of the new bridge to the CVS on Washington street was built. They built the stanchions for the bridge in the streambed, and anytime you do that, you're going to get erosion."

In addition, Chernoff thinks the city's practice of hauling snow contaminated by road sand to a parking lot in Veteran's Park adjacent to the river is causing a problem. The snow, hauled from the berm created on Main Street after plowing is trucked to the parking lot, and in snowy years, the piles are considerable. This year, the pile covers an area about half the size of a football field, and ten to twelve feet tall.

Chernoff wouldn't be concerned if the snow was pure.

"This is a snowmelt and storm runoff river system, and always has been," Chernoff said. "But that snow is filled with sand, and with salt and with a lot of other chemical stuff."

The pile melts and flows directly into the river.

"The salt increases the conductivity of the water during the milt," Chernoff explained. "It increases the number of dissolved ions, and that can harm the aquatic life there."

The city uses the park because it's convenient, open and away from neighborhoods where the late night truck traffic might cause complaints.

"If that snow was clean, you could dump it directly in the Connecticut River," Chernoff explained. "There's a flow there of 20 million gallons an hour. But even there, this contaminated snow would cause a kill off."

According to Chernoff, the Coginchaug, which for the most part is hidden from sight for most of Middletown's residents, could be natural system that's good for public recreation, something that Chernoff, and his colleague on the Jonah Center board, John Hall, have been working diligently to make happen by creating a greenway from Veteran's Park to the peninsula where the rivers meet.

"In the end, a healthy river system increases the value of each piece of property which lies on it's path," Chernoff said. "If the city is interested in making something more of Veteran's Park, they've got to find a different approach than the one we're taking."

Correction: snapping turtle trapping is legal in Connecticut

(photo: John Hall)

In a post Saturday about a paddle trip up the Cochinchaug, I reported some thoughts about turtle poaching, which in the end, don't happen to be factual.

After some research, Professor Barry Chernoff has offered a letter of correction. Now, we need the Common Council to propose a resolution banning the trapping of snapping turtles.

I will also note a correction that sexual maturity of snapping turtles comes at seven years, not twenty years, as noted in the original post.


Click the letter to see full-size image.

A second day on the Cochinchaug

After the paddle up the Cochinchaug River, I decided to take my morning walk through Veteran's Park, which forms the Northern border of a stretch of the Cochinchaug which is stressed due to the commercial development on its border along Route 66.

I started out walking through Wesleyan, and noticed a tree removal posting on two hundred-year plus specimens in front of the Wesleyan Film Center. The Buildings and Grounds Department have made it a practice to post notices on trees which are about to be taken down because they are diseased, dead, or severely stressed. The only problem with the posting is that you have to be on foot to notice them, and if your regular route doesn't take you by a posted tree, you might not notice it in the week or two the postings are up. In addition, these postings are pretty nondescript, black print on regular white printer paper, and after a rain shower or two, they devolve into a wrinkly, unreadable mass.

The two trees in front of the Film Center are definitely stressed, and likely won't make it a few more years. And to be frank, trees, especially city trees, don't last forever. However, what's not implicit in the posting to cut the trees is that the construction of buildings, walks and driveways around the trees a few years ago, probably had a lot to do with their current weakened state.

I've said it before, and I've said it to Dave Hall, head of Wesleyan buildings and grounds, that I'm not always convinced of the effort taken to help trees, especially trees that stand in the way of some proposed building, or which interfere with regular groundskeeping. A half a block away from these trees is a blank spot where an old variety apple tree stood a few years ago. I used to pick apples from this tree for applesauce and pie, and it was a bit ragged, and the rotting fruit was messy and attracted yellow jacket wasps. It's my contention that sometimes this tree removal is a way to make mechanical powermowing easier for the groundskeeping contractors.

On Washington Court, where the apple tree was, a new ornamental maple has been planted. But near Russell House, where two apple tree were taken down, there were no replacements of any kind, and the power mowers zip up and down the hill, unimpeded by low hanging apple branches or rotten fruit.

I think the Wesleyan crew has got to consider the value of the old trees it has, and the concessions it makes for modern groundskeeping. Currently, the grounds crew has been observed, and confronted, because they pour the very toxic RoundUp (glyphosate) at the base of trees so that the grass and other plants will die, and trimming will not be necessary. While RoundUp is purported to only affect broad leaf grasses, one only needs to do a Google search to see that the effect of having a herbicide poured on a tree's roots cannot be healthy for the trees, or the people, birds, insects and animals who come in contact with the area around those trees. There are a lot of stressed curbside trees around campus. What's more, the runoff from the trees, inevitably end up in the local stream and rivers, where glyphosate has been proven to affect amphibian life.

In addition, while Wesleyan painters are doing a great job making some Wesleyan-owned properties look spiffy with new paint jobs, I've noticed that some of the painting contractors have given up on the reliable ladder and scaffold method of reaching paintable heights, for the rolling boom lift, or crane. While these cranes can get painters to tough-to-reach spots, evidence can be found that these heavy vehicles are compacting earth around the mature, though ecologically fragile old trees on campus. Witness the deep tire tracks next to an ancient tree near the Russell House. Will we see "notice to remove" signs flapping from these tree trunks in a few years?

Once past Wesleyan, and my worry about the trees there, I continued on to Veterans' Park. I walked through parking lots adjacent to the Cochinchaug and remembered how Wesleyan professor Barry Chernoff described dead spots in the river as it runs through the park because of the way rainwater sheets off these parking lots (and the parking lots of existing, and being-built commercial properties along route 66). The river is beautiful from the park, and I saw a few small brook trout swimming.

As I walked through the Palmer Field parking lot (the expansion of which was prevented by Chernoff's testimony to the Zoning Board), I noticed a small brook which feeds into the Cochinchaug. Grey water flowed through the brook, which was filled with litter. A little further upstream, an ugly algae bloom was in progress (perhaps the result of contamination by goose feces in the pond which feeds this stream at Butternut Park), and just before the culvert that runs below route 66, a muskrat was gathering new grass, and a small garter snake swam along the surface.

Walking back up Washington Street my mood was brightened considerably by a mimosa tree in full bloom in front of one of the homes there. The flowers are spectacular to see and smell. The homeowner, who was sweeping her walk, explained that she transplanted a sapling many years ago from her former apartment building in Hartford, and that the tree blooms all day and night, wafting its lovely fragrance on the night breeze.

Paddling up the Mattabessett

It was a good turnout of about 50 canoers/kayakers to accompany Wesleyan environmental sciences and biology professor, and president of the Johan center Barry Chernoff and Jonah Center founder John Hall for a tour of the confluence of the Connecticut, Mattabessett and Cochingchaug Rivers. Cheroff has studied the river and the wetlands for years.

The group gathered at the Middletown boat launch at 9, and travelled upriver to the mouth of the Mattabessett which is marked by a highway overpass for Route 9. At the first bend in the river, Chernoff began the first of his informative talks about the river, and its flora and fauna.

Where we floated, just north of the old Remington Rand plant, and site of the Jonah Center, Chernoff explained that the three rivers, and the associated wetlands were a rare example of an ecological system which has all but disappeared in Connecticut. These rivers are the breeding grounds for a variety of fish, amphibians and bird life, as well as numerous mammals.

The first bend in the river is a deep one, and Chernoff explained that the pool beneath the bend, which in a relatively shallow river, is 60 feet deep, and contains some very large specimens of river bottom fish like catfish, sucker and carp. Chernoff also said that the river is home to some very large pickerel.

Chernoff noted that once we rounded the bend we would be in "another world" where the noise from the highway would all but disappear, and we would be surrounded by a cathedral of giant trees which bend over the banks of the river.

Just down river the ecosystem changes to "floating" meadows, which help the wetlands absorb the unneeded, and unwanted nutrients and other impurities which float down the Mattabessett from Berlin and New Britain. During the spring freshet, where the wetlands appear like a giant lake, the sediments are caught by these grasslands, and the water flowing back into the river is purer for it.

At the grasslands stop, Chernoff pointed out the acres of wild rice, which, in the fall is a feedlot for thousands of birds, "who help to replant the rice," Chernoff noted.

We saw a giant egret, a blue heron, several osprey who were inhabiting a man-made nest.

Chernoff called the three rivers and their wetlands the Noah's Ark of Connecticut waterlife. Apparently Connecticut has 48 species of native freshwater fish, and 23 of those species can be found here.

The rivers are home to some invasive species like the carp, which unlike the sucker - also introduced to bottom clean the river - is indiscriminate in it's suction of the river bottom, contributing to a muddy flow, and disturbing the nests and eggs of other species.

Another problem in the wetlands is poaching. Poachers trap muskrat and mink, but the snapping turtle poachers may be the biggest problem. Chernoff explained that the snapping turtle, which is never dangerous in the water, is trapped in large cages for their meat. A few ounces of meat from a five year old turtle will gather a high-price from turtle soup connoisseurs in Manhattan. The five year olds, which can weigh twenty pounds, will not be sexually mature for another 15 years (large snappers can live 100 years), and so, the poaching is interfering with propagation of future generations of snappers. The snapper traps look like large chicken wire coops, and should be reported to the DEP. They are illegal, and any trapped turtle is likely to be angry and dangerous.

Turning up the Cochinchaug, the river got narrower, and shallower as we passed the abandoned landfill, a towering mound of festering methane and waste. We stopped at a landing and Chernoff turned over rocks to exhibit some of the important freshwater river life including leeches, clams, snails, and muscles. Upon request, he also found a water penny, the larval stage of the water penny beetle.

The trip ended with a relaxed return downriver, and a disaster for me. The photos I took here, are likely the last from this camera, which was dunked when I fell into the river upon disembarking from my kayak.

Saturday on the Mattabessett

Saturday, July 12, 9:00 a.m.
Mattabesset River Paddle with Professor Barry Chernoff

We will launch at the Wesleyan boathouse next to Harbor Park restaurant, paddle 1 mile upriver with the help of the incoming tide up to the Mattabesset River and then less than 1 mile into the amazing “floating meadows” to see the osprey nesting platforms and many other birds (swallows, red-winged blackbirds, and plants. We will investigate the Coginchaug River to examine blockages in the river that the Jonah Center has obtained permission to remove, if that can be safely accomplished.