The Buckshutem WMA wildlife project has reached a major milestone. After almost 5 years in the planning and tree removal, it was planted to various warm season grass seed during the Spring of 2004. Here is a brief photo history of the project.
Buckshutem WMA is about 3,000 acres. While there are some old fields, the majority of it looked like this photo. While this is good habitat for a few wildlife species, it is not suitable for grassland loving wildlife. Here you see maturing trees and ferns with laurel. Missing from this habitat is open space for birds to land to eat insects, grasses, and young trees.
The South Jersey RC&D Council partnered with Southern New Jersey Quail Unlimited to develop a plan that would address the loss of the more open habitat or savannah system that was rapidly disappearing from the New Jersey landscape. The reason for the loss of the savannah system (large areas of grasses interspersed with trees) is complicated. New Jersey and the United States saw a boom in agriculture during the 1960's through the 1980's. We saw small fields being combined into larger fields mostly due to larger farm equipment. We saw the old fence row system being removed. We started seeing farming from roadside to roadside. This was followed by the loss of farm land for developments. Wildlife and agriculture were rarely considered as people concentrated in towns and the surrounding areas.
The 'plan' at Buckshutem called for the scientific removal of designated trees to provide openings of various sizes and to reduce the canopy so more sunlight would reach the soil surface. A carpet of warm and cool season grasses, forbs and weeds would be able to grow. This new carpet would provide grassland birds and butterflies the habitat they needed to find food, nest, and raise young.
The project got off to a bang with a major ground breaking event. We had over 125 people attend this half day event on a Saturday in April 2002.
Work had already started on the project almost a year before this. But we worked very carefully around nesting and hunting seasons. Sometimes we could only get in two weeks of cutting as to miss certain critical periods. This was just fine with us since what we were trying to do was give the wildlife a helping hand.
One thing we knew for sure going into this project was we did not want to have a bunch of tree limbs laying around the site. Not only would this have caused more hardship for the wildlife, it would not have met our goal to open the property up for grass growth. Also, this excess wood would have been a new fire hazard.
We brought in some heavy duty machinery to accomplish the job. Here you see a whole tree chipper. The trees are cut and dragged to this machine. The arm picks the tree up and feeds into the front of the machine. I very powerful motor drives a large grinding type wheel that actually shred the entire tree into one inch long chips. These chips are blown into the truck sitting just to the right in the photo. The chips are used either for the decorative bark mulch industry (you may have our wood chips around your flowers right now) or for the paper pulp industry (you may have some paper made of our wood on your desk).
We used the below piece of equipment to cut and drag the trees to the chippers. This photo shows one of the more open areas we made. The background is untouched woodland. The area that was cut was separated with ribbon from the area that was not to be touched.
After all the cutting and seeding, this is what Buckshutem looked like during Summer 2004. There are still trees, just a lot less. There is more light reaching the ground. There is much more diversity of plants growing in the area. What the photo does not show is the abundance of birds using the area.
The entire cut area inside Buckshutem was over 100 acres. We seeded over 70 acres using Team Habitat equipment. Team Habitat, a consortium of wildlife groups owns the ATV and a TruAx seed slinger mounted to the ATV. Volunteers drove the ATV and seeded the area during one week in the spring of 2004. With all the rain that followed, the seed got off to a great start - even better than ever expected.
