Being Where You Are

By Robert Barossi

Being Where You Are: How Environmental Volunteers Impact Their Community and the Planet Every Day features the stories of a charming, eclectic and fascinating group of environmentally involved everyday citizens. They include a frog song monitor who used to be terrified of frogs, a man whose personal mission and life’s work is to clean his town’s beaches, and a mother-daughter team of suburban beetle ranchers, among others. Their efforts run the gamut from monitoring osprey nests and banding migrating songbirds to pulling trash out of rivers and educating children at nature centers. While the places range from small coastal towns and mountain villages to major cities, all of these volunteers have a deep connection to the special places where they live. They also have a lot to say and teach about the environmental problems we all face and how every person, regardless of location or stage of life, can get involved and do their part. As much as they are educational, their stories are hopeful and inspirational, with the potential to motivate others to become environmental volunteers as well, creating important and necessary change in their home towns and their small corner of the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483544557

Book preview

organizations.

PART 1:

On the Coast

1

My Hero, the Osprey: Butch Lombardi

Something I quickly realized while meeting volunteers is that very few of them had a background in the environmental or natural sciences or the environmental movement. Very few of them were biologists, ecologists, ornithologists, botanists or were involved in any other scientific field. Very few of them would have described themselves as an environmentalist before they became actively involved with their local environmental organizations. They weren’t involved in the movement, not out on the front lines, picketing or marching or actively protesting. One such example was Butch Lombardi, a volunteer from Warren, Rhode Island who spent his life working with the phone company and now actively volunteers for Audubon Society of Rhode Island.

Sitting in Butch’s living room, having a beer together, he described his former indoor job by saying that it spanned from very old technology to the digital technology of today, and had nothing to do with the outdoors, the environment, nature or ecology. But, speaking to him now, fifteen years after his early retirement in 1998, you might mistake him for a lifelong scientist or environmental activist. His knowledge about and passion for local environmental issues is impressive and an inspiration for anyone who thinks they don’t have the right background, knowledge or skill set to get involved in environmental causes..

Butch’s connection to his home state and town runs deep. He says he’s lived in five houses but if you took a half mile long piece of string and stuck a pin in the center of town and spun it around, you could cover all five houses.

Growing up in the small Rhode Island town of Warren afforded Butch many opportunities to get out and enjoy the outdoors, something he did as much as possible. I never liked being in the house. I was always outside. When I grew up, which was basically, I was born in 1946, so through the 1950s and into the 1960s, I was always out. Saturday and Sunday, I was out, after school, I was out. Winter time, I’d play hockey or if there was snow we’d go sledding. I always really liked being outside. I became a boy scout and that just expanded on that, cause I had a really good scout leader and we learned a lot about the outdoors from him. I like the water, like being on the water. I’ve always owned a boat almost since...I think I had my first boat when I was twelve or thirteen. And now I spend a lot of time on a kayak, which I really like.

Even now, I’m out every day, he adds I don’t spend a lot of time in the house. I do a lot of photography now...I lend my photography to Audubon because I feel that if I can promote conservation through my photography then at least it counted for something. I just put a gallery up on my website, give them a password and let them go in and take whatever they want.

Butch says he felt a kinship to the Audubon Society because of their mission. I always thought it was valuable, it had a very tangible value to it. With my photography, which gravitates towards wildlife and landscapes, I’d be out shooting a lot of wildlife and you become much more aware of how we have totally destroyed the habitat of almost every living creature on the planet other than us and we’re actually destroying our own habitat, we just don’t realize it. Retiring when I did, in 1998, I was only fifty-one, and I took a...my initial push was to see how good I could get at golf. I was playing four or five times a week. And then my sister started getting serious into photography and she got me back into it and I gradually flip-flopped. I was not spending much time playing golf anymore and instead spending all my time with the camera.

The birds, basically, that’s my main focus as far as wildlife goes, is birds, Butch says of his photography. When I was probably still in boy scouts...I remember my mother bought our first bird feeder, probably the first feeder in the neighborhood, because we had seen a cardinal in the yard. That kind of started it and from there it just blossomed into an interest and now with Audubon, I volunteer for the osprey monitoring program. That came about two years ago when, I think it was the Department of Environmental Management (DEM), they started it. What they were doing is they were monitoring all the active osprey nests in the state of Rhode Island cause they were trying to get a count of how healthy or not healthy he osprey population was in the state...I think it was something like a thousand osprey nests between New York and Boston around 1940 and I think by 1970 there were fifteen cause the population got totally decimated by DDT. They banned DDT so now they’d started monitoring the nests to see how well the birds were coming back. So it got to a point where DEM felt the population was healthy enough where they didn’t need to monitor anymore so they dumped it. Audubon picked it up and when July Lewis, from Audubon, sent out a request for volunteers, being a member, I got it in an email. The Palmer River, which is right up here in Warren has the highest concentration of osprey in the state. So, I looked at the map and they were all wrong, the nests were all wrong.

How did you know? I ask.

Cause I’m out there in a kayak all the time, he replies. I knew where they all were already so I told July. They gave me administrative access to the map and I said, ‘I will mark them all out for you.’ So I did all of those and I did quite a few more in Bristol County and she started sending me to investigate nests that they weren’t sure if they were there or not...they had the nests all over the place.

Butch’s involvement grew quickly from helping identify nests to a number of activities related to maintaining nesting sites. He tells one story, In 2010, the same year the program started, my wife, Cindy, was driving up 114 and there’s a nest, there’s a platform that was put up, and she said, ‘the nest is down.’ I said, ‘are you sure, did you look at the right island?’ She went again and said, ‘it’s not there.’ I had to go to my mother-in-law’s the next day so I went and it wasn’t there, it had fallen. So I called July and I said, ‘the nest is down.’ They called me and said, ‘dig through the nest and make sure there are no chicks.’ Cindy and I took the kayaks and went out there, dug through the nest, didn’t find any dead birds. So I talked to July and I said, ‘we have to put this back up,’ because they return to the same nest every year. So, I said, ‘this has to go back up before they come back in March.’ I contacted the guy who built the original one and we got a group of people together, we wound up finally going out there in October. We built the support pole and I built the nesting platform and we went and put them together at his house. Then we got a group of guys and we went out on a boat with cement and we put the footing in and then we put the platform back up. And now that’s led to, I just did my third one now, for a kid, for his Eagle Scout project. We did that one two weeks ago.

I’ve read several books and I’ve learned a lot just by spending time out there, watching them, Butch says of his osprey knowledge. I’ll be out there in a kayak, we’ll go out for three or four hours and just be in the river. It’s magical in the summer when you’ve got seventeen nests and if each nest produced a chick or two, seventeen nests equates to thirty-four adults and probably as many chicks. So all of a sudden, when they start to fly, you’ve got probably sixty birds out there. You can go out to the river in the morning and there’ll be fifteen or twenty of them, all circling around and the kids are learning how to fish. It’s really neat to see, to go out there early in the morning and just watch it all.

The bids pretty much arrive on the spring equinox and leave on the fall equinox, twenty-first of March and twenty-first of September, he says. That’s pretty much he benchmark for when the bulk of them show up and the bulk of them leave. One of the guys just showed me a picture of one he had just seen out there, which is really late. They say that the longer they stay, the less chance they have of surviving the migration.

Once the birds arrive, monitors select a nest that they will observe throughout the birds’ time in the area. While most monitors take one nest, Butch notes that he’s got five and they’re all the ones you can’t get to and that’s why I took them.

If I do all of them in one day, it probably requires a full day, because it requires time in the kayak, he says. There’s a couple that...one is over at FedEx that I can actually drive my truck over and look at it through binoculars. The others are all tucked in the back of the river out there. So what they want you to do, when birds come back, visit the nest and make sure that both birds are back. Then you gotta come back and...they want you to visit, I think it’s every two weeks, starting in probably mid-April through July. Basically, what you are looking for is, first, are the birds back and then, later on, are they nesting, cause they’ll repair the nest from any kind of winter damage. Then at some point the female will sit. Once she’s sitting on eggs, she won’t leave the nest, she’ll be there from the time she lays her eggs until the fledglings come. She doesn’t go off to go fishing. He does all the fishing, she does the nest-minding...she’ll be sitting and you can just see the head. And then at some point the eggs...I think their incubation period is about thirty-five days and then you’ll see her standing. When he brings the fish, you’ll see her bent down and you can tell she’s feeding chicks. You can’t see them when they’re really little and once they start to grow, all of a sudden, you’ll see them. You’ll see the heads first, bopping around in the nest and when they get bigger they’ll all be standing up around the nest. Basically, what you’re trying to do, the end result is how many chicks each nest produces during the summer.

All of this, Butch says, leads to the collection of important data that will allow Audubon and other organizations to track the health of the osprey population. In the beginning, you can see how weak the osprey population was and I think what...I think what they said is that now the population is at the point where each nest has to produce...I think it’s one point four-something chicks in order for the population to be stable. In other words, the attrition rate...eighty percent of the chicks that hatch this summer won’t come back. They’ll die before they come back. So if we fledged 176 birds this summer and eighty percent of those birds won’t come back, you’re only talking about...you might get thirty-five or forty that are gonna come back.

You’ve developed a real connection to these birds. A relationship with them, I say.

Without a doubt. I’ve named some of them out there, Butch responds. There are nests that...we had one fall down out there in the spring of 2011. I had been out on the river and it was tilted badly and I got a call from Audubon to go out and see if I could straighten it out. So I went out there and I looked through binoculars and the female looked like she was sitting on eggs. So I called them back and I said, ‘it looks like she’s sitting on eggs,’ and I said, ‘I really don’t want to go out there and start hammering. If I start hammering, she’s going to take off and she may abandon the nest.’ So we decided to leave it and hope for the best. So I went to Arizona and came back and I was actually out on the other side of the river with a camera and I looked across the river and it was down. So I came home and I got Cindy and we went over there and walked out through the marsh and we found the platform. I took the platform to Home Depot, I bought the material and went home and built a new platform. I called a buddy of mine and we went back the next day and by eleven o’clock the next morning, we had the new platform up. It was less than twenty-four hours from the time I found it, the new one was up. While we were putting the platform up, we had birds circling us and I went out there two days later and there was a nest taking shape already.

Like they were watching you, patiently waiting while you helped them out?

There’s a pair out there that we repaired...their platform was also tilted really badly. So we repaired that one in January and they’re one of the most prolific pair out there because ospreys usually produce two chicks a year. One to two, Butch says. This nest, I remember going out last summer, Cindy and I went out in our kayaks and it looked like there was a crowd in the nest, it was so crowded. So we got close enough where we could see it, and I took a picture of it, there were four chicks and the mother in this nest. They’re big birds. I don’t know how they were all staying in there. And this year, they produced three. So the male...I read a thing where a nest with two chicks, the male has to catch six to eight fish a day, to keep them going. So with four, you figure this guy had to catch upwards of a dozen a day, to keep that crew going and he’s done it two years in a row, so he’s like my hero.

How do the ospreys react to people?

When the female’s on the nest, and she’s got eggs, she’ll stay until you get really close, he says. One of the things, being a monitor, don’t harass the birds. Being a photographer, don’t harass them to the point where you cause them to fly out of the nest. If you do it too much they’ll abandon the nest cause if they get stressed to the point where there are too many people around, they won’t stay here.

As for the osprey’s food source, Butch says it’s one thing in the birds’ favor, at least in Rhode Island. The Palmer River, it’s really a neat ecosystem...and there’s plenty of fish in there. So that’s what the birds are feeding on. You’ve got the herring run in the spring, you’ve got a ton of herring and they all go up the river to spawn and then come back so they’re going back and forth. Later on you’ve got the bluefish that come in with the skipjacks which are the little blue fish and they’re all over the place. So there’s plenty of fish in the river. They probably hardly make a dent in what’s out there with the amount of fish they take out of there.

Butch hopes that his work with the osprey will have an impact that has to do with people as much as birds. I hope that somewhere along the line, people realize that we can’t just keep building on every square inch of the land that we have. We need to stop this wholesale building everywhere. Because we’re just going to...we’re going to push everything out of here. We’re going to push the birds out, we’re going to push the wildlife out. We’ve already got deer running around in neighborhoods now cause he deer population is...they’ve got nowhere to go. There’s no woods left for anybody. It would be really sad if generations down the line we can only see this stuff in books. You know, to sit out there in a kayak and watch all of this happen at six o’clock on a summer morning when the sun has just come up and it’s nice and warm and the birds are flying around. Most people don’t get to see that. But you know, everybody is so busy in their everyday life that it’s kind of like ‘stop and smell the roses.’

I ask Butch, What do you to say to someone who says, ‘so what, it’s just a bird or a turtle? Who cares?’ How do you respond?

Every species has a purpose and every species is intermingled with other species, right up to man, he says. As soon as you cause a ripple, it has a ripple effect up and down the food chain. Everything has a right to exist. If it’s here, just the beauty of it, if nothing else, just the beauty of a wild animal. You look at what they do...it’s just...they show up, they throw a nest up, they raise their young, and they go back to South America. It’s very simple and basic but it needs to be preserved. I don’t know if I can...it’s an intangible value but it has real worth to it. All wildlife, not only the birds, all wildlife. We just...we are developing them out of existence. The ospreys always nest...they like to nest in dead trees, because it affords them easy access and entry, cause they’re fairly large birds, don’t maneuver well like a falcon or a harrier which can weave through trees. The osprey are not built that way, so they need to have a fairly broad, clear access when they come into their nest and they like to be high, too. So you need to provide them...that’s why the nesting platforms are so valuable...you go out there and there’s just not a lot of trees for them to nest in. There are some tree nests out there but without the platforms we wouldn’t have half the nests that are out there.

While Butch is not optimistic about the future of some species, he has more hope for the osprey. I think the osprey have received a lot of support and a lot more publicity. I think the osprey, simply because they’re a raptor, people have this enchantment with different raptors

Whether it’s from your photographs, your volunteer work or anything else, I ask, do you feel like opinions regarding the environment are changing?

There’s definitely a large group of people that believe in conservation, believe that we shouldn’t develop, Butch says, adding, There’s also the people who have the money and want to buy something and make it something else. They’ll buy a piece of property that’s zoned and they’ll want to change the zoning to something else because they want a different plan for it, cause they want to put more stuff on it or whatever. You bought it knowing what it was and now you want to change it so you can make money and most of the changes are not beneficial to the environment.

As someone with a lifelong connection to his home town and the natural surroundings, Butch has a sense of how history and nature have interacted and changed. I can cite changes to you, having grown up here. The water level in this river is higher than it’s ever...the high tide is higher. A good high tide now is what used to be a moon tide. A moon tide now is almost like a flood tide. There’s definitely more water in the river. As far as winters go, I go back to when I was little and we had more snow...one good barometer is I learned how to skate when I was six and we skated all winter. Now, we’ve had a lot of winters... it’s definitely warming up, there’s no doubt about it. It’s documented that migration patterns for birds are changing. Birds that used to go south of here are now...all of a sudden, you’re seeing a few staying around. There are more robins staying around now than I’ve ever seen. The robins used to disappear and you didn’t see any robins. Now, being here along the bay where it says relatively warm, we’re seeing robins all winter now. There was some kind of butterfly, I don’t know the name of it, I read it somewhere, where it’s basically a tropical butterfly. To see one of these up here is a monumental thing, it’s like seeing a pelican or something like that. Last summer, they saw 100 and something of them. Fall foliage, which is a huge industry in New England, that’s gonna change because the whole forest is going to change. I saw an osprey today. To see one this late in the year...it’s late...it’s not totally out of the question, but it’s late. For them to be hanging around this long, when the ice comes, they’re not going to be able to fish and it’s too late. I’m sixty-six...I’m not ancient but I’ve lived long enough to have something, a benchmark to measure things and look back at. Definitely going back as far as how much snow we get and how cold it is in the winter time, I see a change. It’s obvious.

2

Trash Man: Stan Dimock

Living in southeastern Massachusetts, it’s easy to spend a lifetime never realizing that you inhabit the state’s second largest watershed. The Taunton River and its tributaries drain 562 square miles, including forty-three cities and towns. The Taunton itself flows south-southwest for forty miles, dropping only twenty feet in elevation over the course of its journey. Eventually, that journey leads the river’s water into Mount Hope Bay and then out into the much larger Narragansett Bay, New England’s largest estuary, covering 147 square miles. With an average depth of twenty-six feet, the bay has a shoreline of 256 miles, including island shorelines. Along much of those shores are small towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, towns where volunteers and the public in general work tirelessly to keep their beaches and the bay clean and free of trash and manmade debris. One such volunteer, Stan Dimock, is a resident of Bristol, Rhode Island, where he has worked for many years to preserve and protect the natural environment.

Tall, tan and debonair, Stan met me at Save the Bay’s Bay Center, on the banks of Narragansett Bay. We sat on Adirondack chairs along the shoreline as the perfect, cloudless blue sky reflected on the slowly rippling water which Stan and Save the Bay have dedicated their lives to protecting. He began by telling me about how he ended up here, after a twenty year insurance career which he said he hated. Although he describes it as good money, he left it knowing that he wasn’t satisfied by the work. The decision to make a career change came shortly after he had moved from Pawtucket, Rhode Island to Bristol and began living along the coast.

With that move I had started cleaning the shoreline on my own as a hobby, for fun. And the hobby kind of took off and took on a life of its own...so my love of the waterfront and nature and the outdoors led me to Save the Bay, Stan says. I called and spoke with the volunteer coordinator at the time and she asked me to come in and help with a mass mailing. I sat in a conference room with a bunch of other volunteers and we folded letters and stuffed envelops and had a really good time and I knew I was doing something good for a good organization. At the end of the day when we finished up our mailing task, they thanked me and said, ‘we’ll be in touch if we need you again.’ I called when I got home and I said, ‘I’ve made a complete career change. You have me as often as you want me. I’ll work five days a week doing anything you want me to do.’ That’s when it really took off.

As a volunteer, Stan represented Save the Bay at various fairs and festivals throughout the state, and assisted the organization in any way possible. Before too long, he says, the director of operations asked me to take over the volunteer program. So I was actually a paid employee, full time, for about four years. At the end of that period of time, my mom became terminally ill and after a very short period of time she passed away and that kind of changed everything for me. I took a step back and became strictly a volunteer for the organization, but still a very active volunteer, committed to three days a week. Now I’m sort of a hybrid, I’m a volunteer with the responsibilities of a staffer. And I get a very small paycheck in order to buy into the health care plan. But I’m basically a volunteer, that’s the gist of it.

Now not working full time, Stan dedicates his time to Save the Bay and other volunteer activities in the area. Having grown up in West Hartford, Connecticut, he credits that childhood with giving him many of the environmental values which influence his volunteer work today.

Stan says, "I gained my appreciation for the environment especially from