Archive: Around Town

Birds and maple syrup share the same critical ingredient: healthy northeastern forests. Every year, millions of birds breed, feed and fledge in the same forests that are tapped for syrup (called "sugar bushes"). As long as a sugar bush stays tapped, it will remain a forest and not be cleared for development. Now the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is partnering with the Cornell Maple Program to help sugar bushes in the Arnot Research Forest meet their full potential for bird habitat, sweetening the deal for birds and for the bottom line in the university's own sugar bush. The understory of the oldest part of the Arnot sugar bush was thinned decades ago and deer have kept the shrub layer from regenerating, says Aaron Wightman, who oversees operations at the forest.

Forest managers aim for an ideal diversity of tree species at a diversity of ages, with layers of branches and leaves at the top, middle and bottom. Without younger generations of trees growing up underneath the canopy layer, the entire forest community faces an abrupt decline when all those oldest-generation trees begin to die.

Birds suffer, too, from a lack of diversity in sugar-bush habitat. For example, without a conifer component among the maple trees, birds like the blue-headed vireo, blackburnian warbler and sharp-shinned hawk are missing valuable nesting habitat. Fruiting trees and shrubs in a sugar bush, like black cherry, also provide critical energy supplies for birds fueling up for migration.

Conservation biologist Steve Hagenbuch, who heads up Audubon Vermont's Bird-Friendly Maple Project, says sugar bushes that contain at least 25 percent nonmaple trees support a greater diversity and abundance of birds than stands growing only maples. And he says syrup producers in the Audubon Vermont program are finding that managing a sugar bush for tree diversity is good for sugaring sustainability, too.

With habitat loss and degradation looming as the greatest threats to birds today, sugar bushes have the potential to offer a big conservation footprint for birds.

Aaron Wightman oversees a network of taps and tubing that draws sap from more than 6,000 maple trees.

Bird-friendly maple syrup is only one part of how the food production systems of modern society can help address the massive loss of bird habitat. After all, the very same scarlet tanagers that spend summer in sugar bushes in New York, Vermont and Quebec fly to South America for the winter, where they may look for habitat among shade-grown coffee farms in Colombia.

Ultimately, Wightman hopes the sugar bush in Arnot Forest will be a model for bird-friendly maple production in New York, and for the international importance of sustainable food production.

"Any healthy forest has a healthy bird population," he says. "That's how we should grow all our food."

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