Look Into the Murky Crystal Ball: MNCPPC's Vision 2030 Report

(The following was originally published in the February edition of the Voice newspapers, of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington, Maryland as a part of my Sligo Naturalist column.)

Ever wish you could sit down in front of a crystal ball to see what the future will look like for our area? Last week I attended a feedback session hosted by the Maryland National Park and Planning Commission (MNCPPC). They were gathering final comments and reactions to Vision 2030, a plan which will ultimately guide how the county powers that be treat our parks and recreational facilities in the next 20 years.

Like many area residents, I’ve been alarmed by how deep the cuts have been for Parks and Rec during this most recent fiscal crisis. Because of that I’ve decided to pay close attention to Vision 2030 report.

But without sounding wonkish, what does that mean exactly?

Well, the night the Vision 2030 draft plan was unveiled provided ample evidence of how things can get skewed in this county and how they need improvement.

For example, the report shows (in both text and maps such as those on page 17) that there is an imbalance of programming whereby the farther out (and often wealthier) suburbs get a very disproportionate amount of recreational programs at their facilities.

This is no surprise to parents in the “downcounty” areas of Silver Spring and Wheaton. Ever try signing your child up for a dance or art class? It always seems like more than half of them are held in places like Potomac and Gaithersburg. Now we have real evidence that this is actually the case.

To correct this, one of the stated long-term goals for the county will be to place programs and facilities more evenly, and where there’s a majority of people and more transit access.

That’s good, I think.

There was also an effort made in the report to emphasize that the parks play an integral role in preserving and presenting cultural resources and historic sites to the public. And, a very real effort to address the problem that many services are not accessible to those who are socio-economically disadvantaged.

Again, I think those all are very good goals.

What worried me and many others who were at last week’s meeting, however, was how development-heavy and recreation-heavy the overall vision for the future of the parks seems in the report.

This prompted one attentive woman at the meeting to ask for a definition of what a park was in their report. Could a park experience be, she inquired, something as urban and structural as the new ice skating rink in downtown Silver Spring? The answer that came back was somewhat unclear: Yes, maybe, depending on how they counted it…

This is where my skepticism kicked in, as it did for many others. I like the new rink, I’m glad for it. But that ain’t no park in my book. If they are counting that as a park then right away I wonder how they are stacking this deck.

I’m not the only one apparently skeptical about the way MNCPPC and its consultants rated park use and experience. A few days after the meeting, Carole Ann Barth, a parks advocate from the Four Corners neighborhood emailed me. She’d read the report and had this thought:

“They have no credible data on how the parks are actually used, yet they presume to tell us what facilities are most needed. 100 people could visit a park individually or as families and spend hours picnicking, walking the dog, chatting with neighbors, throwing frisbees, bird watching, or engaging in hundreds of other so-called “passive activities.” All these people, however, would be invisible to Parks, because they only record the single small group of people who permitted a field for a couple of hours.”

Yes, I agree. Or the people who paid for a rental ticket for skates. But the rest of the people, as Carole says, remain invisible.

My concerns only grew as I continued to read the Executive Summary of Vision 2030 more closely. Goal 11, I noted, seeks to “Inventory, conserve, restore and enhance ecologically healthy and biologically diverse natural areas with a focus on Park Best Natural Areas, Biodiversity Areas, and Environmentally Sensitive Areas.” Furthermore the goal states a need to “prioritize Best Natural Areas and Biodiversity Areas based on their ecological value and biological diversity.”

That’s great. Really. I mean it. I want the wonderful bio-diverse parts of MoCo conserved, restored and enhanced before we go buggering them up as bad as we have managed to bugger up the rest of the county.

But I would *also* like it if the not-so-bio-diverse, not-so-environmentally sensitive areas get some badly needed attention. Namely, I’d like those places to get more new trees, and I’d like to see the mature trees that are there appreciated and maintained a protected as valuable resources. And I’d like to see those areas managed with ecosystem values in mind, not programming.

In all fairness, Vision 2030’s goal 11.5 does say that there is a need to develop “comprehensive restoration plans for down-County {sic} stream valley parks including Rock Creek, Sligo Creek and Little Falls.” Hooray! But will that ultimately include funding for things like the invasive plant removal and ongoing maintenance needed to address stormwater trouble in those creeks? Will that ultimately mean that some new parks and green spaces will be designated in the more dense areas? Will it mean aggressively planting trees, and making downcounty developers pay for replacement trees in downcounty parks?

Or will it mean more playgrounds, ball fields and ice rink facilities?

When are we going to acknowledge that forests and streams provide ecosystem services that go beyond their value as recreational venues? Its nice to walk along the creek and peruse new trails, but forests and canopy cover have an intrinsic value all their own that is a benefit to everyone in the county, not just the immediate users of said parks. That’s because every minute of every day those trees are filtering pollution, cleaning our air, providing shade and cooling in the summer and even protecting us from wind during storms. Sure, you can’t charge a program fee for them, but they mean a lot to all of us each time we breathe.

And right now a lot of the few remaining forest tracts in this section of the county are sitting on parkland. They are squeezed in between aging subdivisions and heavily used roads, and ravaged by regular root-scrubbings during storms due to poor stormwater practices. They are tangled in honeysuckle, mile-a-minute and ivy. They are suffering, they need stewardship. They need a commitment to sound land management.

The Vision 2030 report is supposed to guide us towards a sustainable future. But if we give up on our forests down here then we have essentially given up on the downcounty’s future health and well-being. If we chose not to take on the needed stewardship now in the present then we will ultimately give up on the whole watershed, including the Anacostia where so much of our pollution ends up and the Chesapeake Bay which is fed by the Anacostia and Potomac waters.

To that end, Vision 2030 included goal number four, which seeks to “provide an appropriate balance between stewardship and recreation.” But what, I ask, does the word “appropriate” mean? How do we define balanced? That it seems, is up for debate and a bit too open-ended for my comfort.

So I’m shouting out to you now. Take a look at Vision 2030 online. Read it carefully, get a cup of coffee first if that will help you stay awake. But read it. Then respond. Let the county know your thoughts. Because if we don’t weigh in now, the people who live here in 2030 will certainly be the worse for it, even if they do have a lot more places to take skating and art classes.

Following Urban Owls in Silver Spring: The Sligo Naturalist

I thought the dog had a serious nose whistle. Know what I mean by that? Like, when someone breathes in and out in their sleep and it makes a little breezy whistling noise? Not a full snore, mind you, kind of a teeny, tiny snore. A nose whistle.

But how, how was she able to make that noise??? I couldn’t figure it out. I was awake in bed with terrible insomnia, and she was in her little cozy dog bed. Was her nose against something hard, like the wall? It was such an ODD nose whistle.

There it was again.

But wait!! That wasn’t her. She was awake in the dark wagging her tail, wondering why I was staring at her. Suddenly, so was my very groggy husband whom I had accidentally awakened.

“Do you hear it?” I asked him. We both listened. Toot toot tooooo… Toot toot toooo…

“Uh, yeah, I think it’s an owl. Go back to sleep,” he said with exasperation.

The thing was, I wasn’t expecting to hear an owl out our window. We live awfully close to several urban arteries, and very close to the busiest section of the capital beltway. This ain’t Walton’s Mountain.

Whoo who whoooo…. it went again. Whoo cooks for you….

I was dying to get out of bed, but that would have been too disruptive and my poor husband had just gotten back to sleep. Could that REALLY be an owl in my yard? Gosh I was just dying to know. Now I really would never sleep. This was far too exciting.

I should not have been surprised. Several different neighbors have reported seeing owls in the last two years. One emailed videos of a large bird that did, indeed, seem to be a barred owl, splashing around in her bird bath. Another friend woke up one morning thinking she was hearing a domestic dispute in the empty house next door and instead found two owls sending jolly messages across the two sides of her back deck. She was unsure of what species but said they were pretty big. And just upstream, at the headwaters of the Sligo, people see and hear owls all the time.

Even so, I still mostly associate owl calls with camping in the mountains. For one thing, almost all of the local owl species like to nest in the hollowed out parts of old, dead trees. There just aren’t a lot of those in the close-in suburbs Montgomery County. For another thing, these birds are known to do best in large tracts of forest, which really is not a sentence any planner would use to describe Silver Spring these days.

But somehow the owls, like many other birds of prey, are adapting and continue to be out there among us. In fact, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, most barred owl populations seem to be increasing, placing them in the category of species which are of the “least concern.” And the birds seem to be living pretty happily in certain urban areas.

So maybe the only reason I don’t hear them so often is because I don’t really camp in my own back yard.

Last winter I became particularly fascinated by these tenacious birds, and I decided to go on one of Brookside Nature Center’s Owl Walks in December. About four other people came along, including one couple that seemed to be on a first date. (How cool is that?) We all bundled up and headed out into the dark with a naturalist who had some recorded owl calls in hand.

We hiked with flashlights in the lighted snowy woods, and tried not to giggle too much. It was kind of exhilarating, and I kept thinking of those goofy shows where people try to find Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest. Anyhow, once we got deep enough into the woods we turned off the lights and played the recordings of screech owls. Sure enough, a real owl in the distance answered. Eventually, the real owl even came closer, flying just about eighteen inches over our heads in the dark. We were able to spot its silhouette in the trees and caught a glance of it with a flashlight. It blinked, then quickly flew off.

Eastern Screech Owls have long been common in urban habitats and like the barred owls are considered a species of “least concern.” They are tiny – measuring in at anywhere between six and nine inches tall -- but tough. They can eat songbirds that are their equal in size and weight.

Their calls sound so much like a scream that it is easy to see how they got their name. I am sure anyone hearing that sound along a busy part of our watershed would certainly think they were hearing something quite frightful and human.

But they also make a really cool sound which isn’t scary at all. Its almost like a coo, trilled over and over. It is sometimes referred to as the Bounce Song. The screech owls, which are known pair up for life, use this song to call to their potential mates across the woods.

Like other owls they also have HUGE ears which are really just holes hidden deep under soft feathers at the sides of their heads. The holes are surprisingly unsymmetrical, which enables the owls to be excellent hunters.

The only thing that beats seeing and hearing an owl call in person is dissecting an owl pellet. If you want a really cool way to learn about owls at home, you can order these one online. The pellets (which arrive after being sanitized in a autoclave) are not poop; rather, they are the little tufted balls of the leftover stuff that the bird is not able to digest when it gulps down its prey. Fur, feathers, bones, teeth… these can all be found in the mix. It is possible to play forensic scientist and ID what the owl ate for dinner. There are loads of charts online that will help you figure it all out.

Really experienced birders also say you can find owl roosts by looking in the woods for these pellets on the ground near hollow trees. I’ve even met a few bird watchers who claim that they can tell you immediately what species of bird left what kind of pellet.

I’ll keep looking, although I doubt I could do that kind of expert ID at this point. I have learned, however, to hear the difference between a dog’s nose whistle and a barred owl, which will come in handy someday if I decide to go camping in my own backyard with the dog.

(This article was originally published in the Voice newspapers of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington in November 2010.)

Trees are the Answer, Not the Problem

It is frightening to see a large tree fall.

I was walking once at Brookside Gardens on a beautiful sunny day in the middle of the autumn two years ago when I saw one go down in the forest along the horizon. It made an awful sound, and the weight of it made the ground shake around our feet for a moment. You feel a pit in your stomach when that happens. You feel small and helpless.

A lot of people recently experienced this first hand, when massive trees fell along our streets and in the parks. Two families in my own neighborhood even lived through the horrendous experience of having massive oaks fall directly on their homes. Everyone living in both homes came out safe and sound, thank God. The clean up efforts have been slow and hard and my heart goes out to them.

Yes, it is scary to watch trees fall, and also frustrating to experience power losses. I would not deny that.

But as politicians and Pepco argue over questions of management and the public grows increasingly frustrated, I’d like to reframe with a different perspective. We’ve lost a lot of trees this year, and now more than ever we need to be planting replacements.

When I hear people begin to talk as if the trees themselves are problem, I get worried. Trees are not the problem. In fact, I think that trees are the answer. Rather than see them as the cause of our human woes, we need to understand why they are here, acknowledge their importance in our landscape, and manage to somehow live our lives safely in their presence. Because without large trees we would really be in trouble.

Trees, many people know, help reduce air pollution and cool the air. The cooling occurs not only because trees provide enormous amounts of shade, but also because a mature tree actually moves water into the atmosphere.

What a lot people sometimes overlook, however, is that a forested landscape can also reduce the impact of water pollution and slow or reduce flooding in urban areas. That’s because when stormwater is able to move across tree roots, it is readily absorbed by the tree. The roots and the other living things in the soil and leaf litter act as excellent filters. They do this naturally and are quite effective at it.

Although water moves considerably slower through a forested landscape then through a cement-covered one, we’ve done a lot of work lately to fill our watershed with a huge amount of hard surface in the form of parking lots, roads and rooftops. This, in turn, has caused an increase in pollution and flooding, even when the storms aren’t unusual in intensity.

Where once there were fields and forests, there increasingly tends to be concrete and asphalt. Where once, the water moved as if it was moving through a sponge, it now moves as if poured from a smooth pitcher.

All of this is not good for the creeks, which get scoured out by the fast moving water and begin to erode. In the metaphor above, the pitcher is not clean but covered in oily and nutrient-rich pollutants which are washed into the stormdrains and then into our creeks. The abundance of things like fertilizers and pesticides from our lawns and streets can lead to anaerobic and toxic conditions. Our waterways become less inhabitable for fish, turtles, and other wildlife. The waterways, including the Chesapeake, become unhealthy.

“Dirty water kills,” Arlene Bruhn told me recently. She’s written the county council numerous times to advocate for more trees and better tree protection laws. Trees are essential to protecting our water supply, because we drink the Potomac’s water, she added.

Bruhn also reminded me that we’d had the hottest DC summer on record, meaning that we need as many shade trees as possible to help cool the city.

It makes sense, then, to protect the buffer zones of trees around creeks and plant more trees planted throughout our watershed. Does that mean we should plant trees any old place? No. What it means is that we need to be smart about where we plant and what we plant. It also means that we need to take care of what is already there.

“When you go to a garden center and see a tree in a little pot it is like looking at a little preschooler,” Mike Galvin, Deputy Director of Casey Trees told me recently. His organization works hard to get more trees planted in the city. “You need to say, what is this tree going to look like when it is mature, just like you try to think ahead to your kid’s future and how they are going to grow and get big.”

I liked Mike’s analogy. But sadly it reminded me of a story that an older friend here in Silver Spring told me last year. She recalled a time in the early 1950s, right after the houses were built in her neighborhood, when all of the people along one street bought some trees. We walked out one Saturday and planted them together, she recalled with warmth.

I appreciated the civic pride her story demonstrated, but I cringed when she pointed to the trees they had planted. Oaks, maples and gums were all there, directly under existing power lines in what is sometimes called the Right of Ways or ROW along the curblines.

Those trees then grew to be beautiful, treasured, big and dramatic. They also grew to be big problems for power line companies, well-managed or otherwise. And those trees often struggled to grow strong roots where the sidewalks existed. Those happy neighbors had definitely not thought ahead to the day when their baby trees would be mature.

In the decades since, we’ve struggled to do a bit better, with very little success. Municipal arborists now oversee ROW planting. Some developers have undergrounded lines as technology and innovation made this safer. Some who were really progressive even built developments which allowed for central green spaces full of trees. But many did not, opting instead to squeeze as many houses as possible into each space they developed. As a result we continue to lose our existing canopy at an ever increasing rate. New trees do not see to be a real priority for the county or the state.

We need to do a better job in the future. Homeowners can start by planting wisely. If you select a tree to plant, research and understand the tree before you begin. Don’t be afraid to pick a big one, but look up before you plant and see if there are powerlines there first.

If you don’t have space for the big, mature shade trees, pick one that will naturally stay small. Don’t pick a big species and try to train it to stay small. That only leads to pain for the tree and trouble for you or the next homeowner.

You can also work to maintain existing trees, both big and small. Too often, suburban folks tend to see trees as static, architectural features. Instead we need to understand that they are living, dynamic things that change and grow and sometimes begin to decline. They need regular attention in the form of professional pruning by a certified arborist.

The storms of summer have subsided for now, but I have no doubt we will face new ones again soon. Hopefully, we’ll at least get a healthy amount of rain. All those new seedlings I hope to see out there will need it.

This piece originally appeared in the Sept edition of the Voice newspapers of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington.