Wilder
Hazen, an invasive species specialist, led about a dozen people through an educational workshop sponsored by the Hartford Conservation Commission on his 175-acre land parcel Saturday morning.
The buckthorn, he said, had all but ruined a stand of pines located a little ways up a logging road that runs past the trailhead.
“That was about 100 percent cover of glossy buckthorn,” he said, which poses a threat to the next generation of tree species that are valuable to foresters. “So instead of getting your oak trees, your ash trees, your sugar maple, any native trees growing — you have glossy buckthorn.”
Hazen, 28, is the eighth generation of his family to grow up on and work Brookside Farm, which started as a sheep operation in 1771, and has gone through several iterations since: dairy, haying, beef, vegetables and, recently, horse boarding.
Though Hazen has spent most of his life hunting, fishing, farming, foresting and just walking through the outdoors, it wasn’t until after he graduated Paul Smith’s College in 2012 and started doing invasive plant control for Restart Natural Resource Management in Corinth, that he really began to appreciate the slow degradation of the land all around him.
“Ignorance is bliss,” he said.
Buckthorn, like many other invasives, outcompetes native tree species by leafing “out before native trees do, and they hold onto their leaves for longer. And they also have no natural predators here,” said Hazen, “so they can grow uninhibited without any natural enemies.”
That’s actually not wholly true. Invasive plants do have one natural enemy: Human conservationists. But, though the ranks of those who are actively battling invasives are swelling, it will be a long time before they match the relentless incursion of the imports.
That’s why Hazen, who has been a part of the Conservation Commission for three years, and others have been emphasizing education. If the general public could better recognize the difference between native-dominant forests or meadows, and invasive-dominated ones, they would do more to protect their habitats.
Sally Bellew, a retired nurse from Wilder who wore a large, floppy hat to protect herself from the sun, is a good example of the kind of person Hazen hoped would attend the workshop.
“I’m an environmentalist maniac,” said Bellew “I have been since the ‘70s.”
Back then, Bellew said, the only invasive she’d ever heard concern expressed about was Dutch elm disease, which had torn through the country and felled millions of trees.
In the past couple of years, she said, she’s been hearing more and more about invasives, which experts are beginning to cite as a leading cause of habitat loss for native species.
The workshop made an abstract concept concrete, said Bellew, who used a pen and pieces of scrap paper to record notes on buckthorn and other topics Hazen talked about.
“Instead of just walking along and thinking there’s a lot of green things here, now I’ll know that some of them could be malicious,” Bellew said.
One invasive species that’s beginning to take root in the mainstream public consciousness is wild parsnip, simply because it produces such a nasty effect on humans.
Kate and Tim Collins, of Wilder, were at the Hazen trailhead with their two children and 7-month-old puppy, Lucy. They weren’t there for the invasive plant workshop, they said, but they got their education about wild parsnip all the same — the hard way.
Tim Collins, who works at the Red River Computer Company in Claremont, showed off the back of his suntanned hand, where a white irregular scar snaked through his freckles.
Two years ago, he said, the skin there began to bubble and redden. His initial diagnosis of poison ivy proved to be off when the chemical burn intensified and reddened.
He wound up seeking medical treatment at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where mystified doctors sent him home with steroid cream.
“Tim never gets sick,” Kate Collins said. “But he was in bed and incapacitated with a fever for days. It was really scary.”
Eventually, the Collins’ figured out that he had likely picked up some wild parsnip sap while playing softball.
The sap is phototoxic, meaning it causes chemical burns when it is exposed to sunlight. But when the couple began to tell friends and family, they ran into resistance.
“No one believed me,” he said. “They were like, ‘I’ve been living here my whole life, and I never heard of it.’ ”
Hazen said that, now that he’s developed an eye for wild parsnip, activities that once seemed innocuous began to look downright foolhardy.
“One of my first experiences with poison parsnip is, I was out treating it and people were just walking through a field of it, with no idea of what it was,” he said. “It’s rare to know a lot of plants, but it’s a hazard.”
Hazen said he is in the midst of a career transition that he hopes will help him play an even more active role in the battle against invasives. He’s starting up an invasive species eradication company, in which he helps private landowners assess their land, and develop and implement solutions, which can range from chemical treatments to mechanical harvesting.
“Often times people will call me and say ‘I have a real bad knotweed problem.’ I have to be the bearer of bad news and say ‘well, you’ve got glossy buckthorn too,’ ” he said.
The cost to treat an acre of land for invasives typically ranges between $100 and $500, according to information published on the website of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Service, while the Nature Conservancy puts the cost at between $250 and $800 per acre.
Though there are various programs and organizations that financially support invasive plant control campaigns, Hazen said he’s most familiar with the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service, which offers two programs that can help defray costs for qualified private landowners.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.