The incessantly busy streets of Manhattan are eerily empty at quarter to 7 as I yank open the creaky door of our giant pick-up truck and hoist myself into the passenger seat. Today is our first official day of field work with the Alliance, and Ferdie and I are eager to get an early start before the July humidity descends upon the city.
At our field site we meet up with Valerie Francis, the director of conservation at the Alliance, and the rest of the Bronx River Alliance Crew. Our first task is to clear part of the knotweed from a section upstream, so armed with machetes, weed whackers and trash bags, we begin to slowly take back the shoreline.
Bronx Alliance member expertly handling a weed whacker along Bronx River bank.
After clearing the knotweed we start up our plot work joined by more Alliance members. I was initially overwhelmed by how much work we had ahead of us, but now I’m surprised to find that with the hard working crew we’ve breezed through our plot work. Each plot is marked on four corners by flagging, and with a pin oak Quercus palustris in the center. The tree signals a different treatment; either a control site (knotweed is left alone), a cut site (knotweed is cut to the ground) or a dig site (knotweed is dug out and the roots are removed).
White PVC piping to lay out the boundaries of our 2 x 2 meter plots.
Later Ferdie and I will return to do some data collection to see what vegetation has seeded in and how much knotweed has grown back. As we wrap up, the crew relaxes and rehydrates by the truck; although the work they do is exhausting, they maintain a playful and fun attitude. I can tell that for them the work they do is more than a paycheck-- they operate as a family and they believe in the Alliance mission and their own duty to restore the Bronx River. I am really looking forward to getting to work with such a welcoming and warm group of people and learn from their experiences in the field, comparing it with my own fieldwork from the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment