Lindsey Papasian is a reporter with the Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

NEW HAVEN — Hyla Howe trudged through the high grass. She scanned the ground and took note: red clover, sedge, canary reed. Each plant said something about whether the field would be a good spot for bobolinks. 

Suddenly came a wave of R2-D2 chirps as 40 or more the birds were flushed from their positions in the grass, swirling through the air singing. 

“This is amazing!” Howe said.

The birds looked like dots dancing overhead. The fledglings were easy to spot in their clumsier flight patterns, and with binoculars, the adult males were clear in their distinctive black and white plumage, the adult females sporting brown feathers with yellow breasts.  

After a few transects of the field, it was time to go back to the landowner to tell them the good news: The birds had successfully nested, and it was safe to mow.

That’s a day in the life of Howe, hired this year as the first outreach coordinator for the Boboblink Project, an effort run by Mass Audubon, Audubon Vermont and New Hampshire Audubon. She works for the Massachusetts outfit specifically.

Grassland birds like the bobolink are declining faster than any other group of birds in New England. In the last 50 years, over 75% of the species have seen population losses. Some of the worst hit are bobolinks and eastern meadowlarks, two of 10 species of grassland birds in Vermont. They build their nests on the ground, which makes them vulnerable to haying and mowing in fields. 

The Bobolink Project pays the owners of these fields, often farmers, to conduct or pay for bird-friendly management practices. The birds get time and habitat to nest while the landowners get some compensation for letting them do so.

The money to pay participating landowners comes from private donations.

“You don’t think of wildlife as an agricultural product until you remove native prairie, then you kind of have to think about wildlife as an agricultural product,” said Howe. “Essentially, the landowners are raising grassland birds.”

On Howe’s early morning visit to New Haven, landowner Steve Shores was thrilled to hear about the successful nests.

“I am glad you are seeing birds in these fields,” Shores said.

After a catch-up about the farm, life and all its changes, Howe and Shores said goodbye until next year, when she’ll come back to check on the field again.

Every current or prospective piece of land in the project needs to be surveyed yearly. 

To be a part of the effort, farmers must alter their haying processes. 

That’s done by either delaying the first cut of the season — no disturbance in the field until after July 15 — or delaying a second cut — no disturbance in the field between May 20 and July 24. The delays allow enough time for grassland birds to nest safely.

The birds need enough space as well as enough cover to protect their hatchlings until they are able to fly. 

To get their population estimates, scientists have been out surveying fields, which includes analyzing vegetation and counting female birds to estimate the number of nests in the area using a formula created by Allan Strong, a University of Vermont professor who directs the school’s wildlife and fisheries biology program. 

The biggest driver of grassland bird declines has been changes in land use.

The first major land-use transformation affecting grassland bird populations in Vermont today was the demise of sheep farming starting in the 19th century. 

Vermont’s sheep boom started in 1811 and lasted until the middle of the century. By 1840 there were over a million sheep in the state, requiring an enormous amount of pasture.

Two hundred years later, the landscape of Vermont is nearly 80% forest: Many of the sheep farms were left to fallow and have reforested since. The dairy farms that came in after the sheep craze required less open land — and themselves have declined since. 

When farms go out of business and no one’s around to maintain the fields, shrubs and tree seedlings start to take over.

As trees reemerged in disused land, there were less and less grasslands where birds such as the bobolink could build their nests.

The second land-use factor causing grassland bird decline is the intensified management of fields. 

“Fields are being cut earlier than they used to, more frequently than they used to,” Strong said.

“Bobolinks and meadowlarks don’t really have a chance,” he said.

More than 95% of eastern meadowlarks have disappeared in New England, according to the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, and it’s now a threatened species. Bobolink populations have dropped 60-75% continent-wide.

“There are fields I’m seeing now with fewer and fewer boblinks,” said Margaret Fowle, senior conservationist at the Vermont Audubon.

The Mass Audubon hired Howe to manage the Bobolink Project, do more targeted outreach to farmers and provide more opportunities for education and assistance.

The landowners engaging in the Bobolink Project are excited to help conserve the birds while also getting some money for their participation.

“They pay me not to mow, and I don’t mow anyway, so why not get a little money and save the birds?” said Shores, the New Haven farmer.

He was contacted by the project to consider entering his field into conservation.

Marilyn Marks, a prospective participant who lives down the road from Shores, said she wishes the state would provide landowners a tax credit for maintaining their fields for conservation — expanding a current credit system that cuts rates for land deemed for agricultural use.

The effort is not without drawbacks. Delayed cutting of fields could allow invasive plant species to seed.

According to Fowle, invasives such as poison parsnip, bedstraw and spotted knapweed have been moving into these grasslands.

“Fields abandoned, left to fallow, will over time become meadows and then forest in Vermont. It’s a common misconception that fields should be left completely alone,” said Howe

Kevin Tolan, staff biologist at Vermont Center for Ecostudies, sees it as a catch-22. “Can’t cut too much because it’ll destroy their nests,” he said. “Otherwise, if you let the invasives seed, they can take over.”

Howe, as the outreach coordinator responsible for surveying the fields, has been spending the season so far meeting with farmers and landowners and checking the viability of their fields for nests.

Viability of the fields is checked by a few different measures. When walking through the fields, Howe takes note of vegetation, management practices and looks out for birds. 

The vegetation is important to pay attention to since it can reveal habitat quality. For example, an overabundance of sedges indicates that the field may be too wet for bobolinks to nest on the ground. 

And if grass is not dense enough, it puts the bird nests at risk for predation.

Howe thinks of grassland systems in a similar way to forests, with canopies, understories and overstories. The arrangement of cover needs to be right for bobolinks and their hatchlings to succeed.

“It’s like an interesting puzzle,” she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of an invasive plant species.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Bobolink birds are in decline. Vermont’s fields are key to changing that..

Lindsey Papasian is a reporter with the Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

MAD RIVER VALLEY — For the past seven years, volunteers have been pulling and clipping Japanese knotweed from riverbanks, open fields, roadsides and plenty of places in between.

They’re part of a joint effort between conservation commissions in three towns — Waitsfield, Warren and Fayston — to fight the invasive plant, which has taken hold along the Mad River Valley.

More recently, project leaders have enlisted a helping hoof: goats that can eat the knotweed up.    

Goat grazing is a known method to control invasive plants without machinery. Goats feed on the plants, weakening or killing them entirely. In 2024, the Mad River Valley effort hired Mary Beth Herbert to do the job. This year, she’s funded by a grant from the Lake Champlain Basin Program.

According to Curt Lindberg, chair of the Waitsfield Conservation Commission, the project spans a cumulative 260 worksites across the region. Interns from the University of Vermont as well as local volunteers have been working, along with the goats, to control knotweed across the locations.

Herbert got her start with keeping goats in 2018 while working as a trail crew leader on the Appalachian Trail in the south of the state. She got interested in working with goats because of frequent machine failures on the job that set the crew behind.

She spent around five years camping on the trail with her goats, half the time as a volunteer, the other half paid.

In the same year she and her three goats — Ruth, Bader and Ginsberg, after the former U.S. Supreme Court justice — were hired by the city of Montpelier to remove poison ivy.

In the winter of 2023, Herbert gave away her then 23-strong herd and moved to Arizona to study with Navajo shepherds.

That spring, she was contacted by the Mad River knotweed operation to help rid the area of the invasive.

When efforts to remove knotweed first started out, locals found it challenging and had thought, “‘Why even bother,’” said Lindberg.

But in the past few years there has been a shift in perspective.

“With good persistent effort, you can make progress,” Lindberg said.

This year, Herbert has a herd of 18 goats, 14 of which she owns and four she has rented from Villa Villekulla Farm in Barnard.

The knotweed is extensive and dense, especially along the river.

On a recent day near the Mad River Exchange in Waitsfield, Herbert walked along a wooded trail toward the riverside clearing where her crew has been stationed this summer. Unlike the land around it, the field hasn’t been overwhelmed by knotweed; the patches are shorter and more spread out.

She’s been rotating the herd around the perimeter to prevent the invasive from growing any further.   

“I already see a difference from last year to this year,” she said.

Around the field, knotweed grazed on four weeks ago had grown back to chest height while further away, ungrazed plants stood at least 6 feet high. 

Unlike poison ivy, which can be grazed heavily one time, Knotweed needs more regular maintenance to suppress the spread. 

“Knotweed needs to be grazed many, many times, over and over,” Herbert said.

Increased flooding in Vermont is worrisome to both her and Linberg for how it could fuel the spread of the invasive.

That’s because when floodwaters pass over riverbanks with a population of Japanese knotweed, they can carry rhizomes — the part of the plant that grows new roots and shoots — downstream, where the invasives can replant themselves into the soil and spread the network further. 

The field where Herbert is working is public land that could turn entirely into knotweed if left unmanaged. 

“The goal is to work where people used to go and can’t anymore because of the knotweed and reclaim” those spots, Herbert said. 

The goats will be spending all summer eating knotweed around the field. They are moved every two or three days from one spot to another and cycle to previously grazed spots around every four weeks. On that recent afternoon, goats followed Herbert around as she kicked knotweed down to make it easier for them to reach.

“I’m happy because the goats absolutely love the knotweed,” Herbert said.

She sees animal husbandry as the most important part of her job. She trims the goats’ hooves, makes sure they get enough nutrition in their diet and sets up electric fences every time they are moved to keep them from wandering away or encountering coyotes.

Each year the knotweed is getting weaker in places the volunteers are working, Lindberg said. In some roadside spots, where the weed can’t spread as easily as by water, volunteers have eradicated the plant, he said.

Interns and volunteers are set to fight the knotweed into September. In October, volunteers will plant native plants. 

“The goal is to restore healthy, native habitat,” Lindberg said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: To fight knotweed, Mad River Valley towns let goats pig out.