It cannot be contested that humans have made an indelible mark on this planet.

But that doesn't mean nature can't take it back.

Today we're talking with the people who are helping nature reclaim itself.

I'm Jasmin Singer, and this is Environmental Connections.

Joining us today are Matthew Perry from Spring Farm Cares, Marisa Riggi of the Western New York Land Conservancy, Janet Chaize from the Rush Recreation and Park Association, and Lorna Wright of the Genesee Land Trust.

They will share their insights and experiences illustrating the broad impact of rewilding efforts across different landscapes.

I am so glad that each of you are here today to help us explore this important and really beautiful subject and the impact of giving the land back to wildlife and wildlife back to the land.

So thank you all so much for being here today.

I appreciate it.

Matt, let's start with you.

Matthew Perry is the conservation director for Spring Farm Cares' Animal and Nature Sanctuary in the Mohawk Valley.

First of all, Matt, for our listeners who might be fuzzy on this, what exactly is rewilding?

Rewilding is pretty much just what it sounds like.

I mean, you're taking land that was subject to development, cultivation, usually agricultural cultivation, and you're restoring the nature that perhaps once was there and you're giving it a revamped ecology or you're creating habitat where there was limited or no habitat before.

So, Matt, given fact that the land for your sanctuary was used as a dairy farm until 1980, can you talk about what is involved in rewilding such land?

Well, I mean, when you go about rewilding, you can put as much effort in as you want to.

You can just leave former agricultural land to become feral and to regrow forest and to essentially rejoin the ecology of the region of the wild part of the region.

Essentially, when I got there, I found soil that was immensely depleted.

The soil structure was destroyed.

Soil is a complex ecosystem that is very poorly understood even to this day.

You And that was effectively destroyed.

Over 90% of the dairy farm, the 260 acre dairy farm where we set out to do our rewilding.

So we had a challenge just from the ground up.

That soil was incapable really of rewilding by itself in any kind of real time frame.

so we had to inject biodiversity, essentially.

We had to bring in a lot of native species.

We had to recondition some soil as best we can.

I mean, we cannot create soil ecology, right?

It has to create itself.

does technology play a role at all in like an optimal method for rewilding degraded land or no?

Well, the technology we use is our hands and shovels and most importantly, beavers.

Yes.

And I have so many questions for you.

Amazing.

I know you're very passionate.

Beavers are amazing because they naturally rewild areas.

You can essentially put a beaver in an area and they will rewild the wetlands.

They will create wetlands where there weren't wetlands before.

They will, they'll recharge the water table.

They will recreate the floodplain that has disappeared after, you know, 200 years of abuse of the land by agriculture.

Iconic.

I have more questions for you about beavers, but let's get to our other guests first.

So don't go anywhere, Matt.

So Marisa Riggi, executive director of Western New York Land Conservancy.

First of all, welcome to the show.

I'm so glad you're here.

Excited to be here.

And so can you explain what a wildlife corridor is for people who don't know and why they're so important to support wild animals and plants in today's world?

Absolutely.

So a wildlife corridor is the easiest way to think of it, is a connection between habitats.

So you can have huge wildlife corridors, like out west, they have really long ones.

Here, we have often smaller wildlife corridors that connect large habitat blocks, and they're extremely important because they provide a pathway for plants and wildlife to move to new homes when necessary based on climate change or based on expanding their ranges, places to find new mates so that they don't suffer from genetic loss or lack of genetic diversity.

And also it provides a place for them to go and find new food or expand their ranges.

tell us about the Western New York Wildway Project, because I'm curious, like, how long has it been in process and where are you on the path, and that was pun intended, to connect to these green spaces?

Yeah.

The Western New York Wildway is a landscape scale project that we're working on in the eight counties that we work in to connect and restore and protect the largest habitat.

Blocks and forests in our region have connections between throughout our region.

It's also a smaller piece of the puzzle of the much larger Eastern Wildway, which is a project of the Wildlands Network, which is a partner we work with, and that is an ecological corridor and mapping of the entire East Coast up from the Gulf of Mexico to Nova Scotia.

The Eastern Wildway touches the Western New York Wildway and Western New York Wildway is an integral part of it, where it touches the Great Lakes, which through 21% of the world's freshwater flows right past where we're sitting right now.

So it's an extremely important piece of that puzzle.

That is incredible.

Well, I have so many more questions for you as well, so don't go anywhere.

That was Marisa Riggi with the Western New York Land Conservancy.

I'd like to introduce Lorna Wright, executive director of the Genesee Land Trust.

Lorna, thank you again so much for being here.

Thank you.

So Lorna, can you talk about some of the wins that you've had in bringing bird species back to land managed by the Genesee Land Trust?

Yes, we've done a couple of different restoration projects over the years on lands that we own outright here in the Greater Rochester area.

we've done restoration work at our Cornwall Preserve, where we did some wetland restoration work.

And that was funded by the North American Wetlands Conservation Act.

We are at Cornwall Preserve in the hamlet of Pultneyville in the town of Williamson, and this is a 77 acre nature preserve owned by Genesee Land Trust.

It has trails, some orchards and a variety of habitats and it's open to the public.

I know that this was a farm and orchard that dated back to the 1800s.

So how did you come to acquire it?

Yeah, that's a great question.

It was owned by the Cornwall family for over 200 years.

They gave Genesee Land Trust and opportunity to purchase the property from them, which we did in 2016.

And then another small piece in 2019.

So what kind of work has been done to the land to get it to what we see right now?

There's a lot that goes into a property like this.

A lot of restoration or rewilding efforts.

We're walking by this beautiful grassland right now, which is one of the first projects at the site where we removed a number of invasives and then replanted this area with grasses and wildflowers to again provide benefit for wildlife.

Really, the property has become a community asset with a lot of folks who are interested in helping out and, you know, putting their time in to volunteer at the property.

So we're going to get started with the tree planting today.

We have a variety of tree species and shrub species today, some silky dogwood, a couple of species of rose, Virginia rose.

And then we have a few red oaks that we can plant.

We want to keep the native plants growing here to outcompete with the invasive shrubs and trees that would otherwise come in.

My name is Jim.

My wife Carol, and I are the stewards of the Cornwall Preserve.

We have lived in the area.

We're only three miles from here.

We've known the Cornwall.

We been through the property for many, many years, unofficially.

And we were very, very happy to be come involved.

There was a dump over there.

We took out over 200 tires.

There were fire pits along the shore.

But now that it is a land trust property, people are much more respectful of the property and they realize what a special place it is.

I'll go with you.

Okay.

Sounds good.

Maybe we can go a little bit further.

Spread out.

I would just look for a spot where there's not too much vegetation.

Right.

Yeah.

You go give it a good stop.

There you go.

Okay.

Yep.

That should be good.

Wiggle it around in there.

You'll get a little spot where we can tuck these roots.

Okay.

That's good.

We can just put these down in here.

Wow.

It's amazing that that's a tree.

I know.

I always wonder what's going to happen.

We just have to plant it and walk away.

How long until this guy is like, our height?

So this is a shrub.

So the maximum height would be about six feet.

Okay.

And then probably six feet wide.

It'll probably grow pretty slow for the first couple of years while it's kind of getting acclimated to its new home.

Okay.

And then I would say in three or four years, it'll be a nice big shrub.

There are times when nature could use a little bit of help from us.

And so here we are, planting trees.

We are trying to bring back native species that can thrive in this region that are more resilient to the effects of a changing climate.

That really helps us in the long term as well.

That looks good.

All right.

Good luck.

So how many trees have been planted on this property?

When we did this big project, we planted 4300 trees.

Oh, and we've got another 200 trees to add to that.

What do you hope this looks like, where we're standing in, like, five years?

I'd love to see, you know, these shrubs kind of spotted in here.

And hopefully there will be not too many invasives that are coming in and taking the space of the natives that we're planting and just home for all the songbirds.

Knowing that Carol and I were part of the preservation and continuing enjoyment of this property has given us an opportunity to kind of sink our feet into the earth.

We love this property as much as we love our own farm.

And we were very, very happy to be asked to be the stewards of the property.

So, Lorna, what are some of the threats to plant and animal life in waterways and wetlands and how is the Genesee Land Trust addressing these threats in the Rochester area?

So in the Rochester area, as in most of our country, some of the threats are haphazard development, unplanned development in ways that use up the landscape pave it over, change how water flows and really removes the natural lands that already exist.

So one of the things that we are pretty adamant about is that protecting the natural spaces that are here, especially the high quality ones, is critical to being able to have spaces that then rewild later.

And so that's where we start.

And so, you know, some of the threats just come with human population, but also climate change is a major threat.

And so as we're doing restoration work, we're looking ahead as opposed to behind to see what will this landscape look like in the future.

How can we help assist to make that happen so that it stays a healthy, vibrant ecosystem?

Yeah, well, there's a lot of decision making and there are so many individuals that are whose lives are on the line.

So I'm curious, Lorna, if you could speak about another of the Genesee Land Trust's mission, because that is to connect everyone to nature.

And so some of the preserves stewarded by the Genesee Land Trust, they don't have trails.

And I'd love if you could talk a little bit about how the trust decides, which preserves be left in or reverted to wild states and which should be made more visitor friendly such as with trails and parking?

Yeah.

So most of our preserves are open to the public because we look to see is the habitat resilient enough to handle humans walking through it or is it too fragile?

Also, how difficult will it be to create a trail through this space?

And so sometimes it's where's the population base, who will be visiting, but also what is the condition of the natural resource and can it handle that kind of traffic?

It's good to hear these kinds of questions being prioritized Last but certainly not least today we've got Janet Chaize from the Rush Recreation and Park Association.

Welcome, Janet.

Hi.

Glad to be here.

I'm so excited to chat with you.

Last summer I interviewed you for a story about a grant in the form of trees that your organization received from the U.S. Forest Service.

Can you talk about trees as a focus of the rewilding effort in the 100 Acres Natural Park?

Absolutely.

So we're lucky that about 60 of the acres is already forest.

Some of it has some old growth areas, which is really wonderful.

And the whole piece goes right along the Genesee River from Route 251 all the way up to Henrietta.

So this grant is going to be giving us it's now looking like about 500 trees over the next two and a half years.

So these are all native trees, Red oak, swamp, white oak, pin oak.

So we're getting a lot of oak.

Let's see, red maple and Hackberry and Black Cherry are coming.

So we're pretty excited about that.

Wow, that is really exciting.

And how are the trees that are already planted doing?

They're doing quite well.

Yeah.

I just wanted to say really quick, because I'm excited what Matt said about beavers because we saw beavers for the first time over the last few months.

We're very excited to see that.

So Matt, let's talk about them.

Let's talk about beavers.

Beavers like to flood areas to make habitat for themselves, and in the process they create habitats for other plants and animals.

So can you share an example from your sanctuary where beaver activity has transformed an ecosystem for better or worse?

Well, it's all good news as far as I'm concerned.

Beavers probably have done, despite what I've done with reforestation and live flower reintroduction over the last 25 years, the beavers have done more.

They've probably created about 25 ponds, some of which have reverted now into just kind of wide spots in the stream, which are important areas, too.

That's also an important habitat.

But they have brought with them, beavers are keystone species.

They're known to be a keystone species because the habitat they create is relied on for dozens and dozens of other species, as you said, like plants, but also birds like herons and kingfishers.

And the whole wetland food chain is dependent on beavers to make ponds.

We do have a caller and so I want to go to Rich because Rich, you have a question for our panel that I think a lot of people also have.

So Rich, are you with us?

Yes, I am.

Welcome to Environmental Connections.

What is your question?

My question is the effects of animals like deer as we wild.

We have more deer in New York State than ever, I think ever been counted in the history and they have a really adverse effect on areas that people are trying to grow trees or shrubbery or stuff.

How does that affect your rewilding or do you just say they're here now, we just have to deal with them?

I mean, and it's just one of those things that I wonder about and also just one real quick, another question is where's your measure of rewilding?

What is your standard?

What's your model?

Do you look at a forest of 100 years ago?

Where do you get the models that you have that you decide how to rewild?

Amazing questions.

Thank you so much, Rich.

So the first question was about deer.

So are there any of my in-studio panelists?

Yes, Marisa.

I guess I could talk about that.

So we definitely and I spent a good chunk of my career out in New England and really connected forested areas with much lower deer pressure.

But I'm from Buffalo, so I definitely understand the deer issue that we've got here, and a big chunk of it is kind of two things.

One is a lack of predators, so the deer population isn't really tracked in any way here.

But another huge thing that doesn't really get talked about as much as how we develop and that we are creating more and more edge habitat or habitat that is good for generalist species like white tailed deer.

And we have less and less interior forest habitat, which is not that specialist species is more like fish or even beavers.

So dealing with the deer on any restoration project that we're doing is one of the main things that our restoration ecologist deals with on a day to day basis.

And every tree you plant needs to be caged and, you know, the deer are having huge impacts on our forest understory.

They are consuming a lot of the native species and they don't like so much the non-native species.

So you have this feedback loop that is pretty difficult to deal with.

It's not impossible to deal with, but it makes everything a lot more expensive, unfortunately.

Yeah.

Well, that is a question I think a lot of people do have.

So I appreciate the caller.

And what about the question about how you measure rewilding?

Do either of you want to take a stab at that, Janet or Lorna?

I can take a stab at that.

So when we're looking at what are the different species we want to be planting, what are the different levels of restoration we want to be doing at any particular place, we are not looking backwards necessarily to see what was the forest 100 years ago as our measure, because many of those species actually don't exist anymore or threatened by other insects, diseases, etc..

So instead we look at what is there currently in our high quality habitats that are in the area and start with that.

And then we also look at the various models that exist for where our different species moving because of climate change.

And so sometimes we'll bring in a species that's maybe just a little bit further south that we know is coming up this way.

Or instead of planting more maples, we'll plant more oaks, oaks that are here, but we know that that's going to be a stronger hold in the long term.

That's an excellent point.

I mean, I don't quite know how to ask this, but do the native species or plants shift as climate change shifts?

And how do we accommodate that?

And maybe I ask that in an incredibly ignorant way.

So please correct me.

So yes, native plants do shift.

It takes longer to see it than it does with animals because they have their roots in the ground.

So they don't actually pick up and move.

But you see changes in the composition or the makeup of the overall forest of the understory.

So those smaller wildflowers you see, you start to see that difference change slowly over time.

And so we're already starting to see some of happen.

Okay.

I would just say that a key way to ensure that those species are able to make that migration, whether it's wildlife or plants, is to have corridors, to have wildways so that those core areas that those species are living in can move as the climate is changing and can take their time, especially for plants.

If you have those areas protected, they can take their time doing that movement.

Yeah.

Patti, via email says, As a suburban homesteader, an obstacle that needs addressing is city and town codes that make it difficult to rewild our home spaces.

For example, fencing rules and code inspections, mainstream ideas of a yard.

How do we shift local regulations so that safety is attended to while supporting rewilding?

Lorna?

Do you want to take that one?

Sure.

I would say join groups like Janet and the Rush Preserve and really, you know, start doing that kind of work as well.

It is really exciting in Rush to see this coalition of just regular, everyday residents coming together and really making an impact.

But also, you know, there are ways and we're seeing a proliferation of this across the media to start to bring in native plants into your gardens.

Start to think about what are the plants in my space, and that will then bring in the wildlife as well.

You know, I myself am talking to my neighbors about the fact that my son wants me to let my grass grow long so that quail can come.

Quail or not coming to our yard, but that concept is starting to get into the younger brains as well.

And so it's, you know, talking with kids about what do wild spaces look like, who lives there, who lives in our yard.

And so, yes, zoning codes take a long time, but who's enforcing those zoning codes?

Talk to those people.

It's great advice.

And also something that people can do right now.

Janet, do you have anything to add to that?

You look like you're very passionate about this subject.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I'm excited hearing these experts next to me talk about what they're doing.

And I guess we're hopeful that eventually people will come and see what we've planted and say, Hey, I want to put that in my yard and that young people will come and already be much more educated than we were at their age.

So I have hope for the future.

Okay.

I'm going to just take that little quote and play it over and over again.

How is policy changing to accommodate rewilding?

I'm not sure who wants to take that.

Can you at least talk a little bit about that?

So, you know, in New York State, we have now the 30 by 30 initiative to conserve 30% of New York State's land and waters by 2030.

We have a lot of work to do to get there.

But you're seeing that happening at the federal level with President Biden's plan and then New York State with Governor Hochul's plan that she signed as well.

So you're starting to see that as well as more and more available funding for wildlife crossings.

And also we had the Environmental Bond Act that went through recently.

So we're still waiting to see how all of that funding shakes out.

But there's a lot of opportunity right now, specifically in our state, to make huge strides towards seeing policy and action towards more wildlife habitat and connections.

Janet, I'm curious about something that's giving you hope these days.

I mean, in the work that you're doing, you're seeing the good, the bad, the everything in between.

What are you most excited about?

Well, we're having a bunch of programs this summer, inviting people in for walks.

One of them is a bat walk and it'll be in the evening.

And it just happens that in Rush, there's two bat biologists that are going to be giving their time for that.

Thats batty.

Exactly.

So just bringing in more people, education, you know, the young people.

I'm excited to think about going to some science classes and talking about what we're doing in terms of rewilding.

So, you know, I just think the future is in our young people Humans are a powerful force, but then again, so is nature.

And when we work in tandem, wild things can happen.

Until next time.

I'm Jasmin Singer.

Thanks for making today's environmental connections.