Executive Overview

Mountain Lakes Woodlands Committee

Status Report, June 14, 2004

Executive Overview

The Mountain Lakes Woodlands Committee has been working its mission for about six months. During this time they have established contacts and working relationships with key experts from various organizations in the field: The Nature Conservancy, New Jersey Audubon Society, NJ DEP, Natural Resource Conservation Service of the USDA, as well as deer management experts in both contraception and culling. We are fortunate to have on our committee two of the resident experts on deer management. In addition to the hours spent walking and studying our woodlands and collecting and reviewing good current reference material, committee members have attended workshops on environmental inventory techniques, vernal pools, and herptile surveys. Much work and study remains to get a better understanding of how best to manage our different woodland habitats. However, we feel that we know enough at this point to believe that our methods are sound and to support our two major recommendations:

1) Continue with the deer management program. Our woodlands are under serious stress from overbrowsing and they will not recover unless the deer herd is drastically reduced.

2) Begin immediately with an aggressive program to remove invasive species from our woodlands. This will require patient and persistent effort because many species have seeds that remain viable for years. Garlic mustard seeds are viable for 4 to 5 years; Japanese stilt grass, for up to 7. And each garlic mustard plant may produce 1000 seeds. Patience and persistence.

In the longer term, a new disease has appeared in California and may have been inadvertently exported to the rest of the country. They have been calling it “Sudden Oak Death.” It affects oaks, rhododendrons, and mountain laurel, at least. We do not know enough about it yet to assess the risks. But it has done major damage to oaks in California.

But the news is not all bad. A walk in the woodlands at the end of Yorke Road can still remind us of what an inspiration the woods can be: wildflowers, healthy understory, a busy vernal pool, lots of young trees to replace the older ones when the time comes. Another bright glimmer can be found over at the sled run in Richard Wilcox Park. One of our committee members was clearing some garlic mustard away from some jack-in-the-pulpits and found some trilliums growing underneath all the cover. This is surprising because deer eat trilliums. They must have missed them underneath all the plants that they do not eat. But the clock is probably ticking for those trilliums because garlic mustard is believed to change the soil conditions so that other plants cannot grow there.