Woodlands Committee Meeting Minutes
Attendees: Jerry Uhrig, Phil Notestine,
Martha Dwyer-Bergman
The minutes from the previous
meeting were approved.
Reports
Deer Management (Phil)
Phil reported that all is
quiet in this area: a few deer have been taken. There was one bait site located
too close to a trail near Phil’s neighborhood.
Phil and a neighbor moved it.
Phil has spoken to UBNJ about the incident. It will not happen again. Other than that single issue there have been
no problems to report.
There will be a time in
November when bow hunting will overlap with the DMS feeding. It is understood that there is to be no bow
hunting near the feeding stations. DMS
and UBNJ will coordinate.
Signs have been posted at the
entrance to all trails.
There are three residents that
have requested that hunters come onto their private property and hunt.
Deer Contraceptives-
Martha reported that she
finally had a response from Jack Schrier of Mendham
regarding deer sterilization and his request that the Borough Council adopt a resolution
which calls on the Federal government to allocate $5MM to the Department of the
Interior to develop a formula for a safe effective single-inoculation of the
deer.
Martha will contact Armen Melikian of the
Environmental Commission regarding his knowledge of deer contraceptives.
We should also follow
Invasives
(Jerry)
Jerry handed out a flyer on the
Frelinghuysen Arboretum’s Invasive plant workshop. It will be held on
Jackie Burkett gave Jerry a
list of websites that discuss invasive plants:
This is the website of the Alien Plant Working
Group of the Plant Conservation Alliance. It is a good source of information
regarding recognition and control of invasives.
This site is titled
“The Source for Information and Images of Invasive & Exotic Species.” It is maintained jointly by
the
http://www.for-wild.org/download/invasive.html
This is a listing of many additional sites related to
invasive species. This site also has an excellent Q&A archive.
There has been some dumping of
bamboo in the woods across from a house near the end of
Phil mentioned that the
Environmental Commission is interested in getting involved with the invasives problem. Jerry
will contact Paul Shorb.
Woodlands threats
Jerry handed out information
sheets on some of the currently known woodland threats. Some useful websites
are the following:
Sudden Oak Death www.suddenoakdeath.org
This website gives monthly
updates on the status of the Sudden Oak Death threat. It was mentioned that the
fungus has been found and hopefully isolated in
Asian Longhorn beetle http://www.uvm.edu/albeetle/
This site is maintained by the
Emerald Ash Borer http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/eab/
This site is maintained by the
USDA Forest Service. It gives current information on the status of this threat.
For now, the major outbreak is confined to the lower peninsula of
Input to Council
for Budget Recommendations
Our thinking on the budget
continues to evolve as we get additional information. It appears now that,
contrary to our thinking in June, it might be more useful to allocate funds to
monitoring for threats rather than for removing invasives.
One approach would be to contact a trained forester to help us determine how to
protect the Borough woodlands against the various known threats, such as those
cited above. We need to determine how much professional help we would need for
the inspections. Hopefully, we can learn how to do most of it ourselves and
call the professional when we suspect we might have a serious problem. A
reasonable starting point might be the forester used by the Shade Tree
Commission.
Education/Publicity
The Woodlands Committee
website can be found by going to the
Status Report to the Borough Council -- June 2004
Executive Overview of June 14, 2004 Status Report to the Borough Council
We
need to work on improving the access to particular issues, such as, threats to
our woodlands with links to helpful websites. We also need photos to illustrate
our own local conditions.