Birds and making maple syrup go hand in hand
Want a scarlet tanager with your maple syrup? A Blackburnian warbler with your breakfast?
That’s the premise now being made by conservationists in New England and New York. It’s that a healthy sugarbush makes for a better place for forest birds to live.
Toward that end, the state chapters of the National Audubon Society in Vermont and New York have begun to help maple syrup producers in those states manage their woods to promote biodiversity.
In return, the syrup they make can go to market with a “bird-friendly” label, thus bringing the ornithologicallyminded to a maple-sweetened breakfast stack.
Zack Boerman, as associate forester for Audubon Connecticut-New York, said the program has 46 participants in Vermont, and six in New York, with Connecticut soon to be added to the list.
Mat Wilkinson, president of the Connecticut Maple Syrup Producers Association said the program fits with what maple syrup makers do anyway, he said.
“We’re conservation-minded,” he said. “We’re in it for the long haul.”
Right now, maple syrupmakers in the state are gearing up for the start of the season. There are about 250 maple syrup producers in the state, Wilkinson said, making about 20,000 gallons of syrup a year.
That season is one that’s grown more unpredictable in recent years. Climate change is bringing earlier, more uneven spring weather. In turn, solid blocks of ideal sugaring weather — sunny days with temperatures in the 40’s, cold nights dropping down into the 20s — are harder to come by.
“We have seen fluctuations in the temperature,” said Vincent LaFontan, executive director of the Flanders Nature Center in Woodbury, which has taps in about 350 sugar maples on its property, making about 80 gallons of syrup a year. “Traditionally, we start putting taps in around Valentine’s Day. The last couple of years, we tapped in January. This year, we started on Feb. 5.’’
“It was just like clockwork before,” said Mark Mankin, who is the head of the Great Brook Sugar House at Sullivan Farm in New Milford. The farm has about 1,600 taps working, and has been making syrup for more than 20 years. “Now it’s all over the place.”
“Every year is different,” said Mike Murray, the farm manager at New Pond Farm environmental education center in Redding. “Mother Nature tells you when to start.”
Murray, who has been making maple syrup all his life, first in northern New York, then at New Pond Farm, said the conditions will even vary within Connecticut. Litchfield County can still have snow on the ground when it’s bare ground in Redding
“It depends on where your sugarbush is,” Murray said.
A sugarbush, loosely defined, is a forest with sugar maples. They are strictly a North American tree and North America is the only place where people make maple syrup. Lucky us.
While maple sugaring goes on as far south as Kentucky, it’s really a northern product, with Vermont, Maine and New York the leading states for maple syrup production.
Connecticut is on the southern edge of the sugar maple forest, with far more red maples growing in our woods than sugar maples. Alas, red maples have markedly tasteless sap.
Mankin said it takes about 40 gallons of sugar maple sap, boiled down, to make one gallon of syrup, For red maples, it’s 60 to 70 gallons, he said.
“You’re better off tapping a birch or a walnut tree,” said Murray of New Pond Farm.
The Audubon bird-friendly sugarbush program emphasizes managing a forest to promote a diverse mix of hardwoods and conifers and a healthy undergrowth. Snags and fallen trees are welcome. Such forests attract and sustain neotropical migrants — tanagers, orioles, warblers.
Steve Hagenbuch, a conservation biologist with Audubon Vermont, recently gave a Zoom conference, sponsored by Connecticut Audubon, on what makes a bird-friendly sugarbush. He said that if you overlay a map of the states with the greatest density of bird populations with a map of maple syrupmaking states, the two line up nicely.
By promoting a healthy forest, he said, maple syrup producers are creating healthy habitat for birds.
In Vermont and New York, Audubon staffers have gone to different sugarbush lots, evaluated them and written out management plans. In turn, the people who make maple syrup from those trees get to add a bird-friendly scarlet tanager label to their syrup bottles.
“You can find them in retail markets in Vermont now,” Hagenbuch said. “It’s out there.”