Land Stewardship

The old hayfield that comprises most of the NBNC preserve is slowly returning to forest through a process known as ecological succession: the reestablishment of species after a disturbance like fire, flood, or farming. In some areas, we are letting shrubs and trees regrow on their own. In other areas, we are maintaining the open field to preserve the view and enhance habitat diversity. We use our small stands of young regrowing white pines as a natural tree nurseries: the larger pines produce small saplings, which we transplant to reforest other areas around NBNC.

Beaver dams and lodges take a lot of wood to build and maintain! At NBNC, where trees are scarce, the beavers cut down trees faster than they can grow back. To restore our riverside forests while coexisting with these rodent engineers, we wrap our shade-producing trees with protective metal caging. Beavers are essential to nature in Vermont. Their ponds are home to many organisms, and lush wetlands and forests grow in the fertile soil left behind when the ponds drain. Beaver dams also slow floods and filter stormwater.

We are helping some areas become more ecologically resilient by planting hundreds of trees to reestablish a pre-agricultural floodplain forest. This will help stabilize the soil, expand biodiversity, provide shade and food, and filter and retain floodwaters. We select species that like occasional flooding and are adapted to Vermont’s warming climate, such as silver maple, swamp white oak, sycamore, and shrub willows. We are also planting “food forests” of edible trees and shrubs like apple, chestnut, hazelnut, serviceberry, and others.

Bluebird boxes are designed to attract Eastern Bluebirds, a beautiful yet declining insect eater of Vermont fields. We install the boxes are in pairs so that bluebirds can take one box, while other cavity nesters like Tree Swallows and House Wrens can occupy the other. Swallows and wrens defend a wide perimeter around their nest from predators and competitors, and the more easily displaced bluebirds benefit from their neighbors’ defensive watch.

River-adjacent fields like those at NBNC are natural floodplains that historically flooded naturally almost every year during spring thaws. Now that the North Branch is managed by the Wrightsville flood control dam three miles upstream, NBNC’s fields only flood during major storm events. In July 2023 and 2024, the water was knee-deep across the floodplain. Healthy rivers need “room to roam.” Wide, undeveloped floodplains give space for the river corridor to shift, and plenty of land for floodwaters to spill into. Riverside fields and forests like these are critical to a flood resilient future in Central Vermont, so NBNC works to maximize this landscape’s role in slowing, spreading, and storing floodwater. More about how rivers work.

Knotweed is an introduced, bamboo-like plant that spreads rapidly in easily-disturbed places like streambanks, forming dense patches that outcompete all other plants. Its ability to easily spread is partly thanks to weak and buoyant roots that don’t hold soil in place, so riverbanks with knotweed erode easily. In its historical range, insects, fungi, and other competitors keep knotweed balanced in its environment. Those ecological checks-and-balances have not yet evolved in the Northeast, so we remove knotweed several times a year, and plant other trees and shrubs in its place.

In 2025, after careful consideration, NBNC decided to begin incorporating herbicide treatment into some of our most intractable knotweed patches. To learn more about this decision, read our article about the thought behind this decision.

The Monarch butterflies seen in our fields in September will migrate all the way to Mexico to overwinter. The population’s 2,000-mile return journey each spring takes multiple generations: the adults arriving in late summer are the great-grandchildren of the Monarchs that were here last year. Monarch caterpillars can only survive on milkweed leaves, and the nectar and pollen in milkweed flowers are delicious to countless other butterflies, moths, bees, wasps, flies, and beetles. Healthy milkweed patches support Monarchs, other pollinators, and local insect biodiversity, and we manage our fields to maintain large patches of milkweed.