Shopping for a jug of maple syrup, you might need observed a bit yellow sticker adorned with a crimson fowl, marking the bottle as “bird friendly.”
It’s a program that grew out of Vermont Audubon a decade in the past to encourage sugarmakers to handle their forests with birds in thoughts. Today, the Bird-Friendly Maple program works with nearly 90 producers in Vermont and others in Maine, New York and Connecticut.
And quickly it’s going to expand to several more states, together with Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded the National Audubon Society $2 million earlier this month.
Steve Hagenbuch
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Courtesy
It’s an enormous deal for Steve Hagenbuch, a small-scale maple producer at Sweet Bird Farm in Waterbury Center and a biologist at Vermont Audubon who dreamed up this system almost 20 years in the past.
“To have the U.S. Forest Service and Inflation Reduction Act funds recognize this as something that’s valuable and exciting and really somewhat new in the field of bird conservation is pretty rewarding,” he stated.
With the funding, he desires to see if bird-friendly maple might turn into a real “third-party verified and certified program,” working with teams just like the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) and the Food Alliance.
The money may also assist fund social science analysis about what motivates producers to become involved and shopper advertising to additional scale this system.
Daniel Behm
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Audubon Photography Awards
Sugarbushes make up an enormous chunk of summer season nesting habitat for birds. Over 70 species use Vermont sugarbushes in the summer, from ovenbirds to red-eyed vireos, wooden thrush and scarlet tanagers, based on recent analysis.
“The maple industry really is an important part of forest bird conservation efforts,” Hagenbuch stated.
And sure administration practices enhance this habitat for birds, like sustaining a range of tree species — having a minimum of 1 / 4 of the forest be species aside from sugar maple — leaving downed logs and standing snags, and sustaining leaf litter by stopping the unfold of invasive earthworms.
The suggestions aren’t an enormous carry for a lot of sugar makers with forest administration plans — like Cori Giroux of Mountainview Mapleworks in Richmond, a small-scale operation with about 1,200 faucets. Her sugarbush has been a part of the Bird-Friendly Maple program for years after Vermont Audubon initially surveyed their forest.
“We were already doing it, and then it’s nice to have been recognized,” she stated.
She labels each jug of her syrup with the bird-friendly stickers, and he or she has an indication hooked up to the entrance of her sugarhouse.
“Any connection we can make between nature and what we’re eating is going to be a plus,” she stated.
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