Abandoned cranberry bogs in Yarmouth slated for wetland restoration by state

When Cape Cod’s cranberry farmers abandon a working bog, when they quit adding the nutrients, pesticides and layers of sand that keep the iconic expanses of crimson berries coming back year after year, the landscape changes.

After about 30 years without maintenance, the Bayview Bogs in West Yarmouth are badly overgrown. Cape Cod Conservation District Chairman and Yarmouth Board of Selectmen Chairman Mark Forest described them as blighted. In 2016, police said they discovered a homeless encampment they discovered a homeless encampment where people were cooking meth.

“Clearly the impairments to the flow of water in the system are really creating all sorts of problems to the ecology of the site and the site itself,” Forest said.

But over the next few years, thanks to a new commitment by the Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration, the Bayview Bogs will be transformed into a thriving wetland ecosystem, enhancing the area’s wildlife habitat, water quality and resilience to coastal flooding.

Bayview Bogs, a 90-acre parcel owned by neighboring Cape Cod Hospital, was recently accepted into DER’s priority projects program, according to a Dec. 17 press release from the Baker-Polito administration.

The new designation means that the project, along with three others on Cape, is now eligible to receive technical and program management support from ecological restoration division staff, technical services from contractors and direct funding not yet announced.

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Several new DER priority projects involve retired cranberry bogs, a focus of wetland restoration efforts in Massachusetts.

There are more than 13,000 acres of cranberry farmland in Massachusetts, but falling prices and other factors have led some farmers to consider other uses for their land, according to the state.

“For some,” the state’s Cranberry Bog Program website says, “a ‘green exit strategy’ involving land conservation and habitat restoration makes sense.”

That’s the plan for another newly accepted priority project involving abandoned cranberry farmland in Yarmouth, near the Upper Bass River headwaters.

There, the Friends of Bass River plan to work with DER to restore about 57 acres of abandoned cranberry farmland to healthy wetlands, a project intended to improve water quality, increase public access to town-owned land, promote recreational use with walking trails and improve fish passage, in part through the replacement of an undersized culvert at North Dennis Road.

Friends of Bass River Executive Director Rick Bishop said the DER commitment will allow his organization to pursue a restoration design plan they already procured from the engineering firm Tighe & Bond with the help of two other sizable grants.

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“Tighe & Bond is recommending replacing the culvert with a 60-foot-wide bridge to get water up into the Mill Pond area, which is a very upper portion of Bass River,” said Bishop, who serves on Yarmouth’s conservation commission.

Nitrogen mitigation part of the plan

That part of Bass River is suffering particularly severe nitrogen pollution, according to a state report released in 2011.

“The state determined that the Mill Pond area required a 76% reduction in nitrogen to get back to a healthy state,” Bishop said. “If we're able to take the retired cranberry bogs and restore them as wetlands, they become, naturally, a very effective carbon sink and nitrogen sink. We're able to naturally begin the water cleansing there.”

Yarmouth is in the early stages of a gradual transition from septic to sewer, a massive infrastructure project intended to reduce nitrogen pollution in the town’s degrading waterways.

While the wastewater overhaul is a historic effort to improve water quality in town, Bishop said it will take years to finish. In the meantime, projects like the one at Bass River will move the ball forward, he said.

“The Yarmouth plan is fantastic, I'm so proud of what was accomplished at the last town meeting, but the reality is the pipes won't get up to that part of town for possibly 40 years,” Bishop said. “So it's even more important that we're able to kickstart this natural process of beginning to reduce the nitrogen getting into the water.”

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The project would also help to restore the habitat that fish, including herring, need to survive.

“In 1873, that area was the second largest herring catch in all of Massachusetts,” Bishop said. “Now it is zero because the fish can't get there, because when they built the cranberry bogs, they blocked off all the access.”

Following a restoration blueprint

The Bass River and Bayview Bogs projects are following a cranberry bog restoration blueprint already hammered out in Falmouth.

There, a retired bog at the Childs River

is in the midst of wetland restoration, and a few minutes away, a retired bog at the Coonamessett River

has been fully restored to a natural wetland habitat.

“The Coonamessett River now, after I think 18 months, has wildflowers,” Bishop said. “It's just gorgeous. And when they replaced their undersized culvert, within seven days they had herring going back upriver.”

While cranberry bog restoration can be jarring — it often involves tearing out invasive plants and shrubs, removing layers of sand, and tilling soil to expose long-dormant native seeds — Association to Preserve Cape Cod Executive Director Andrew Gottlieb said residents who see the finished product usually appreciate the work.

“The Childs River is about two years behind the Coonamessett, so it doesn’t look great, but if you go back in the spring, it’ll start to look like what the Coonamessett looks like now,” Gottlieb said.

But the benefits of turning dormant cranberry bogs into wetlands goes beyond aesthetics or wildlife preservation, Gottlieb said. One of the main benefits of wetland restoration is the protection of human infrastructure from flooding, which is projected to worsen as climate change produces more intense storms.

“From a human perspective, one of the primary ecological values of properly functional wetlands is to absorb floodwaters and provide opportunities for floodwaters to get processed through the plant matter and make their way down to the groundwater without carrying all these pollutants through them, as opposed to all that floodwater having no place to go and ending up in someone's backyard and flooding public infrastructure,” Gottlieb said.

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In addition to the cranberry bog restoration projects, the Division of Ecological Restoration also committed to assisting with two other Cape projects, both in Chatham.

One project, headed by the Chatham Conservation Foundation, would restore natural tidal exchange and stream flow in the Frost Fish Creek estuary.

The other, headed by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, would restore salt marsh, increase tidal flow and restore estuarine habitat with the goal of supporting herring, American shad, striped bass and rainbow smelt populations in Ryder’s Cove.

Contact Jeannette Hinkle at jhinkle@capecodonline.com.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Abandoned cranberry bogs in Yarmouth slated for wetland restoration