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01/27/2016 07:00 AMGlenn Frey’s recent death recalls lyrics from a popular Eagles song: “No more walks in the wood, the trees have all been cut down”—mourning a lost world and lost love. It’s odd such songs top the charts. We love to shop, but don’t connect two incompatibilities: having every national chain nearby and living in a soul-soothing environment.
Costco’s soil scientist recently illustrated his Inland Wetlands Commission presentation about 573 East Main Street with photos of on-site woodlands.
Harry Cooke, grandfather of the Costco parcel’s owner, loved his land, his apple trees, and his neighbors, and generously let my cousins and me roam his orchards, follow the honeysuckle-lined farmers’ lanes through fields and woods, and skate on frozen farm ponds.
Those walks are among my happiest memories. One October morning I crossed an open field (about where Costco’s service road is planned) and startled two ring-necked pheasants. Who in Branford has encountered ring-necked pheasants lately? On those childhood summer mornings, wood thrush called deep in the woods. Like the loon’s cry, the wood thrush’s song is haunting—a melodic ee-oh-lay one never forgets. The Cornell Ornithology Lab and Penn State biologists both lament the decline of this magnificent songbird. Penn State’s biologists wrote that the thrush is a species of great concern and under great environmental pressure because of their nearly obligatory need for large patches of mature forest habitat. I haven’t heard one in this East Main Street neighborhood in years. The woods have all been cut down.
Perhaps we cannot bring back this world we have lost, but we don’t have to utterly destroy it by over-stuffing these properties with tarmac right to the edge of wetlands. It is well to recall Thoreau’s dictum: “In wildness is preservation of the world.”
Janet Riesman
Branford