And then I read a scary piece about how avian flu is likely to make its way around the globe, written by Laurie Garrett, who apparently has written a scary book about the topic.

Her analysis is fascinating, but so is her solution — mainly because it relies heavily on the longtime footsoldiers of grassroots environmental activism. Writes Garrett: “One of the best untapped resources in this epic battle against influenza is bird-watchers, who are among the most fanatic hobbyists in the world.”

Avian flu is spread by migratory wild birds, traveling well-known flyways; the wild birds infect domestic poultry. For now, people catch it only if they come into contact with infected birds. But anyone who knows anything about the subject says it’s just a matter of time until the avian flu mutates so it can be passed from person to person. And when that happens, the old joke — “I opened the door and in flew Enza” — will be grim indeed.

When wild birds are infected with avian influenza, they die, just as poultry does. And that’s where birders can be useful, Garrett says:

The major bird-watching organizations and safari clubs ought to work with the World Health Organization and OIE, the World Organization for Animal Health, to set up Web-based notification sites, where birders could report sightings of groups of dead birds, and the movements of key migrating species.

Ornithologists and climate experts should immediately sit down with pandemic planners and virologists, creating lists of known H5N1 carriers and plotting their most likely global movements. As the birds appear in new regions of the world, birders and professional wildlife surveillance personnel should issue alerts, which should be swiftly confirmed and form the basis of government response.

When carrier species are sighted in a region, swift action should be taken to minimize contact between the wild birds and their domestic kin. In such a way, it might be possible to limit avian deaths to susceptible wild birds …

The way to minimize contact between wild and domestic birds is to move domestic bird indoors or, if that’s not possible, to keep them in pens, behind fences, and under netting.

Garrett is quick to say that birdwatchers alone won’t keep the world safe from avian flu. But she does think they can help minimize a frightening pandemic. More than a century ago birders organized themselves and fought hard to save egrets and herons from being destroyed. The various Audubon societies and clubs are their legacy. Now they might have a chance to save more than just birds.

O’Connor, you may remember, successfully prosecuted the operations director of the Fishers Island ferry for dumping raw sewage into Long Island Sound and the Thames River, near New London, Connecticut. The operations director, Mark Easter, is going to jail and paying a $10,000 fine.

Now comes news that O’Connor has gone after Operations Management International, a company that manages 116 municipally-owned sewage treatment plants around the country, for permit violations at plants in New Haven and Norwalk, Connecticut. O’Connor nailed them for failing to properly report violations that were in and of themselves relatively minor (or so it seems to me).

But his office used the prosecution as an opportunity to get OMI to put into place a number of significant improvements — at a cost of $6 million — in its nationwide operation. Here, from the Deferred Prosecution Agreement (MS Word doc), is what O’Connor and his staff have gotten from OMI:

A nationwide compliance and auditing program … This new program includes a detailed checklist of compliance and reporting requirements … at each particular site. Legal and technical teams now provide more careful review and dedicated assistance to each facility. This review and audit program has resulted in several voluntary disclosures to appropriate State agencies across the United States and has been applied to all of OMI’s 116 plants nationally. The President of the company telephoned every Project Manager and instructed him or her on the importance of the program and that this protocol was mandatory and would be the subject of compliance audits.

… increased the personnel and resources dedicated to environmental compliance …

OMI appointed a Director of Environmental Compliance to provide national leadership in the design and implementation of environmental compliance training and compliance assurance programs. Six new persons were added to assist with these programs, augmenting OMI’s compliance and reporting group. In addition to the plant-specific permit compliance checklists and training support described above, these personnel implement the nationwide compliance audit program.  Two major training courses were provided to all OMI personnel….

The training has included case studies designed to focus employees on real life situations.  This culture of compliance as a top priority is reinforced by the furnishing to all employees of a Standard Operating Procedure making clear that full compliance, and reporting of any non-compliance, is every employee’s job.  The first round of compliance audits at OMI’s plants has been completed and followed by corrective action plans to remedy any deficiencies.  The program calls for additional audits at three year intervals, or more frequently as needed, as well as focused reviews whenever problems arise.  

OMI has installed a telephone “helpline” for its employees nationwide to report any perceived or suspected compliance or ethical problems and has established a process by which issues raised can be quickly brought to the attention of upper management.  This “helpline” can be accessed by e-mail or fax as well as by telephone.  This establishment of the helpline was accompanied by the delivery of enhanced ethics training for all employees.

OMI also has kicked in $1 million to establish an endowed chair in environmental studies at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, in New London, and $1 million for environmental improvement programs at the New Haven treatment plant.

All this might indicate that, having been confronted with problems, OMI wanted to do the right thing. Or it might indicate that OMI really, really didn’t want to tangle with the U.S. Attorney. Whatever. The result is that O’Connor decided to forego prosecution for the time being and to let OMI off the hook if the company keeps its nose clean for two years.

More importantly, he has used a handful of minor violations on Long Island Sound to trigger a useful bunch of corporate reforms nationwide.

That neighborhood was northern Westchester County, just north of New York City. It’s an area where large-lot development has done severe damage to local biodiversity. The spotted turtles that Behler was studying, along with box turtles and wood turtles, have undergone a long-term, non-cyclical decline, as Michael Klemens, a Bronx Zoo colleague of Behler’s, characterizes it, because of suburbanization.

About a year and a half ago I found myself on a field trip with Behler (whom I had first met and interviewed back in 1983, when I was writing about bog turtles) and some others, on a big wooded tract in his town. It was late May, warm and humid. A brook bisected the property, and Behler was saying there was a good chance that wood turtles — which need healthy streams, fields, and forest — would be living there. As we stepped over a stream, we looked up and saw one of our companions holding a turtle.

Behler smiled. “You have a wood turtle? I called it!”

He took the turtle, looked it over, and began to tell us about it. It was a male — he knew because the plastron was concave so it would fit into place over a female’s shell when it mounted her. He looked at the annuli, or growth rings, on the plastron and said it was more than 30 years old. He turned it right side up. One front leg had been “amputated,” he said, probably gnawed off by a raccoon. He looked in the turtle’s face.

“This is a handsome animal,” he said. Handsome, but a messy eater: Behler noticed a yellowish slime on its face.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but it just ate a slug and the slug’s name is Arion subfuscus.”

We were standing at the edge of a grassy opening in the woods that was maybe an acre in size. Soon we found a box turtle, a female, and then a female wood turtle. Behler, who was wearing a Wildlife Conservation Society baseball cap and had binoculars hanging from his neck, stuck a finger under the wood turtle’s shell, at the rear leg.

“She’s got eggs in there,” he said. “She’s about two weeks from depositing them.”

He was telling us the wood turtle was more than 20 years old when someone found another box turtle, and then another, and then a wood turtle and another box turtle.

“I’ve never seen this many, this close together,” the curator of herpetology for the Wildlife Conservation Society said. And when we found a fourth wood turtle (but before we found a fifth), he looked at me, enthused but now serious too: “Are you taking notes? This is a remarkable find.”

Indeed, I had been taking notes. Later that day I typed them up and e-mailed him, to check my facts. Here’s what he wrote back:

You are correct, we saw 3 male and 2 female wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) – formerly Clemmys insculpta, and 2 m/2f box turtles. I palpated all female wood and eastern box turtles that we saw.

He then referred to his spotted-turtle research in the county park that I mentioned earlier.

I have worked thousands of hours in the farm pond, vernal pools, and streamlets throughout the 777-acre [county park] property since 1991. While I have focused on spotted turtles there, I am always on the lookout for box turtles and other species. Since 1991, I’ve not seen any wood turtles at all there. And I have seen less than a dozen box turtles there. So the chelonian events of today are unprecedented for me in Westchester.

I view the discovery of so many turtles over such a short time period as an extraordinary event. Not only were these species confirmed for the site, it is a bonus to learn that good populations of these dramatically declining species remain in the Town …. We also discovered a major nesting area for them as both species typically position themselves along the edges of openings prior to nesting in them in June.

All in all, it was an awesome day with lots of witnesses! Terrific!

Best wishes,
John B

Someone had told me that Behler had a bad heart, but he was thin and wiry and I had a hard time believing it. We exchanged emails occasionally over the ensuing months. I had wanted to talk to him about the bog-turtle research he had done further north, and we agreed to get together at some point for an interview.

I wish we had, but we never did. The bog turtles made for a sad story anyway: In the two decades since I had first talked to him about them, the number of bog turtles on the site he had been studying fell from 30 to 3 because of poor habitat management. But that leaves me with a better memory, not of somebody discouraged by a conservation loss but of a great wildlife biologist who could still be excited by what he found close to home.

“The chelonian events of today are unprecedented for me in Westchester,” John Behler wrote.

They were unprecedented for me too.

It’s hard for me to say whether the punishment fits the crime here. But I have a feeling that someone is being let off the hook, politically if not legally — and I’m not saying it’s Mark Easter.

Easter was charged and pleaded guilty after federal investigators determined that the two ferries that connect Fishers Island to the mainland were dumping pretty much all their sewage into local waters. From January 1999 until July 2004, a period during which the boats’ sewage holding tanks should have been pumped out twice a week, or about 570 times, they in fact were pumped out only seven times.

How could that be? Simple. Easter ordered that the pipes be left open, to empty directly into the Sound and the Thames (which, by the way, is pronounced Thaymes in these parts, not Tems). Pursued and caught by the Coast Guard and the U.S Attorney, Easter pleaded guilty in September. And so, off to jail he’ll go.

But Easter wasn’t a free agent. He was a municipal employee (Fishers Island is just off the coast of Connecticut, but it’s part of Southold, a town on Long Island). And the Fishers Island Ferry District is overseen by a board of directors that consists of Fishers Island residents.

So shouldn’t someone from the island or the town have been aware that for five and a half years they were paying virtually nothing for sewage disposal? That instead of 570 pump-outs, they had just seven? Did town and ferry-district officials not notice? Did no one audit the books or the operation?

The residents of Fishers Island probably prefer it when Southold officials keep their noses out of the island’s business. And because Fishers Island is physically isolated from the rest of the town, it would be easy for officials to ignore the goings on there — easy, but not acceptable.

Island residents may be physically removed but they are not bumpkins. In addition to the 250 people who live there year-round, there’s a large and very wealthy seasonal population. A couple of summers ago they invited me out to give a talk as part of a week-long environmental awareness week. It’s a beautiful place, a 7-mile-long strip of glacial sand at the border of the Sound and the Atlantic. One of our hosts was a DuPont. The chatter at the post-talk cocktail party was about how one of their golfing buddies, a fellow named Porter Goss, had just been named head of the CIA. When I got home, I ran into a Roosevelt, who told me he was sorry that he happened to have been off-island at the time, otherwise he would have come to the talk.

All the island residents I talked to that day consider themselves environmentalists (in some cases appropriately), and I’d be surprised if you’d find more than a handful of people on such a beautiful place who don’t. All of them take the ferry.

But for five and a half years none of their neighbors on the ferry district’s board, and none of their municipal officials, noticed that the sewage disposal costs were so low.

I don’t feel bad for Mark Easter. But shouldn’t someone else at least admit they should have asked to see the bills?

That’s the situation in Milford, Connecticut, where the owner of the local Honda dealership has asked the town for permission to put in a gravel road so he can hunt, with bow and arrow — not on a remote tract deep in the woods but on a 100-by-100 plot behind his showroom.

In some parts of suburban Connecticut (backcountry Greenwich, in particular), it’s estimated that as many as 68 white-tailed deer are crammed into each square mile (the best guess of deer density before European settlement is eight to 11 per square mile). Milford doesn’t have Greenwich’s expansive estates and expensive landscaping, which are paradise to deer, so I assume the density of its deer population doesn’t match that in Greenwich.

But to have a deer problem there at all says something about how our land-use practices have made it easier for deer to thrive and multiply. The Milford car dealer isn’t selling Hondas on the edge of the wilderness. He’s on the old Boston Post Road, U.S. 1 — the road that for the northeast states epitomizes strip development. Empty McDonald’s bags are what we are used to seeing in its median and gutters.

“All of a sudden,” said Milford’s recreation director, “you are seeing dead deer on the Boston Post Road.”