hello everyone welcome to today's edition of community conversations i'm your host roger coulton through the community conversations pod cast we hope to bring varying parts of the belmont community to the public intraday show i have invited roger rubel to join us roger isabel my resident and he's drek tour of the mascot of been society's habitat education center and wildlife sanctuary here in belmont today we're going to talk about open space and environmental education roger welcome to community conversations and thank you for being willing to come and talk with us on today's show it's great to be here roger before we start talking about habitat in particular can you tell me a bit about yourself how long have you been the director of habitat here in belmont what attracted you to the habitat sanctuary in the director for sixteen and a half years and i was teaching at u mass boston and i set up their undergraduate environmental studies program and i lived here in belmont and i got very one of the  places my my wife who lived here when i met her one of the st places she took me was habitat so i know knew it immediately when i st moved here and it's a very special place we were actually married there before i worked there so i have a lot of connections to it and i got to know the director lori bennett who was the st mass or director at habitat and when she moved up in the mess audubon organization she sort of asked me if i knew some people who were interested in her job and i wound up applying for it and getting it so that's and we went up at habitat and can you give us a brief history of habitat itself  they lived there together for until one thousand nine hundred and twenty six and then they got divorced and robert atkins her husband moved on to new york she stayed there with five children and lived there until nine hundred and seventy when she died and  and seventy people were very interested in the environment so the following up on what they knew were her wishes they they started an environmental education facility privately and it at st was an internship program for adults and it functioned that way for a few years and then it started to morph into offering programs for children offering a summer camp eventually doing weddings in order to audubon forty five acres right next door so there was a lot of without any buildings so it was just open space it's the highland farm section of the property it was called highland farm wildlife sanctuary and so there was a lot of association between habitat and order bon habitat would run programs there they would sometimes take care of the land and in the late one thousand nine hundred and eighty s the boarded habitat and  staff and run education programs the way habitat does so habitat is just one of the fifty four dollars sanctuaries that mass order owns that can be visited by the public in massachusetts and the purpose is simply to preserve open well it's not simply to preserve open space because that would mean nobody would use it but to preserve open space and to promote environmental education around the state you know if you look at the symbol of mass a it's a triangle with a turn in the middle and that triangle symbolizes the three parts of mass autobahn which are advocacy education and conservation so we do all of those before we start talking about any substantive issues and there are a few substantive questions i want to ask you this morning can you tell us a little bit about the the facility the physical facilities you've talked about the  center but you know you have trails open to the public yeah so we have we own ninety acres which is a lot of land in belmont and we have four miles of trails we've got a visitor center that has a number of classrooms in it as well as a kind of laura g was the living room of the house a large room that we have a art gallery and we have a real rotating  every month we change the show every month and there are some classrooms in there so we classes tend to be sort of stored indoors get outdoors pretty quickly we've got meadows  wetlands forests so we have three of the main habitats in massachusetts and so we can run lots of programs that teach people about those three different habitats pretty close proximity to themselves and can people come and use those trails at any time or do they have to sign in and pay a fee so if you're a belmont resident it's free if you are a mass audubon member it's free if you are not center is actually open every day we have shorter hours on the weekend but there's somebody there every day and i would assume that you can't do things like hunter fish up there safe so it's a wildlife sanctuary so it is you know a place where animals can go to be to avoid being hunted and that sort of thing yeah so it's hunting and fishing and collecting is not allowed we do some of that with our education programs but we really don't want people coming in and collecting our mushrooms and plants and things like that so that's the physical facility when i think of habitat it's the wildlife sanctuary in education center which would indicate that you have considerable you have programming i'll let you say whether it's considerable it is considerable like habitat programs from preschool to adult we have a preschool program that runs every morning four days a week in one afternoon we've got programs for children who come alone we've got programs for parents and kids and we've got programs for adults we run programs during vacation weeks that are all day long for kids and we run a very busy summer camp where we have over five hundred kids over the course of the summer and i seem to remember that my friend phil solomon used to run or used to be involved with an intergenerational program of habitat she still is twenty years ago before i got there phil who has always been very interested in intergenerational programs and getting kids and seniors really to interact with each other started this thing called the habitat intergenerational program which is a volunteer program and its goal is to get children and seniors to be interacting with each other around environmental projects and sort of the unique thing about it is it isn't the adults teaching the kids have to do stuff it's them all learning together and certain people have certain expertise in certain areas but sometimes it's the kids and sometimes it's the adults so it's a very flowing kind of model for to get children and older adults to interact and her feeling about it was that you know families have really been spread apart now and children don't have that much interaction with older adults with seniors and this was really an opportunity to sort of get them to know each other are there other volunteer opportunities mayne well i'm not sure what the volunteer opportunities m opportunities to give of one service yes we run a big volunteer program and the reason for that is that we have a property staff that really works likes working with volunteers  they get a very satisfying experience we get a lot of good work done on the property so we host in the fall in the spring we have a thing called trails day and we'll get you know one hundred to two hundred people who show up to do projects out on the property we have heard of goats we have eight goats that live on the property and we've had no trouble getting volunteers to come in in the morning and let them out and come in in the f in the evening and put them back in and spend some time with them brushing them and sort of interacting with them and all of those people are volunteers and so we have lots of volunteer opportunities if you're interested in that give us a call and we'll sort of try to accommodate you what kind of experience you want to have but it really is one of the best things about habitat is the number of volunteers that we have coming to the property  belmont habitat wildlife sanctuary be before we come back to the sanctuary itself let me tell you one of my impressions and ask you for your reaction to the mascot the habitat sanctuary but then it's got the what i still refer to as the mclean open space and then there's rock meadow those are the three really big open spaces did those three properties or sets of properties interact at all well organizationally they have different owners so habitat is a private land sanctuary lone tree hill which is the the now the name of the property that was known as the mclean open space is owned by the town mostly mclean st retains part of it but it is managed by land management committee that has people from mclean and people from the town on it and then there's rock meadow which has been conservation land in belmont since and sixty five i think it's seventy acres and it is owned by the town and managed by the conservation commission so we mainly have done volunteer projects there we when they do volunteer projects property you probably use all three we and sometimes that's problematic there have been times when we have one of the problems we have in managing our property is we have lots of these things called invasive plants which are alien plants that have been brought up brought into the area usually for horticultural purposes and liked it so much that they kind of went wild and they're out in places where we don't want them so also the seeds from those plants can move from one property to another so even if we clear out all of the particular invasive habitat we can be easily reinvaded from neighboring properties but you know belmont is really blessed in having these three properties which are one to seventy acres one's a one hundred and twenty acres lone tree hill and habitat is ninety acres that's a big chunk of land if you're managing land for wildlife plants or animals what you want is  bigger is better the more land you have the bigger the populations can be and the more species that can be supported so it's very important to have these kind of contiguous open spaces that are that can biologically they can interact with each other well let bit because then if we pull back to a little bit further and look not simply a bell but look at the western suburbs there is what i believe is called the western greenway which is in waltham lexington belmont i don't know if part of it's in arlington but i think of it as waltham lexington and dhamma yes that's correct you know when you talk you know how does that fit into the picture here you know so this is sort of one of the most exciting things that i've done by being director of habitat is that when you look at the map of the area it turns out that there is about one thousand two hundred dollars acres of undeveloped land that's connected now managed by the department of conservation and recreation so it's conservation land and that property is over three hundred dollars acres that property is connected to another property in  lexington in waltham that is used to be the tuberculosis hospital that was run by the county and that land is now managed by d c are and the city of continues west to that property we call lot one which is the former tuberculosis hospital property and then go south to the robert retain a state so i've worked with with group people in belmont lexington in waltham and we've created a trail system that goes from habitat to the pain a state which is seven miles long and is blazed with western greenway trail signs and you cross a couple of roads but that's about it you can walk continuously continuously starting at the habitat in belmont yeah starting at habitat in belmont and winding up at the rubber tree pin estate in waltham so that is part of the western greenway seven miles of trail and what we're still working on is continuing that so that it comes back to the beaverbrook rest reservation in belmont in waltham so eventually it'll be about a twelve mile circuit that will have in the area you've used the word in are connected in a number of times and my education tells me that that interconnectedness is  in addition to simply allowing for the trail that you you're talking about biologically speaking it is important that if you took the exact number of acres and split it up it would be not as important or not as i don't know if important is the right word but not as biologically rich yeah they have in an interconnected area so one of the problems that we have in highly developed areas like eastern massachusetts is that the areas that we have that are still quote natural that are forests or wetlands or whatever they're they're kind of islands that are isolated from other such areas and because of that there's a lot of what's called edge effect that they can support species that need large blocks of habitat and so that it limits the kind of species that can live there and it limits the biological richness and it also makes those property susceptible to invasion by things like invasive plants because they do very well in disturbed edge habitats so having these blocks of larger properties like one thousand two hundred acres and in the three communities that are interconnected with each other is great for the plants is great for the animals and also for the people who want to have more of a nature experience than  is available in the smaller properties if you went out into western massachusetts it's much richer because you've got huge state forests and privately owned conservation land that are interconnected with each other  and those are really the ones that those are the properties when we look at it on our biological maps we want to protect land around those big land masses in order to preserve those large wild la and preserve the wildlife that lives in them now when i think of interconnectedness hopefully this isn't too much of a curveball but when i think of interconnectedness that's one of the topics or one of the arguments that i keep hearing about the community path that's proposed here in belmont is is there a connection between the community path then and the interconnectedness of the the western greenway there  reservation and it would go through belmont and from that path you could get to lone tree hill or habitat or rock meadow and and other open spaces but it sort of provide provides a corridor for mainly for people now you'll find that wildlife use that corridor also because it's easier to walk on a plowed path than it is through the forest when this three feet of snow in it so you will find deer and other animals using the pants but mainly it's this being able to accommodate people frankly away from cars because our experience is so  by vehicles and traffic that having a place where you can be quiet and you can walk and you can talk to your friend you can listen to the radio you can do whatever you but you have much less stimulus than you do from walking on the streets of these off path paths that are developing right now and really i think they'll ubel and i find the whole thing really exciting so the path that goes that is being proposed in belmont that comes from l wife there is a larger plan called the mass central rail trail which follows this abandoned railroad track that went from cambridge all the way to hampton in western massachusetts and that's one hundred and four miles so the path from belmont would allow you to travel if you want to do one hundred and four miles to northampton eventually different communities are working on it and wailin are actively working on it right now in this about a thirty mile stretch in central massachusetts that's done and there are some sections in western massachusetts that are done but completing that trail is really quite amazing and exciting for people who are interested in that and i think the community peth and belmont is really going to enhance the community and it's to change the town for the better i think in a lot of ways that we don't even quite understand right now but you know when i go and buy these community pets or a bike or whatever it makes me happy i can't describe it any other way they're kind of cool you've got this way of getting around that is totally away from cars and streets so it impresses me as being sort of the same reason i would go and i have never been on the seven mile trail that you talked about i would go walk that you know but you can almost pretend like you're not in a major urban area when you're on a trail like that or when we bike the path out through arlington and lexington and him you know well the minuteman path is pretty amazing the number of people that use it and the variety of ways that they're using it like i use it a lot in commuting and you know there are usually more walkers on it than there are people riding bicycles on it there are people that are carrying their groceries along it so it really is sort of this amazing alternative transportation corridor that you could use used for recreation or more utilitarian things well we've been talking about some some fun things i would like to ask you about not so fun thing  if i may because it seems like that a property such as habitat could really be endangered i don't know if it endangered may overstate it by surrounding street that has a large property it's long in relatively narrow and it abuts habitat and it is about a little less than seven acres and the owner has proposed building a road into the property to the back of the property which is the part that abuts habitat and building subdividing the property into six lots and building five additional homes on the property so this goes to the  problem if you walk on the border trail it habitat it actually starts at the highland farm loop it habitat and then crosses on to this property and a neighboring property and then goes back on to habitat so when you walk on that trail and you look around you wouldn't know that you're on private property other than habitat because it looks in functions it's ackley the same as habitat does so for us it is a really important piece of property for the town and it's really an important piece of property and you know we're working with the town on trying to avoid development that would compromise the integrity of habitat the other really special thing about it is it's what this property it's got to vernal pools on it and a very large wetland which is likely a vernal pool and so there's water that drains from marsh street through habitat down through belmont to little pond to the little river to el wife brooke to the mystic river and then to boston harbor so the water that is starting on this property  is one of the headquarters of the mystic river and and eventually the water and it winds up in boston harbor so impacts to that something that i think should be avoided and is this isn't the only big property up there right there are well you mentioned another property that the border trail you know process but there are other big properties so this property  s three neighbors that have properties that are large enough to have multiple houses on them and one of them probably a similar road that goes into the it's a large it's between five dollars and six dollars acres so it could also  put a road in and build houses to give it in a frontage in order to build multiple houses on the property so what happens with this property is not just this property it really affects other properties in belmont that are houses that have laura just landed around that can buy the zoning can support more houses we've seen this already unconquered haven't you there were two large brick houses on the hill going up concord avenue towards lexington the land around those houses was sold off subdivided and large houses were built on it and if and further down concord avenue you may have noticed there are two houses set way back from the property that the forest in front of has been cleared in two more houses are going to be built so that the land is worth a lot of money for houses right now and that's why this is happening can you talk just a little bit about how fragile if at all a place like habitat is is it big enough that it might be degraded but it's going to absorb this in continue or is there a real danger well well that a loaded question i mean will continue but what you're doing is sacrificing the ability of the property to support the make the habitats smaller and smaller it becomes harder and harder for those raptors and species that are high on the food chain in order to find enough food in order to survive so yes habitat will keep functioning but it will become less rich in wildlife and the community will be able to support less wildlife than both plants and animals or wildlife not just animals than it could if you make the in belmont today one thing that i would like to ask you i think i would be remiss to not ask you is if people wanted to be involved in some way  what would they do so so habitat is it a great place for involving people and we have a lot of different ways of doing it so we talked about the volunteer opportunities and that's kind of the easiest way to do it to come to a trails day  that if you want to teach we have if you have some knowledge of natural history or you have some skills teaching we do programs and a lot of those programs are done by part time teachers many of whom are retired teachers or people who 've just had an interest in nature and we help you get started and we do some training and we allow you to observe programs and you get paid so you can have a small part time job that you can adjust to your own schedule so that's another way to get involved great fun roger the clock has ticked down on us today it sure has been fun and i really do appreciate you being here i know you've got things to do on a daily  basis we have been talking today with roger rubel roger is a belmont resident who is director of the habitat education center and wildlife sanctuary here in belmont again i would like to thank you for appearing today and i would like to thank you the listeners for tuning in you can listen to this podcast by accessing it on line at belmont media dot org and you can also download us from i tunes by searching for the m c podcast network i would encourage our listeners both to stay tuned to the media center and to read the weekly belmont citizen herald for continuing information about events going on throughout the town about  i'm roger colton your host of community conversations thank you again for listening and i will talk to you again in two weeks