Jane Winn is BEAT’s Executive Director.
“Biodiversity is really all the living creatures and plants and fungi within a given area, so, that whole web of life in an area," she explained. "And for us, for our Biodiversity Day this weekend, we're holding it at Brattle Brook Park in Pittsfield. So, we will have scientists out exploring the entire park, looking at whatever they specialize in looking at. So, we're having several bird walks and an owl prowl to see what birds we can find, herpetologists out looking at reptiles and amphibians, people who specialize in lichens and fungi and insects. It's just a great way to get an idea of what is out there in one of our big parks.”
Brattle Brook Park is tucked in between the residential neighborhoods and industrial lots of Pittsfield’s east side.
“it's a park that has a lot of open grassland, so you get interesting grassland birds like bobolink nesting there," said Winn. "We've also got quite a lot of forested area, and it contains Goodrich Pond, which isn't one of our premier ponds in Pittsfield, but it is a pond that has all sorts of aquatic life, and we'll find out exactly what it has.”
While Pittsfield is the urban hub of the largely rural Berkshires, it’s filled with pockets of natural space.
“Pittsfield is amazing at having really large parks right in the city," Winn told WAMC. "Brattle Brook being one, Springside Park up off North Street being another, and then you've got Burbank Park out by Onota Lake. So as much as we are the city in the heart of the Berkshires, we also have a lot of biodiversity right in our city. I think we're really lucky.”
As always, the season will dictate the biodiversity in Brattle Brook Park this weekend.
“We still have monarch butterflies that are migrating sounds, lots of the fall bird migrants also are passing through," said Winn. "At this time of year, we don't get the nesting birds as much. And one of the interesting things with Brattle Brook this year is, it's sort of transitioning from being maintained more as a park to being maintained as a conservation area, because it's owned by the Pittsfield Conservation Commission, and as they change their management, we're hoping they'll be doing a lot less mowing during the year and we want to see how the bird species and nesting birds change from one year to the next. So, we'll have a baseline. It's not during the peak nesting season, so we can't be looking directly at that. But we'll see how it changes as the park management has changed.”
The potential for discovery is one of the key selling points of Biodiversity Day.
“Sometimes, we find things that we didn’t expect. So, at Burbank Park many years ago, we found invasive hardy kiwi, and we've been working on getting rid of that," said Winn. "Sometimes we find a rare plant that we didn't know was there.”
Winn has her own hopes for what the day will bring to the Berkshire community and environment.
“The big thing I would like people to get is having their interest just sparked in being out in nature and observing what's there," she told WAMC. "I think more than anything a good scientist observes, and it's so much fun, especially if you can come in with that sort of childlike wonder and see, wow, this is really cool, look at this insect eating this plant, and how come it's on this plant, not the one next to it, and just learning all about that interaction that keeps our nature alive. And then I guess the other piece is looking at the International Panel on Climate Change reports that show how much of our biodiversity worldwide we're losing and how important it is to know what we've got now.”
The 13th annual Berkshire Biodiversity Day at Brattle Brook Park in Pittsfield begins with an early morning bird and moth identification event. From noon Saturday to noon Sunday, members of the public are encouraged to join biologists, naturalists, and environmentalists as they attempt to identify as many living things as possible in the park over the course of the day.
