 Hi, I'm Roger Burley, and this is another segment of Member Highlights. Today, we are out on a cliff island with Oceanside Conservation Trust at their 2013 annual meeting. And I have with me Bob Bittenbender, who is an invasive species professional, who not only is a board member of Oceanside Conservation Trust, but also an invasive species specialist over at Maine Automotive Society. So, what are your thoughts today, Bob? Well, I think this has been a really great little meeting, and to see the progress that the people of Cliff Island have made over the years in getting rid of invasive species is an inspiration to the rest of the people of Casco Bay and beyond. So, I'm really impressed with all the work they've done with their island fellow, and it's just been wonderful to see this kind of work going on and on. It's wonderful. Well, Bob, this is year five of this work on Cliff Island. Do you think there is a goal line that we can get across in another five years or 25 years, or will this work go on perpetually? I think, unfortunately, it is going to be perpetual, but I also think that we can make such progress that it will become just sort of a normal maintenance problem instead of being overrun by plants that don't belong here. So, yes, it will be an ongoing project, but it also will be something that as the years go by, will actually get less and less. And if we treat it as just simply a chore that we have to do every year, it really won't seem as daunting. Well, you talk about as the years go by, global warming climate change is happening. Should we be expecting a steady stream of new invasives with the warming temperatures? Unfortunately, that could be true, but I think by getting rid of the ones that we are now infested with, when new things come along, we'll be able to deal with them better because we will have our eyes at them, people will have figured out how to deal with them. Yeah, it's going to be a problem in the future, but I also think that it's a way to be prepared where we haven't been in the past. I made up an award for you guys. This is for the first annual Casco Bay Basin Species Irradiation. Two. The people of Cliff Island. So you can use this as making people feel guilty the ones that are on board and get them to do it. So who have, by their hard work, determination and understanding of the issues involved in this effort been an inspiration to the people of Casco Bay beyond? We salute you for being a leader in restoring habitat and the health of our beautiful place we call home. Now I have Gene Kulnick, another director of Oceanside Trust. Gene lives on Peaks Island just about four or five miles from here and Gene has been at the heart of a really exciting project over on Peaks involving kids. Yeah, we were really inspired by the work that has been done out here in Cliff Island and we thought Peaks is bigger, probably has even more of an issue with invasive species and we really needed to get a program off the ground to raise awareness out there and we thought, you know, who are we going to start with? And there's a few environmentalists we could have targeted but we thought who can really, who has time to really pay attention? And you know adults are so busy trying to catch the ferry we decided we'd focus on kids and so we got a grant thanks to the generosity of the Peaks Island Fund to do a project in the Peaks Island School. It's a big collaborative project, involves a bunch of island organizations including the Peaks Island Environmental Action Team, the Island Institute. We're also going to be involving the other land trust on Peaks on Pilp and that project has focused on getting the students in the school really to become the foot soldiers in this battle against invasive species. And so it began with educational efforts. We brought in Bob Bittenbender who is an expert on invasive species to educate the students. We also brought in Jeff Tarling, the city arborist and before long it was kids pointing out to their parents, look mommy, we have bittersweet in our yard. Look mommy, we have Norway maples and they really, they get at the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is we really want to see, we want to see the land, the land that we can serve on Peaks Island, support biodiversity and invasive species have exactly the opposite effect. So the better we can battle these invasive species, the better we support biodiverse healthy ecosystems which are good for birds, good for bees and ultimately really good for us. I always thought like once you had that easement on the land you were done. And being on this board I really learned that really begins there and the next really critical step is stewarding the land. And what all this invasive species protection is, is good stewardship. And just really like trying to make that land perform as best it can, as best it really can. And it's really, it's just like Carol said, we want that land to maximize the ecosystem services that we put out. We want it to be biodiverse. We want it to support that Blackbirdian war work. And so that's absolutely critical. And I think oceanside, you know we have a lot of pieces of property now and we're really trying to make sure that's the case. So now I'm here with Carolyn Walker, a Cliff Island resident and professional horticulturalist and she has been the inspiration and the perspiration behind this whole invasive species management program on Cliff Island. Carolyn we had a good turnout today and I thought there was a lot of energy in the crowd and some really seriously interested people. What was your take? I thought it was fabulous. I'm really excited. I'd like to get all the, well as I've been telling you for, since the beginning of the program, I'd like to extend it to all of Casco Bay and make sure that people aren't duplicating their efforts. So it was, it's great to see all the people from the other islands because now they won't have to make the same mistakes that we made. This is sheep's laurel, which is of Calamia and Custifolia I think. And it, it's beautiful now that it's covered by these. And it, it gets beautiful sort of mountain laurel like flowers, lake spring that are, that are bright pink. So that's what that is back there. And then these are smooth hydrangeas, which are a native hydrangea. This is a cultivar called Invincibel. Smooth hydrangeas grow natively on Cliff Island, but they don't come in pink. So that's why we put these in here to show you. You want a pink hydrangea, you don't have to use one of the Asian ones. You can use a native one. And then the plant in the back with the big pink flowers, that's flowering raspberry. And it actually does produce big raspberry things that you could eat. So those are just more, more native plants that you can use to substitute and get some, and be, you know, excited about something that's different in your garden. Our current program manager is Matt Fischel back there in the corner from the University of Delaware. He's our first program manager with real scientific background, which has been great. He came here already having read what I consider the book, which is Bringing Nature Home by Doug Talamy, and also with training in what these invasive plants were, and, you know, so he could sort of start from day one getting rid of them. Today I'm going to be showing you some of the areas we're working on. Some are in walking distance and I'll just leave you over. So I'm going to talk about some of the ways we remove invasive and the challenges we face with these plants and some of the successes we've had too. They just love these flowers and you'll get, you know, not really many insects don't really visit these bushes, but if you plant natives like this, you might, you know, see a lot of pollinators and it's really something interesting to have in your garden too. So if we just walk over to that way, we'll look at the native hedge that we planted. This area was actually a hedge just like the one you saw before a few years ago, and Carolyn put an initiative to take out all the invasives and plant these native plants. And this is one of the display gardens for the community to show them that you can actually have really beautiful native plants. These bushes are nine barks. There's a spruce over there and there's clethora. And you can see a lot of native wildflowers that have just sort of seeded in. There's jack in the pulpit. There's some sedges over there and goldenrod. So this is a really good example to the community to show them that they're really nice native plants and they're pretty tough. You don't have to worry about them too much and they'll look nice all year round and they can provide the same sort of barrier as invasive plants once they get a little bigger. This is Roger Burley out here on Cliff Island for member highlights at the Oceanside Conservation Trust 2013 annual meeting on Cliff Island. And so it has been very exciting to hear about what is going on in invasive species management at various stages and various communities around Casco Bay.