Community Update

Every year a Red Fox Vixen delivers a liter of pups in a cave dug deep into the steep hillside behind my neighbor’s house on route 154 in Haddam. It is a wonderful right of spring and a real joy to watch the pups play, explore and grow. In the late spring my wife and I took turns with the binoculars watching a nearly grown pup eating something on the abandoned railroad tracks behind our house. Later in the day a fox pup walked through our front yard, crossed our driveway and fell over dead. Our family was crushed. I buried the corpse in the yard.
Can I legitimately conclude that the fact that the fox was eating on the tracks somehow killed it. No. Frankly, I am not even sure it was the same fox. However, the ordeal did open some old wounds. I do not pretend to be an authority on insecticides, herbicides or defoliants. Frankly I don’t have a clue and really don’t know one from another. However, I do have a God given common sense. If you have occasion, walk the railroad tracks next time you go to the Transfer Station. It is scorched earth. You will be hard pressed to find a live insect. All plant life is dead. Look on both sides of the railroad tracks and you will see a disproportionate number of dead trees up 30” in diameter. Whatever this chemical is that is used to keep the tracks clear is obviously very powerful and harmful to living things.
I was told by workers on the tracks that the poison they use is the same that is used routinely by all railroads. Also, it is important to note that railroads are exempt from having to notify adjacent property owners of what and when they are spraying. Here is the rub. I would make this important distinction between the tracks that run along the Connecticut River from Route 82 North in Haddam and those that run along the Connecticut coast. Along the coast trains actually run on the tracks. Not so in Haddam, not for over forty years. So What? Well, for one thing wildlife naturally avoids active tracks and the poisons. Also, the tracks in Haddam run through the pristine residential Connecticut River Valley where people walk and children play.
So, when are we going to collectively come to terms with the glaring fact that the abandoned tracks are really an unnecessary poisonous scar on Haddam’s landscape? Isn’t it time to make this space a beautiful, safe park and “rails to trails” that we all can enjoy? Ironically this was the original designation by the State when the trains stopped running in the 1960s.

Ken Gronbach