Did you know that a block from City Hall and Main Street in Fitchburg you can find wild mink and river otters, hear yellow warblers and song sparrows singing all day long, and even spot great blue herons and diving ducks called mergansers fishing in the Nashua River?
Those are just a few of the natural treasures you can discover in our Riverfront Park. And if we manage the park right, they’ll continue to be part of our downtown landscape for many years to come.
Riverfront Park is the most historic spot in Fitchburg. It’s where the first sawmill was built to provide lumber for the town’s first houses, and it was the meeting place of the Fitchburg minutemen in 1775 when the American Revolution began.
The park is also the best documented natural area in Fitchburg. More than 80 species of birds have been recorded there and added to an international database of bird populations worldwide (ebird.org/hotspot/L6926932).
It’s taken a long time for this little section of the Nashua River to begin to recover from its former status as an industrial waste site, and progress hasn’t always been even. After several years of slow growth, a native cattail marsh had begun to form and attract migrating birds. But then last fall the city cut it down. That took us a few steps backward from a Riverfront Park to a sewerfront park.
The river’s banks have long been choked with invasive Japanese knotweed, which is of little value to wildlife. Native trees and shrubs have gradually been coming back, but again last year the city cut many of them down. The result was predictable: one stretch of willows, birches, and catalpas are now gone, and the bamboo-like knotweed has come back twice as strong as ever.
Fortunately, it’s a simple matter to manage the park effectively for both people and wildlife and to make it into a real downtown treasure. Here are four things we can do to help green-up our Riverfront Park.
First, encourage the grape vines and the Virginia creeper to cover the south fence where they have already begun to grow. This will screen out noise and traffic and provide food for migrating and nesting birds. Keep the section in front of the wonderful Marion Stoddart mural clear of course, in honor of one of the heroes of Massachusetts river conservation.
Second and importantly, let the river banks regrow with native trees and shrubs, and selectively trim out the invasive knotweed. This will decrease bank erosion, decrease flood risk by slowing discharge into the channel, improve water quality through natural filtering, and improve wildlife habitat and recreational value. A win all around.
Third, acquire the southern half of the vacant parking lot behind the old Santander Bank building and replant it with trees and shrubs as an addition to the park. (Leave the 20 parking spaces along Boulder Drive as they are.) This will also decrease flood risk, reduce pollution, and increase the area available to both wildlife and human visitors.
And finally, complete the next phase of park development that was planned years ago by removing the north retaining wall and replanting the north bank with native trees. This will greatly increase the channel capacity of this river segment, reduce downstream flood risk even further, and enlarge the park’s available landscape still more.
As we head into summer, the yellow warblers, song sparrows, catbirds, and robins in the park are already feeding their fledglings, and the mockingbirds are raising their second brood of the year. The turkey vultures and nighthawks that passed overhead on their way north this spring are gone, but they’ll be back and heading south in September, along with a host of other autumn migrants.
With a little concerted effort, we can continue to green-up this historic downtown section of the Nashua River and preserve our river heritage for future generations of Fitchburg residents.
Dr. Robert J. O’Hara is a former college biology professor living in Fitchburg.
