Trouble with MAM

The air is thick, hot and wet and the sky is bright with humid sun at midday.  Moving through weeds over my head, I follow a deer trail and hope my hunch that they use this trail to cross the bridge is correct.  Grasshoppers and stinkbugs cling desperately to the grasses as I move sideways through the "trail" using my foot to tamp down grasses before moving through.  I see where the deer have bedded for the night as I detect the pungent odor of their recent presence.  How they can move through this trail without widening the space between the grasses is impressive. Or, perhaps, how the grasses can pop back without being permanently damaged is impressive.  Either way, I'm hot and move on.

I find a few MAM vines and know that where there are a few...And soon enough my hunch proves correct (thankfully) and I reach sight of the MAM-infested bridge.  MAM nearly covers it.  The plant's thin, waifish stems conceal tiny barbs that stick into your skin and make you feel as though you've raked your hand over a sliver-infested piece of wood.  The vines move up the bridge supports and under the railings.  Tiny green berries are beginning to form and soon will form luscious-looking blue berries ready to be greedily consumed by a bird or rodent, or worse stored away in a location currently lacking MAM.  Either way, the plant is spread to the new spot.  The MAM's location here on the bridge and along the riverbank is especially insidious as the berries float and will be carried downstream enabling the plant to colonize virgin areas.

At this point, I can no longer move by making a trail by pushing down the grasses because the MAM holds them together like a binding.  The MAM sticks to my clothes and boots, rakes my face, and literally encompasses me as I dig for my clippers.  I should have brought a machete if only for the fleeting satisfaction that I'm fighting back.  Instead, I clip my way out of the mess.  And that is exactly what it is.  A mess of tangled vines and barbs covering, smothering, the native plants and grasses and forming a monoculture of victorious MAM that few creatures will eat.

Even the weevils the Agricultural Experiment Station released seem to be limited in their effect.  Sure, they're eating their native MAM, but how much can something tinier than a tick eat?  And will it eat in enough time to turn the tide and limit MAM's exponential expansion?

I opt for the river instead of fighting my way through the MAM now obstructing the other side of the bridge too.  Tentatively feeling for the bottom of the river I wish I wore my waders (which I ripped the last time I did this).  My knee-high boots seem to be okay and I move slowly in the river staying away from the MAM's barb-infested banks.  I see the point where the weevils were released and observe deer tracks exiting the river.  It appears that the deer chose the same path I took!  Instead of fighting their way through the MAM, the deer took to the river.  That is something I would have been interested in seeing.  MAM is not just a human scourge; the deer don't seem to be too keen on it either.

Reaching my release point, I observe the weevils dutifully eating the MAM as it proliferates.  They eat the tender shoots but are not on every stem of the plant.  Weevil damage here is low.  So there remains lots of MAM to spread and expand.  More berries here too; some already ripened.  I do my counts and take my photos for the record.

The fact that the weevils survived the flooding and beaver damming is a good sign.  They're reproducing and spreading.  The MAM is outpacing them though.  I think that a controlled removal project is needed.  But how and who to do the work?

This morning I saw a public works crew around a small fire they had lit in an abandoned parking lot.  Are these people going to be in charge of MAM removal?  Can we hope that they will check the machinery and ensure that no MAM is clinging to it before they move it to the next spot? Even if instructed to do so?  Will they only begin to cut when they're at the MAM infestation thus leaving the native plants to thrive and go to seed in order to attempt a war of plant growth next growing season?  Will they try to limit the damage the machines will do to the river banks?

We don't have funding to pay laborers to remove MAM and our commissions are taxed with their existing agendas.  The last time I held a "pull party", we ended up with some well-intentioned older people, bored and apathetic teenagers whose parents dropped them off to get community service in time for graduation, and a German Shepard.  Oh, and me.  We were quite the motley mix, but we made some progress.  There is just too much to hand pull.  But we may do a better job than those particular alleged professionals.  I suppose I should make some calls.