Eco-Restoration Journey Week 3: ‘We let Mother Nature take over’

If you’ve driven along Route 124 near the Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Harwich, you’ve probably noticed a lot of hubbub going on across the street.

Hungry excavators have been at work for nearly a month at the Harwich Conservation Trust’s (HCT) Hinckleys Pond – Herring River Headwaters Eco-Restoration Project. The carefully-calibrated chomping is designed to remove chunks of sand from the retired cranberry bogs to get the surface closer to groundwater level. 

Then, the remaining layers of sand are turned over in a process called microtopography, which creates the higher and lower areas that are typical in a natural wetland, allowing different plants to grow at different moisture levels.

Meet Travis Sumner of SumCo Eco-Contracting

At a recent site visit, we caught up with Travis Sumner, Co-founder and Principal of SumCo Eco-Contracting. Sumner also serves as the Chief of Operations for SumCo, which has been working on the eco-restoration project.

“The work has been going according to plan,” said Sumner. “Bogs are pretty stable work environments.”

SumCo is a pioneer in the eco-restoration field, and Sumner has worked on these kinds of projects for a long time, including efforts to restore freshwater wetlands, remove dams and enhance fish passage.

But his journey toward this field took an interesting culinary side trip.

“I’m a mechanical engineer by schooling,” he said. “But I opened a bakery when I graduated from college. Then about a year into running the bakery, I decided I was ready to get back a little closer to my schooling and joined up with a company that was doing salt marsh restorations and kind of cut my teeth there. We started SumCo in 2006.”

We asked Sumner why he likes working on eco-restoration projects. “I grew up on a farm in Vermont,” he said. “This work is kind of like getting back to my roots, getting my hands dirty, and helping out where we can with Mother Nature and the environment.”

About the project

The Hinckleys Pond – Herring River Headwaters Eco-Restoration Project includes the restoration of two retired cranberry bogs that bookend 174-acre Hinckleys Pond in Harwich, at the headwaters of the Herring River estuary and immediately downstream of river herring spawning habitat in Long Pond and Seymour Pond.

The project also seeks to improve shoreline habitat of Hinckleys Pond, which is also a herring spawning pond. The Brown family, who owns a retired bog on the other side of the pond, is also partnering with HCT on the project. The partnership eco-effort aims to increase biodiversity, restore freshwater wetland habitat and enhance recreational opportunities.

By the late 1990s, much larger off-Cape bogs were producing an extra supply of cranberries that caused the price to fall. This shift in the industry made it more difficult for some local growers to continue farming.

In 2021, thanks to generous donors, HCT was able to purchase the 31-acre retired bog area from the Jenkins family. If not preserved, the forested upland along Headwaters Drive and Rt. 124 could have been converted into a subdivision which would have impacted pond health and closed off the popular spot to the public.

The eco-restoration project was funded by HCT donors, the Brown family, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Southeast New England Program (SNEP) Watershed grant, EPA National Estuary Program Coastal Watershed grant under cooperative agreement with Restore America’s Estuaries, Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation MassTrails grant, foundation funds through the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, and a Transformational Habitat Restoration & Coastal Resilience grant through the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

A different kind of engineering

Despite the complexities of the eco-restoration project, Sumner was easily able to boil it down. “We’re doing our part to kick things off, and then we let Mother Nature take over,” he said. “It’s certainly very gratifying work that we do.”

Typical engineering work involves the construction of roads, bridges or buildings. There is highly visible evidence of the planning and toil that went into the job. But eco-restoration projects are different: the initial work fades away as nature steps in.

Sumner described the difference this way: “Man-made fixes look best on their first day and look worse over time, and nature-based solutions look their worst on their first day, but get better over time.”

–Visit our News Updates page each week for another chapter of Eco-Restoration Journey. There’s a lot going on!