Abstract
The Great Meadows bordering the placid Sudbury and Concord Rivers of Eastern Massachusetts are a quiet wilderness today. The narrow channel winds along in a broad floodplain of sedges, buttonbush, black willow, and purple loosestrife, a ribbon of wild marshland through the suburbs twenty miles west of Boston, troubled only by a few canoes. For the past century, the Concord River has been famous mainly for its birds and for the naturalists who have watched them, following one another in the ripples of Henry Thoreau’s rowboat: William Brewster, Ludlow Griscom, Edwin Way Teale.¹ Through alert conservation, the river has become