CARVER, Mass. (AP) — About this time of the year, Jarrod Rhodes should be checking on the vines of cranberries that have grown on his bog for decades in southeastern Massachusetts.

Instead, he is watching a backhoe tear up the cranberry bog, exposing the dark peat underneath that will eventually become a meandering stream through the 32-acre (13-hectare) South Meadow Bogs Restoration site. The goal of the six-to-nine-month-long, $1.1 million project is to convert this bog to a wetland that should see the return of native plants like steeplebush and straw-colored flatsedge along with providing habitat for wildlife like wood frogs, hawks and muskrats.

“These bogs were originally built on top of a wetland, so now we’re putting it back to the way it was,” Rhodes said, adding that this bo

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