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| Lori Totman, director of the Knox County Parks District, shows a photo of flowering bloodroot in one of the field guides she recommends, the National Wildlife Federation's "Field Guide to Wildflowers of North America" by David M. Brandenburg. She mentioned she knew Brandenburg but was too modest to mention that she is mentioned in the book's acknowledgements for her help when she worked at the Dawes Arboretum, where Brandenburg is a botanist. |
August 17 Last Chance for New Knox County Naturalist Program
Knox County’s chance
to have its first Ohio Certified Naturalist Program, like Licking County’s, is
endangered as the deadline for getting at least 15 applicants approaches: August 17.
As of August 3, I was only the 8th
applicant. The program is a great chance
to learn about Nature and then share it with others so more and more people
become environmental stewards.
Our Backyards Are Frontiers of Ecology
The
backyards and countryside and parks of counties like ours are the real
frontiers of ecology, the places where we can make a difference in the survival
of wildlife, from monarch butterflies that winter in Mexico to polar bears in the
Arctic, where ice is melting because of practices in our country.
To become a certified naturalist, we need to complete 40
hours of classroom and field instruction between August 25 and September
29. Then we need to perform 40 hours of
volunteer service that can range from leading tours to monitoring bluebird houses to logging computer data,
depending on individual interests.
Interested persons should call 740-397-0401 or e-mail
Sabrina Schirtzinger at schirtzinger.55@osu.edu.
For more information, read the article “Deadline approaching for naturalist program”, (page A-6 , August 10, Mount Vernon
News.
Schirtzinger, Knox County Ohio State University Extension Educator for
Agriculture and Natural Resources, is organizing the program. One of the program's many instructors is Knox County Parks Division director. She got her start as a professional naturalist and served as a Volunteer Naturalist
in Licking County. She also worked at the Dawes Arboretum. Her colleague at Dawes, David Brandenburg, is another instructor in the program. He wrote the National Wildlife Federation's "Field Guide to Wildflowers of North America."
The program is patterned after the Master Gardener program.
As one example of the countless projects participants can
engage in, Totman cited expanding and maintaining Wolf Run Park’s small trail
of 12 bluebird houses, adding maybe 12 more near Upper Gilchrest and Yauger
Roads. Or, she said, we could build
bluebird trails in Honey Run Highlands Park.
Proving that the possibilities of service projects are
endless, organizations involved with the program, in addition to the Knox County Park Division and
Extension, include the Brown Family Environmental Center at Kenyon College and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Division of Wildlife.
Another possibility is education and outreach work with
Schirtzinger, working with adults or children.
Totman said that they would “play on the strengths of the
volunteers.”
Examples also include leading bird walks, removing
non-native plants, creating National Wildlife Federation certified wildlife habitat
in our backyards, planting milkweed for Monarch butterflies, and counting birds
at park feeders for Project FeederWatch.
For those who don’t want to get down and dirty, there is office work
such as data entry. My Cider Press
articles might qualify, as might my wildlife gardens, my moth counting, and the
school tours of the Brown Center I’ve volunteered for.
Totman said there is a need for long-term collection of data
on populations of all species of wildlife—“insects, amphibians, reptiles,
birds, mammals, mollusks, etc.”--on the County’s approximate 1,150 acres of
parkland, to spot trends. I know that parks consultant Gary Moore told me long ago that data like my moth counts are valuable in
documenting the biodiversity value of parkland.
The training topics include Watersheds & Aquatic Life, Plants, Geology, Herpetology,
Ornithology, and Mammals.
To get a taste of what you might learn by becoming a volunteer, check out the following article I wrote for the June 2015 issue of the Apple Valley Cider Press. The story is about two tours I covered, one by Totman and one by Heather Doherty of the Brown Family Enviornmental Center. Both are instructors in the naturalist program that will only begin if more people enroll!
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| Heather Doherty, program manager for the Brown Family Environmental Center, shows plants to children at a wildflower hike. (Photo by Don Comis) |
May’s Fertility
Well into a wildflower hike in the shaded woods of Honey Run
Falls near Millwood on May 9, Lori Totman, Knox County Park District Director,
revealed her secret motivation for the hike:
To show us the valued native spring ephemeral woodland flowers to
inspire us to help her remove the non-native plants that threaten these
treasures.
“We want you to know what’s here, what we can lose to non-native
invasive plants,” she said.
Saving Honey Run
Falls’ Treasures
She mentioned this when she reached one of the major
offenders, garlic mustard plants, after we passed native spring beauties, blue
violets, Dutchman’s breeches, squirrel corn, bloodroot, Mayapples, wild blue
phlox, wild ginger, kidney leaf buttercup, butterweed, white trillium, hepatica,
and true Solomon’s seal.
Then we reached a clump of garlic mustard, at which point
Totman offered us a free pass for removing the invasive pest along any public
trail in the county parks. Some of the
dozen who came for the walk dutifully pulled clumps of mustard and carried them
off.
The Knox County Park District website
(http://www.knoxcountyparks.org) asks anyone interested in pulling invasive
plants or helping in other ways to send an email to info@knoxcountypark.org, or
call (740) 392-7275.
Later we saw Jacob’s ladder, jewelweed, false Solomon’s seal,
and other wildflowers.
Totman taught me that most of these native woodland flowers
are early bloomers because they have to be done flowering before the forest
leaf canopy fills in and shades them out.
Wildflowers We Can
Eat
We started seeing native wildflowers right in the parking
lot at the beginning of the walk— pink spring beauties and blue violets. A common theme with many wildflowers emerged
right then when Totman mentioned both are edible. Native Americans ate the tubers of spring
beauties and the flowers and leaves of blue violets can be eaten too. The blue violet leaves and flowers can be
used in salad. The leaves can be eaten
raw or sautéed like spinach. The flowers
add a peppery taste to salads. “Or dip
the flowers in sugar for cake decorations,” Totman added. Also the flowers can be brewed as a tea that
will be “more blue than purple”, she said.
Sautéing came up in discussions of other wildflowers as
well.
Obviously, we aren’t allowed to remove more than a taste
when we find them on parkland, unlike the garlic mustard.
We must avoid Mayapple plants because every part of them is
poisonous, except the “apples” they produce in August. But you have to beat wildlife to the punch to
get any.
I could see why these flowers are called “ephemeral”—many of
the flowers were gone by the day of our hike, including the flowers of
bloodroot and hepatica, which blooms in mid-March. And the flowers of Dutchman’s breeches were
on their way out.
It reminded me of how quickly things can change in May, like
the blossoms on my crabapple tree disappearing so quickly, probably sped up by
the mini-heat wave in early May. A
friend told me he saw the same thing with his apple trees, the blossoms not
surviving long enough to attract a lot of bees as they did last year.
Love Along the
Kokosing
By the time we reached the end of the hike, at a sandy beach
along the Kokosing River, we had seen about 30 different species of native
wildflowers. The beautiful scene by the
river, with huge boulders and two boats, was a fitting climax to a walk through
shaded woodlands with colorful flowers and beautiful rock formations and cliffs
and a gorgeous waterfall cooling off children and picnickers, including the
Amish. We even got to see a man propose
to his girlfriend on a large boulder overlooking the river!
The preview of summer had packed the park, at least the
falls, and filled the park’s two parking lots.
For wildlife, we saw an American toad, heard a frog plop
into water, and heard gray tree frogs and two migrating birds—an Acadian
flycatcher and a yellow warbler.
Celebrating Spring’s
Fertility Rites at Kenyon
On a May 2 wildflower hike at the Brown Family Environmental
Center at Kenyon College, Program Manager Heather Doherty said that she heard
her first tree frogs that day. Now,
they’ve replaced spring peepers as serenades outside my bedroom/office
window.
I celebrated spring May 2 on the Brown Center’s 1.5 mile Fern
Trail. That hike was not capped by any
marriage proposals, but it did end with an outside dance performance by Kenyon
students, which I saw as a celebration of the Center’s woods and fields.
During the hike, we saw some flowers not seen at Honey Run,
such as a trillium that Doherty accurately called “smelly” and “ugly”, planted
in a garden near the beginning of the walk.
Doherty explained that the trillium’s smell is designed to attract flies
to pollinate the plant. We also saw
flowering bluebells, speedwell (one of the first to flower in spring), dead
nettle, and bedstraw.
Doherty reminded us that we can tell that dead nettle is in
the mint family because of its square stem.
I recognized the purplish flowering plant as a common weed in my garden
and widespread in a farm field I drove by since the walk.
We also saw mustard plants (bittercress) which explode when
touched, sending out seeds. I recognize
them in my garden too, and they may have been the plants that coated my shirt
with pollen after I walked through them.
The star of the Kenyon walk for me was Grant Metcalf,
4. First of all he wore the kind of
outfit I’d like to live in—cargo pants and a cargo vest, with an official
looking “Metro Parks Columbus” patch. (Of
course, my patch would read “Knox County Parks”.) Second, there wasn’t an
edible plant he didn’t eat on the walk, including dead nettle, violets, and
chickweed.
He particularly liked bedstraw plants because the entire
plant sticks to people’s clothes when thrown on them. And throw them he did.
On our way back to the hike’s starting point, after watching
the dance, Doherty opened one of the Center’s many bluebird houses to show us
three small pale blue eggs.
From the proposal we witnessed at Honey Run to the bluebird
eggs and flowers producing seed, we sure celebrated May’s fertility on those
two walks!
Check out my website (www.doncomis.simplesite.com) and blog
(www.donaldcomis.blogspot.com) for more photos and stories. For example, by searching for my “Visiting
Guy Denny's Ohio Prairie” blog of July 27, 2014, you can read about my
experience last year at an event that was repeated this past July, with a
link to the Owl Creek Conservancy’s website list of this and other upcoming
events in the 14th annual “Explore the Nature of Knox County” 2015 series.
Note: Anyone with
comments or suggestions is welcome to send me an e-mail at
doncomis@centurylink.net or post comments on my website or blog.
