First Week at the Nature Center

When I pulled in to the parking lot of the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes, I was immediately mobbed by mosquitos. Most of the time this would cause me to flail around trying to slap them away, but this was exactly what I signed up for. I knew that at the Nature Center, I was not going to stay clean and avoid bugs, but that I was going to be outside experiencing the natural green space. 

My first day our senior project group (consisting of Emily from Beachwood, Eric from Shaker, and Chris and myself from Hawken) was shown around the nature center by our project advisor Sarah. Sarah is the head of the Land Management and stewardship department at the nature center. She is very eccentric and full of energy. She gave us a tour of the main building, as well as the surrounding trails. For our first project, we started off with a bang.... We worked on the roof of the nature center! The center has a roof garden that maximises exposure to sunlight, and takes full advantage of rain water. However, over the past year or so, sarah told us that this garden was home to a nasty family of geese. She even told us the story of how last fall, the male goose was walking around the parking lot of the nature center, and ended up biting three people. Needless to say, sarah had to do something about this. So last fall the nature center installed fencing on top of the roof garden to prevent any further geese from nesting there. After the geese evacuated the space, it was our job to take down the fencing. However, this was made a lot more difficult because of the fact that the plants in the garden had grown up and through the fencing. So taking great care not to damage any of the plants, our project group worked to fish the plants through the fencing, and take it down.

The next couple of days, Our senior project group did a vast array of odd jobs. There is no one specific task that we have to complete every day, rather it is just doing whatever seems most necessary to Sarah to maintain the integrity of the natural green space. Our activities ranged anywhere from working with a school volunteer group from Hathaway Brown that came to help build a "soil check" to help prevent erosion, to trouncing around in the mud with knee high rubber boots looking for the pesty plant "garlic mustard", to taking apart and smashing an old unused display table with a sledgehammer. There is constantly variety in the activities that we do at the Nature Center, and I am very excited to see what other adventures are in store for next week.