Month: September 2021

I recently did a talk for some of our internal programming related to the Season of Creation. “The Season of Creation is the annual Christian celebration of prayer and action for our common home. Together, the ecumenical family around the world unites to pray, protect, and advocate for God’s creation.”

Due to mobility issues, work schedules, and/or COVID precautions, not everyone was able to attend, so I recorded the 28-min Powerpoint (turns out that it’s not too hard to do!). It’s a 5 year retrospective on the process of establishing herbaceous pollinator patches, as well as broader considerations on our roles and responsibilities relative to ecological restoration and Creation care.

The other week I had the pleasure of collaborating with several other stewards, educators, and volunteers of the Arrow Head Country Resource Conservation & Development.

For over 25 years, Arrow Head Country has been getting public school high school kids out on the Tippecanoe River to learn about water quality, forestry, river flora and fauna, and more. I wrote about this in 2019 (and also when they gave us a grant for wildlife cameras), so I won’t go on, but this definitely gets high marks from me not only for quality but also for longevity. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” I’m simply impressed by the committee who keeps this vitally important service chugging along, year after year. It’s relevance has not diminished one iota. Unless people know and love something, they aren’t likely to care for it.

God bless the many maintainers in our society!

Photos credit of Shannon O’Farrell.

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The coronavirus pandemic cancelled the float in 2020, but that didn’t stop the crew from filming a 5 minute piece that summarizes many of the topics paddlers typically learn.

I’ve been doing some plant sampling around our solar arrays recently (see here for older posts on pairing native, pollinator-friendly plants with solar energy installations). We are trying to figure out which plants will grow given the strange soil, light, and precipitation conditions that happen between and around the solar panels. For example, directly underneath the panel there will be very little direct sun or moisture. There aren’t many (any?) plants in our region that evolved for those precise conditions.

There are many ways to assess the vegetation, but I won’t get into them all here. The growing season is for grabbing data before the opportunity passes, and the full analysis often has to wait until the dormant season.

One of my pet peeves is ecological initiatives (or any social initiative, for that matter) that fail to collect data after implementation to see if the intervention worked. There are many reasons this happens, but… happen it does. So I’m trying not to let old projects fall off the radar (and certainly can’t claim to be perfect in this regard). If it actually matters whether our work gets done or not, let’s get smarter and do better and learn from each other!

Back to plants…

One way to get an idea of the abundance or distribution of a plant is running linear transects along which you place some sampling plots. Like this:

Do enough of them, and you can get a pretty good approximation of what is happening, and better so than just walking through quickly and “eyeballing it.” Yes, Black-eyed Susan is showing up at your site, but was it a single plant, or is it showing up in almost every square meter? Has the Ironweed expanded its territory relative to last year, or is it contracting? Are there flowers available to pollinators from the very beginning of the growing season to the very end, or just a big flush in the middle? Repeated transect sampling gives us answers to these questions.

I used this method to count blooming species along shaded, partially shaded, and sunny transects. This gives some fine-grained detail as to what is thriving, where.

In the following photo, I’m directly underneath the center of the panels, so the plants are significantly thinner than in the full sun, and bare ground is present. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, because most native bees species need bare ground for nests! Despite being relatively dry and very shaded, there are still some plants growing and even blooming.

I also try to establish a control group when possible. In this case, it’s the surrounding cattle pasture in which the arrays are located. Running a couple transects on adjacent ground gives me an idea of what floral resources are available absent this intervention.

In addition to the fine-grained detail, I also take a full account of any plant species that were present on the site, whatever their abundance. But… more on that another time.

However you slice it, paying attention is the first step. That calls to mind a Mary Oliver quote… “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Anyway… the real purpose of this post is to share videos and photos! We’ll start with this little surprise I found while cranking the solar panels up and down (we adjust the tilt 4 times per year to maximize energy production).

I can tell you that the treefrogs are VERY excited about pollinator-friendly solar. They are everywhere. And… of course that’s the whole idea of the food chain, of which we are a part.

I’ll finish with a gallery of photos. Enjoy!

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