Checking Up on Gladys and Al Wright Rock Creek Nature Preserve
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One of Stewardship Director Bob Easter's regular responsibilities is to complete annual site inspections at NICHES properties and easements. He recently reflected on a day at one of our Warren County preserves.
Today I spent half the day at NICHES Land Trust’s 120-acre, Gladys and Al Wright Rock Creek Nature Preserve in Warren County, clearing downed trees from the trail and completing an annual site inspection.
The original 80-acre preserve was donated to us by Gladys and Al Wright and the 40-acre Litzenberger annex was generously left to NICHES by long-time supporter Nancy Litzenberger upon her passing.
I completed one of my first big projects as a NICHES employee on the original acres. I spent weeks girdling and treating the mature non-native black locust and thinning sugar maples across most of the 80-acres.
Looking back in recent years, I would have liked to have done it a little differently, but I was stepping in to a project that was already ready to complete. Today, I felt better about it after walking most of the original property and comparing it to the Litzenberger annex.
Everything didn’t happen as I expected it to, but the thinned areas are much more floristically diverse and active with wildlife.
Some of the oak slope areas look close to what I was expecting; increased graminoid cover and forb diversity. Some areas where the canopy was opened a little have regenerated young stands of tulip poplar, maple, paw paw thickets, or thickets of spicebush. This is what you notice first when you were expecting widespread oak regeneration, and it doesn’t happen. But what I noticed today was that the diversity of the different responses to increased light creates a nice mosaic of habitat and the preserve is better for it.
Our work is never done in caring for these places. All we can do is learn from our previous work and learn to listen to what the land is telling us. It’s a love that must span generations and that takes time.
You can see more photos from my visit in the NICHES Land Trust Facebook Group >>
- Bob Easter, Stewardship Director, NICHES Land Trust
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