Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist Training Program
Topic News
Lucas County OCVNers have "Adopted an Acre" at Oak Openings Metropark, providing a chance for class members to work together on a project.
(Submitted by Eileen Sawyer) With the park's blessing, our 2008 class adopted the Blandings Pool area in
Oak Openings Preserve as a place we could do stewardship projects and all sorts
of monitoring.
The long-term goal for the area, per the parks, is to manage it for Oak
Savannah. They do prescribed burns in there occasionally, but the last one was
several years ago and the scrub oak has just taken over, choking out the
blueberries, sweet fern, and prairie species and quite altering the overall
plant life. Removal of the scrub oak and stump-treating them so they don't come
back very much needs to be done. We take out the bigger stuff, and the small
foot-high trees will be killed during the next prescribed burn.
The area is quite amazing and we're lucky to get the okay to work there.
Near the transect in the south it's a mass of scrub oak with some surprising
little pot-hole pools scattered here and there. From there the land slopes up
going northward. There are a half-dozen vernal pools in this "cleared" area,
tall-grass prairie plants, lupine out the wazoo, puccoon, etc. The north border
of the area is the "cattail pool" - another vernal pool (very different from
Blandings) that was monitored a couple of years ago. Blue racers, box turtles,
coyote, fox, Blandings turtles, and skunk have all been seen in this patch of
ground.
Our classes can do joint projects there, and/or separate ones -- whatever
we want. Some possibilities are the stewardship, seed collecting of prairie
plants, lupine monitoring possibly, vernal pool monitoring/exploring (Blandings
is a great pool for this), I believe part of the butterfly transect runs through
the area, raptor monitoring, the list goes on and on.
