I started out at
A few notes about my choice of site. I have been active as a volunteer steward at this location since before I joined the congregation and I have gradually been accumulating information about and observations of the natural elements there. A process I had a hand in initiating will soon deliver to the congregation a “Site Master Plan” document which I see as a necessary framework and prerequisite for the development of plans and proposals focused on restoration and improvement of the outdoor/environmental elements of this site. I hope to include a PDF version of the work product of the planning group as a part of this narrative.
A major issue for me has been the creation and re-creation/expansion of a “scorched earth” bare ground “spoils pile” made up of subsoil extracted from the foundation excavations performed when the sanctuary and later the religious education wing of the church were being constructed. Due to the economics of the building process and the lack of adequate planning/controls, both the first excavation, and then the subsequent excavation, completely destroyed all vegetation on several acres of ground. The first time this occurred was about eleven years ago when the main building was constructed.
Due to a “zoning dispute” with Scio Township, the congregation’s purchased and installed temporary classroom buildings housing religious education removed several years earlier than planned, and the congregation took on an additional 2.7 million in debt to construct a permanent religious education building and more parking on the site. Virtually no money was set aside for landscaping and/or restoration of the disturbed areas, and supervision of contractor work in the creation of the spoils pile, while improved over what was done when the sanctuary was built, was still minimal.
I see this area as a potential “restoration biology” research project
and have been discussing plans with
Perhaps as a portent, the first “natural” thing I noticed as I started out on my “walkabout” was a group of four unidentified birds which flew across the grey cloud face as I looked out on the site. They were larger than the typical “small birds” which fly in groups and did not fly in formation like ducks or geese. My best guess was that they were four of the “inland seagulls” which are becoming so commonplace in response to the feeding environments provided by parking lots in our “man made” environment.
As a method of documenting things, I experimented with using my digital camera. The cold was severe enough to interfere with the battery power required for controlling zoom and focus, so some shots I wanted to take were lost. The cold was so severe that my attempts to take notes in the field by writing on a tablet in pencil were quite painful. I managed only half a page of numbered items referencing some of the photos I took.
What follows is a display of some of the photos and associated notes added in the warmth of my study.
The first shot shows established weeds and grasses near the spoils pile to the left of the trail. This area has been cleared of most of the buckthorn growing there in the past two seasons and a number of small Red Osier dogwood planted in the lower wetter area. A prominent weed here and in other areas is teasel.
Photo 1
Buckthorn battle zone
There were old small animal tracks in the snow along the trail but they had been obscured by the most recent snowfall. Some had the characteristic pattern of rabbits, which I have noted in the area on previous occasions. I have yet to discover where they live, but when they wander around in the area, they seem to follow a path behind some piles of buckthorn cuttings created over the past two seasons. The chips from our last “chipping party” disappeared under the snow on the trail. The remains of a pile of buckthorn cuttings appear mid-right in the photo above. Note the curve of the hillside created by the contractors which will be a prime target for re-seeding of weeds from this area. The wind today was out of the north, and was blowing across the area hard enough to carry airborne small seeds I disturbed by walking around the bare ground in the weeded area.
The second shot shows the “line of demarcation” required by state law when bare ground is being worked by construction machinery. What is interesting on this site is that the “erosion fence” was installed to separate the “high ground” from the bare spoils pile area, and it was never installed on the other side of the pile where most of the storm water runoff is likely to occur. In this picture, there are some “native grasses” introduced by the efforts of some conservationist oriented members of the congregation in the area just outside the fence which was disturbed 10 years ago, and only trampled occasionally this year. The results of investing in several bags of expensive prairie mix seed have been mostly buried. Note the concentration of teasel and thistles which invaded and are still dominating this 10 year old disturbed site. One of my concerns is that these plants will immediately invade and begin to establish themselves on the bare ground.
Photo 2
Teasel northwest of spoils piles.
The trees in the background grew up along a fence line between the church property and a neighboring 6 acre plot which is typical mown suburban hillside with landscape plantings 20-25 years old. The “dominant” tree downwind of this fence line is hawthorn, much younger than the trees along the fence line. Over the rise, not really visible here is a “monster” hawthorn which I have come to think of as the “parent tree” for much of the hawthorn thicket to the east and south of the spoils area. Note the young hawthorn thicket on the left downhill area of disturbed ground which was graded bare 10 years ago and left undisturbed in the subsequent re-grading.
When you look over the recently graded surface under an inch of snow and ice, it is difficult to see if there has been any effort made to distribute seed after grading the ground. Track prints from a large bulldozer which was used in the “final grading” are clearly visible, and the soil is extremely compacted and hard. Walking outside the margin of the spoils area is easier on my back even though the grasses make it “hummocky” and there are lots of tall weeds to avoid. A sense of the expanse of the bare ground comes from this shot taken looking slightly “up the hill” from the track leading from the church back yard lawn.
Photo 3
A fundamental concern with this bare ground is erosion. Final grading reportedly was done by mid-November, about 8 weeks ago. The next shot is a close up of an emerging erosion gully, approximately 5” deep on the side of the spoils pile. The previous pile which was not quite so carefully “rounded off,” had 1’ to 3 ½’ deep erosion cuts all over which occurred before the ground was disturbed again in 2004.
Photo 4
A “new” gully
A single day of sunlight, even when the ambient temperature above the ground never reaches 20 degrees, is enough to melt away some of the snow in uneven patterns around rocks and the edges of gullies which do not hold snow. The walls of gullies warm faster than the surrounding ground, and contribute subtly to the increase in erosion along established runoff tracks.
Standing on top of the rounded
Photo 5
The conifers were planted around the “Outdoor Worship” area.
Almost nothing about this site is “as it was” before settlement. None of the trees appear to be more than about 40 or 50 years old. The taller trees in the background are in an area which was not pasture when the church bought the land and the tallest ones are on our next door neighbor’s property to the east. They include a number of apparently self-seeded ash trees which are already “too far gone” for the state to use in experiments to test chemical ash borer suppression techniques. The hawthorn thicket contains a significant percentage of buckthorn. It is all about the same age.
I proceeded south and west across the more grown up part of the property observing a pasture area which had no hawthorn upwind and which was not disturbed by our road building or dumping of spoils. The same hummocky pasture grasses which were there many years ago are still the dominant feature, although every year invading clumps of autumn olive and buckthorn are a little larger. When I got down into the lowland area near Travis Pointe golf course at the southern end of the property, I was searching for evidence of deer which I had seen on earlier walks the year before. A place where the snow had been packed after a blizzard last year by deer “bedding down” was carefully checked for signs that they were using the same place this year with no luck. I saw a lot of old deer tracks along the regular “deer trail” openings.
I was looking for “fresh tracks” everywhere, but didn’t find much. In my casing about, I noticed a flash of green. Apparently the recent warm spell had “greened up” a clump of grass.
Photo 6
Ice Proof greens…
This particular plant did not seem to have been damaged by the following cold snap. The leaves were still flexible and did not appear to be frozen. It is a member of the “onion” family. Their leaves are hollow triangular or rounded tubes which must somehow resist freezing. Most of the other vegetation, even live tree branches, was extremely brittle in the cold and broke off as I brushed against them following the deer trail.
It is easy to see how these trails become “highways” for the animals that may live in the area. In winter, the deer break through the branches of various shrubs and small trees and pound down the snow and ground clutter. Smaller animals and the local dogs follow the same pathway. People often do too. The result is a track which is more visible and easier to follow in winter. Every year the tracks seem a little more pronounced.
Having been in the area many times, and concerned with the current status of erosion, I went to look at a couple of bridges which had been installed some years ago by a volunteer member of the congregation who was part of a group interested in “trail building”
Even though there were no leaves on the trees, the lighting was considerably reduced at the south end of the property where trees had been allowed to grow up in a low wet area. It was probably not farmed as much after it had last been cleared because equipment kept getting stuck there. Even in winter the bare branches of the tree canopy continue to cut down the light. In the summer, this area tends to be avoided because the underbrush is so thick and there are several areas where the predominant ground cover is poison ivy. The creek bed seems appreciably wider than it was a couple of years ago when I first started visiting.
Photo 7
Our growing creek bed
My “sermon” to the Land Use committee of the church has been that we must re-vegetate the spoils area upstream as quickly as possible to help reduce erosion and control runoff. Recent runoff has already undermined the trail builder’s efforts of 7-8 years ago. One of the bridges over the creek bed which used to let you walk safely from bank to bank about 3’ above the level of the water has been completely undercut and has dropped into the stream bed. It is now in the process of being washed away.
Several of the trees which are found in the area which now appears to be stream bed have been undercut and killed by the water. In summer, it is depressing to look up at the largest trees which initially grew near the stream rather than in it and see that they have died or are dying. Apparently, some of the trees which grew up near the stream when it was small grew well when they were watered by the stream, but died when the entire root system was flooded for weeks at a time.
Photo 8
Washed out bridge
To the right upstream of the bridge you can see one of the “bubble holes” where the voice of the stream running under the ice was being amplified. The sheet ice over the water acts like a drum head. The ice boosts the noise level of the water over the rocks in the stream bed loud enough to drown out any sound of distant traffic and/or the possibility of hearing birds or small animals.
A couple of days ago, we had fifty degree weather and lots of rain. The runoff from the bare ground and parking areas upstream had filled the storm water catchments above the level of the second drain and then settled and froze over when the cold front came in. Water was still flowing freely under the ice at a rate strong enough to keep it from freezing solid even though the night time temperature was probably close to zero. The holes in the ice make interesting patterns in the otherwise smooth surface of the stream.
Photo 9
Moving water keeps the ice at bay
Note how the holes are elongated by the flowing water and how the ice has softened and become slushy where the moving water is in contact with it from below. The creek was “breathing” today. I could hear it flowing under the ice. It acts like a drum or the head of a banjo amplifying the sound of the water flowing in the channel beneath the ice.
Photo 10
Another “breathing hole” in the creek
The stream bed serves as a “highway” for game and seems to attract human traffic as well. Since I started going to this area, a much more pronounced pathway on the right side of the stream has emerged.
A small animal left fresh tracks on the surface of the iced-over stream. When I first looked at the picture I took of these tracks, you could hardly make them out. By enhancing the contrast, I got a clear view of them. I’m not sure these were made by a squirrel, but that is the most likely candidate. Which way was this animal going? Was it in a hurry?
Photo 11
Squirrel Tracks
In the upper meadow, as I glanced down the trail looking at the indentation in the field where people always walk along the edge of an overgrown fence line, I saw a flicker of black so quick I had to ask myself whether I’d seen a vole or field mouse, or whether the “floaters” in my eyes had blocked my vision of the trail because of a reflection. When I looked closely where I thought I’d seen the tiny rodent, I found no evidence of footprints, but the ground under the grasses which held up snow was hard and an animal keeping low to the ground and jumping across the trail might not leave any visible prints.
In more wooded places, overcrowding is so pronounced that a lot of the spindly young trees reaching toward the canopy for light have died. Vines accompany and probably enhance this process. I observed grape vines, poison ivy vines, and a common “creeper” type which I have yet to identify.
Photo 12
Aerial rootlets on a vine
These two pictures contrast a vine which has aerial root structures climbing a now dead tree, and a smooth barked vine on a tree nearby. In this part of the wooded area there are vines using every standing dead tree as a platform. Sometimes you can’t tell for sure whether or not the trees are dead in the summer because there is such a mass of leaves supported via the vine which has climbed to the very crown top of the now dead stem. My preliminary guess is that the tree with the aerial rooted vine is a black cherry and the one with the rounded smooth creeper is hawthorn.
Photo 13
Smooth stemmed vines climbing Hawthorn
The stream definitely “meanders” in this area scouring its banks when it swells and sinking back into its bed when it is dry. Note all the trees which are pushed over. This is in part remaining evidence of an ice storm we had a couple of years ago which loaded up everything and collapsed a lot of the young overcrowded stems. Some of these trees are still alive growing at odd angles and struggling not to be taken over by the vines which may have contributed in some cases to their initial collapse.
In the summer, you do not even see many of the downed trees because the foliage is too thick. In winter when people and larger animals walk the banks of the stream, branches which are “in the way” of the trail are frozen. They get snapped off as the humans and deer push through, making the trail more pronounced every year.
Photo 14
Creek Bend and old ice storm damage
There is a long standing “issue” regarding the survival of the construction road which was built to facilitate construction of a septic field. The only place on the 46 acre site which was approved for septic field use is at the lowest point at the south end of the property, only yards away from a broader stream which borders the northern edge of the Travis Pointe golf course. It is only a few feet from the surveyor’s stakes indicating the extent of the church property which are clearly visible from the clearing where the septic field was enlarged last summer.
When the religious education wing was built there was ongoing discussion and controversy over the zoning approvals for occupancy numbers in the classrooms. The economics of the situation is such that the congregation is obligated to try to “rent out” the space to a school of some kind during the week to help defray some of the construction costs. A decision to not include a commercial grade kitchen in the facility was taken in part because of the zoning regulations and the need to provide capacity for enough weekday occupants of the building to make renting it out a viable option.
In my personal opinion, the clay soils on the property do not “perk”
adequately for any septic field use, and the sewage treatment process which was
approved by the local zoning authorities probably should have been denied. When the first wave of construction occurred,
a proposal was made to extend the church sewage line to the sewage treatment facility
built by the Travis Pointe developers.
That extension would have filled the capacity of the Travis Pointe
plant, possibly eliminating the likelihood of one or two houses in
When the road was first built, the natural stream, which grew significantly when part of the northern end of the property went under asphalt, washed it out within one season. Some members of the congregation, as a volunteer effort, found and carried to the site a 20’ long piece of culvert a little over a foot in diameter. They planned to dig out the stream bed and bury it by hand, but the effort was never completed. When construction crews brought in equipment to enlarge the septic field, they got bogged down making their way across the stream bed. The 1’ pipe found lying by the side of the road was buried under the road on an ad hoc basis because it was there and cost the contractor nothing but the time to bury it. You can see the opening at the upstream end of the pipe just to the right of the base of the tree on the left. Unfortunately, it is probably less than a third of the diameter which would be required to keep the road from washing out again. The road runs across the stream left to right and you can see a 4’ wide cut. To the right across the road is a flat area which was packed down by road building equipment and used as a turn around. The grasses appear a bit “fragmented” because clumps of growth were pulled out or crushed
Photo 15
Creek cutting the road. Culvert intake hole at base of tree on the left.
A shot of a second trail bridge just upstream of the road shows the extent of expansion of the stream responsible for cutting the road again after less than a year since its reconstruction. The bridge which now appears to be touching the surface of the stream was installed a at least a foot above the normal water level when it was put in several years ago. Now it is resting at the surface of the frozen stream.
Photo 16
Bridge barely above water level
This bridge too is about to be washed out at both ends by the expansion of the stream. When I first crossed this bridge two years ago, the ends extended 2’ or more over the bank on either side of the creek bed. Now, the water is touching the bottom of the bridge and it is precariously perched on the undercut banks.
On my way back up the hill toward the church, I stopped to inspect some of the 50 white oak seedlings I planted with a dibble last year. I had put orange flags next to them so I could find them again. One was bent over close to the ground and had probably been trampled by someone walking in the area when the ground was soft. Another showed signs of predation. I’m not sure what ate this one, but some of the buds which would have produced the first big leaves in the spring are neatly nipped off. I’ve been told that the buds of white oak are attractive to deer. This tree will probably survive what happened to it this time, but if it keeps up year after year, it may die.
Photo 17
Nibbled young white oak
This walk in the cold took a little over an hour, but writing it up has taken several more hours.