Mushrooms, trees, ceramics, rocks, ice cream, saplings, birds, milkweed balls, and more all came together for one big celebration at the Norwood Park Natural History Day, Sunday October 30. Over 200 attendees learned about the trees in the Park, what kind of mushrooms grow where (and even sampled some cooked up right on site), learned about watersheds and the importance of native plants, and did some non-native invasive removal.
21 Bird Species Spotted in Norwood Park on Morning Walk
Little Falls Creek Fails Macro Test; Stream Rated Poor.
Muddy water and a broken water main were the highlights of the Fall stream monitoring last Saturday, October 22. No sooner had our volunteers started to sample than the water started to rise and turn muddy. A woman passing by told us that there had been a water main break at a construction site upstream from our spot. With only three-quarters of the nettings complete, we abandon the water for safer ground.
Fecal Bacteria Monitoring Ends for Season
Thank you to our amazing volunteers for making this program possible and to Joe Barnes for coordinating the effort and publishing the data every week. The data from the final week was consistent with our findings through out the summer. Two sites on the Little Falls Branch pass, two failed and all three sites on the Willett Branch showed dangerously high levels. We are working with the WSSC to track the source of the fecal bacteria.
T-shirt Design Selected for Norwood Park History Day
We have a winner! The Norwood Park Natural History Day t-shirt design competition features Ginkgo, Redbud and Tulip Poplar leaves, and a Monarch Butterfly, as well as one of the well-loved merry-go-rounds at Norwood Park. Thank you to everyone who submitted art work and congratulations to winner Lucy O’Dowd
T-shirt Design Contest
Visiting Westbrook and Sumner Village
This week I had the pleasure of visiting two of our habitat restoration projects to see how the plants were holding up. The goal in these project was to restore native plants to the areas - not so much as a landscaping project, but to bring back the wildflowers and plants that would normally grow in the area. We didn’t need to remove many non-native invasives, but just replaced the existing grass with native plants. I am pleased to say that both projects are doing well; it’s hard to even imagine what they looked like before. And there were butterflies and bees!
The Green Acres Meadow is Blooming!
Cardinal flowers, bee balm and mountain mint are just some of the flowers blooming in the Green Acres meadow. Volunteers have been hard at work weeding, mulching and planting.
Trees are mulched! After experimenting with several different methods, we decided to add mulch rings to the base of our new trees to protect them from lawn mowers which have been banging up the trunks.
Bird Count shows 65 Species in Green Acres
Salt monitoring programs shows that effects are felt long after snow events
Volunteers testing creeks in the Little Falls watershed found that although salt readings in area creeks spiked to toxic levels after snow storms, they did not always return to safe levels after the events. Since November 2021, trained LFWA volunteers have tested 8 sites along the Minnehaha, Little Falls and Willett Branch creeks before and after snow storms as well as once a month in the warmer months. Two of the sites along the Little Falls Branch exceeded the threshold that freshwater aquatic life can tolerate over a period of three years even when there was recent storm. Only two sites consistently returned to safe levels after a storm.