Thursday, July 20, 2006

Natural History


Right now, natural history blogs on the Internet are becoming quite popular. Jim McCormac's Ohio Birding Blog has inspired me to embrace this phenomenon. I'll blog a bit on my natural history travels. Now that I've received my camera back from Canon factory service, I'll be able to capture a few sparkling moments in the field, and hopefully adorn this blog with snapshots of my adventures. Isn't amazing that I get paid for this stuff? Very Cool.

This morning (I am writing this blog at 3:51 a.m....too many tacos at Adobe Gilas last evening) I'll be going to Singer Lake Bog. This jewel of a site is owned and managed by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Jim Bissell, curator of botany, worked his magic throughout the 1990's and early 2000's to acquire a patchwork of land parcels to protect this site. The site contains several natural kettlehole lakes, left when large ice blocks were surrounded by glacial outwash over 15000 years ago. These blocks melted, the depressions filled with water, and the slow course of succession began, resulting in today's bog meadows, shrub swamps, and a little open water. I've never been to this site in Summit County, but used to drive by in wonderment when I was a seasonal for DNAP in 1999 on my way to pull purple loosestrife at Jackson Bog.

Here is an aerial view of Singer Lake. It is incredible that this gem was left untouched. In recent years, there has been some encroachment from homes, but Bissell's work has ensured that this area will retain it's biological integrity for some time.

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