Ohio's Prairies Featured in the Columbus Dispatch

You may have caught my post on Ohio's remnant cemetery State Nature Preserves in Madison County. Steve Stephens, a travel columnist for the Columbus Dispatch, has a great article, including awesome photographs, in today's edition of the paper:

Fruited plains: Small pieces of once-vast prairie thrive in Ohio

Tom

My First T.V. Interview- Gypsy Moths at Highbanks Metropark Revisited

Well, this video pretty much tells it all. Thanks to our local Metropark District and Peg Hanley, whom happened to see my writeup of the Gypsy Moth infestation at Highbanks Metropark, The Ohio Nature Blog and I were featured last evening on our local T.V. Station. Ben Gelber, a fine meteorologist with Channel 4, does environmental stories- stories that typically don't get airtime on the local news.

Anyways, this all happened very fast, and I was pretty nervous and excited all at the same time. I think the video footage from June really added to the story, since quite a bit of the forest has started to leaf out once again, plus, the defoliation is best appreciated on a sunny day. Yesterday was gray and rainy.

Here's the the footage that I took that was featured on Channel 4:



The bottom line here? What we nature bloggers do is really important- In the past week, two stories have made it to the mainstream central Ohio media. First it was Pinky, then this story about the gypsy moth defoliation at Highbanks Metropark. Thanks Ben for taking an interest in environmental news and bringing it to the mainstream.

Tom

Ohio Prairie Article by the Akron Beacon Journal

For those of you who regularly visit the "blog", you know that most of my posts detail some animal or plant I have observed in the field. The local media does cover natural history from time to time, and I thought that I could start highlighting various stories about nature that appear in Ohio's newspapers. The Akron Beacon Journal recently published such an article about Ohio's prairie past. It is a good read. The article can be accessed here: High praise for prairies

Ohio had several grassland areas called prairies when the first settlers reached this state. A very few of these areas still exist today. In addition, Ohio also is the home to prairie-like habitats called wet meadows dominated by sedges rather than grasses, which make up prairies. For more about a wet meadow that I have studied, check out The Ohio Department of Natural Resources prairie education website here:Ohio Prairie Interviews. There are several informative interviews that detail the people behind the management of a state nature preserve.

Tom