In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Each day of the year I will post something here about nature. It may be any format, a photo, video, audio, sketch or entry from my nature journal. It could be a written piece. Each day I will connect to nature in some way and share it here by the end of that day. You can keep up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed or be notified by email. See all the 365 Nature posts.
This morning was my monthly restoration work at Pritchard Beach, the park near our house. The wet meadow has been living up to its name and has turned into a pool of clay with our record-setting rainy winter. I avoided it at first, instead crawling under dogwood branches to try and pull up Reed Canarygrass. I’m pretty sure the dogwood still has some of my hair gripped in its branches. I dug up a rewarding number of insects with the canarygrass roots and I found centipedes, wood lice, snails and even a plume moth.
Later I joined in the efforts to dig up blackberries so the newly sprouting lupine has room to grow. That was a muddy, mucky mess. I used a claw tool which I swung down like an ax, the only problem was it would inevitably get stuck in the muck or in the roots and when I yanked it back up it would come bringing a spray of mud with it. By the time I was done I had mud in my hair, splattered on my face and on my glasses. My boots gained an additional five pounds each with the mud caked on, I had to wash them off in the lake. It was worth the efforts however because I removed a lot of blackberry roots. Hopefully our efforts will allow the lupines to bloom into a beautiful, bug-filled meadow again this summer.
