the Way of the Turtle

Harvesting Seeds in the Pine Bush
Friday, October 22, 2010

Several times a year we have community service days at work where we spend the day doing work both at the school and volunteering in the Albany area community. Since I have a new group of student advisees this year, it was an opportunity to go to a new venue to work (my previous group was adamant that we continue to work with the same organization every time, in part because they often bought pizza for us afterwards) and I chose one that is near and dear to my heart, the Albany Pine Bush Preserve. Since moving to Albany in late 1999 I've run, biked, snowshoed, skied, and walked countless miles on the Pine Bush trails, so this was an excellent opportunity to give back a little bit.

Our job today was working with two staff members harvesting bush clover seeds for planting next spring in one of the areas where habitat restoration is being done, a process where the vast majority of plants in an area are removed, leaving behind essentially bare soil, to get rid of invasive species and allow re-establishing of native species that are important to the various endangered species that need the Pine Bush to survive - in this case, the Karner Blue butterfly, which as an adult feeds on the nectar from the bush clover blossoms. After meeting the staff at the Pine Bush Discovery Center we headed over to a field along Kings Road where we spent 2 1/2 hours harvesting seed materials, which will be run through equipment later to extract and clean the seeds to planting in the spring.

I was pleasantly surprised that the boys didn't grumble about the work being pretty boring, though they did get antsy toward the end, mainly because they were getting pretty hungry and in some cases a bit chilly. Before we headed back to the Discovery Center for lunch, the staff members weighed the bags we'd collected - turns out we gathered 63 lbs of material altogether, which is pretty darn impressive.

Back at the Discovery Center the staff explained why the Pine Bush is important (it's environmentally unique) and we got to see the box turtle they have there (rescued from someone who had been keeping him illegally.) The boys chowed down on the food we'd brought with us from the school and then spent a while checking out the displays and activities. I was glad to have the opportunity to see the inside of the Center - usually I'm there in the evening when it's closed - and chatted with the staff briefly about how tough it's been with all the budget problems NYS has been having, before we hopped back on the bus to return to school.

JMH