February Updates

Mike has found an arborist to take down and remove the two big Siberian Elm trees on the south side of the field station lot. They produce thousands of seeds every year and are too big for us to cut down with our chainsaws. We could kill them with drill and fill but when they died and fell down they might hit something they shouldn’t, like the house or the shed or Dave Krueger’s Christmas trees.

Rodolfo, Denny, Sarah, and Mike burned most of the brush piles in Super Sumac. There are some left on the south edge east edges. They plan to burn more when weather permits. We need snow on the ground as a safety factor but not on the piles because that makes it too hard to get them lit.  You can see what the area looks like now in the photo below.

On Thursday Mike and Rodolfo interviewed for a person to work at Ives this summer. There were four candidates.

On Tuesday David Mindell, who owns PlantWise, a commercial restoration company, will visit the fen to check out the area we want to clear with the stimulus funds. We expect that he will be able to clear the north end of the central fen and the south end as far as Property Line Ditch but probably won’t get to Siberian Elmia, which isn’t high priority anyway.

The 30 Delta Airlines employees who were going to come on April 17 have turned into 30 employees each day who will come on April 21-23. They will fly into Detroit in the morning, pull some garlic mustard, eat at the field station, and then pull some more garlic mustard before flying home in the afternoon. Possible areas for them to work are the north end of the floodplain forest where we work every year, the areas north and south of the path behind the field station, the area near Sutton Road where we cut honeysuckle the first Saturday in June last year, and the area across the river where the Heartleaf Skullcap grows. I will scout out the potential areas a few days before they get here. We might work two areas each day since we will be eating lunch at the field station.

We are still expecting an Americorps crew from the end of March to the beginning of June, mainly to help with prescribed burns, follow-up on the areas cleared by David Mindell, and do some torch burns.

Rodolfo hired Sarah Cech to work with him and Denny at Grand River this summer. She is from Ohio and is spending the week in Jackson while she is working here.

Ten Ohio State students are coming to Ives for alternate break from June 12-19. They will mainly be working at Grand River but we can probably get them for a day if we want to do a weekday workday.

Circle K is signed up for honeysuckle cutting on March 20.

We might cut honeysuckle on March 13. I see a 40° in the forecast for next week and hopefully it the weather will be OK the week after that.

We will have a display at Tecumseh Earth Day on April 17.