1 week Ago By gneese
Whether they were looking down at fire pink on the trailside or up at a blue jay soaring over trees, the sights of Enlow Fork Valley found an appreciative audience during Sunday’s 46th annual Spring Fling. The Association for Rural Conservation launched the walk in 1980, part of a wave of community efforts to protect local streams and nature areas. Attilia Schumaker of Sycamore, who now co-organizes the event, said it has let people know “what an extraordinary natural habitat we have in the area.
” It’s as far north as you’ll find the cerulean warbler, she said. The same is true of the blue-eyed Mary, a perennial sign of spring in the valley. The event was co-sponsored by the Ralph K.
Bell Bird Club and the Wheeling Creek Watershed Conservancy. A 8 a.m.
bird walk to collect numbers was part of the spring nesting count for the PA Bird Atlas 3, a five-year survey to map bird populations in Pennsylvania. Mary Grey found out about the walk 20 years ago from Larry Helgerman, her fellow guide on the nature walk later Sunday morning. She’s been coming to it ever since.
The blue-eyed Marys draw the most attention on the walks, scheduled at the time of spring when they carpet the forest floor, Grey said. “They’re coming out now and getting their life cycle in before the leaves fully come out in the trees, because once they’re shaded over, they can’t photosynthesize,” she said. Pointing out birds such as a yellow warbler, Grey instructed the crowd on how to keep the bird in their field of vision as it flit from tree to tree: spot it with the naked eye, keep it in your field of vision, then bring up the binoculars to see closer.
The yellow warbler — “fluorescent yellow, just head to toe” — caught the attention of Casey Kirsch of Canonsburg, who enjoyed getting to see bird varieties he can’t see at home. Getting an up-close view of swimming tadpoles was enjoyable, and even just having plants identified by expert guides. “I have an interest in them, but i didn’t know them like that,” he said.
“It’s just knowledgeable people that do it because they like it.” If not for people’s interest, the area would’ve been underwater, Schumaker said. Community pushback in the 1980s forced U.
S. Steel to abandon a plan to site a slurry pond in the valley as part of its coal manufacturing process. Instead, said co-organizer Colleen Nelson, U.
S. Steel changed course and built a dry dam near Majorsville. And the Enlow Fork Valley has now been set aside as State Game Lands 302.
As a science teacher, Schumaker did her own part to alert people to what could happen, bringing her eighth-grade students to the site to do macroinvertebrate counts in the stream before and after the area was undermined. Though counts have rebounded since, she said, she estimates they’re about 50% of what they were. She said the Spring Fling is a way for people to celebrate the unique nature they’ve been able to keep alive.
“It would have been a horrible injustice to the environment had it been destroyed, so we like to let everyone know it was actually saved, primarily because of the natural habitat we have in this particular valley,” she said. “That’s kind of why we do it. Greene County is pretty special — when it comes to habitat, when it comes to nature, for that matter, when it comes to people.
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