Plants of Fenner Nature Center

In today's post, Brock Feltman catalogs plants of Fenner Nature Center and the various purposes they serve for humans.

Marisa VanDamme and I are Fisheries and Wildlife majors at Michigan State University. Most of our classes are based around the science and management aspects of natural resources; however, this semester we took a writing class titled: WRA 341 Nature, Environment, and Travel Writing. This class represented one of the few opportunities we had to be creative and combine our love for the outdoors with the process of writing.

During the class, we were assigned a project where we had to describe a particular ‘space’ in a unique way. We decided to map Baker Woodlot, a natural area on MSU’s campus, in terms of what plants were there and how they were traditionally used for food, medicine, fiber, tea, etc. Not only was it fun to hike the woodlot and identify the plants, the knowledge that we gained through completing the project applies to natural areas outside of Baker Woodlot as well.

On a recent hike in Fenner Nature Center, we were inspired to catalog plants in a similar fashion.  In this sense, we hope to enhance the way users experience their environment while hiking and observing these plants.

                 

Dandelion – Taraxacum officinale

ID: Leaves have sharp, irregular lobes. Single Yellow Flowers.

Add young leaves to salad or boil them to eat.  Young flowers can be battered and fried.

Wood Nettle – Laportea canadensis

ID- Slender clusters in leaf axils.  Toothed leaves and stinging hairs.  Leaves long stalked with alternate arrangement.

Edible cooked greens.  Soup and tea can be made from young leaves and shoots.

Lamb’s Ear – Stachys byzantina

ID: Fuzzy/velvety texture.  Grows to about a foot tall and leaves are arranged in whorls around an axis

Nature’s Band-Aid and toilet paper.

Trillium – Trillium grandiflorum

ID: An ephemeral that blooms in spring.  Three petal flowers can be white or light pink/purple. 

Early leaves can be cooked and eaten.  Root has many medicinal uses and can be grated and used in eardrops, or ingested to cure menstrual and other abdominal cramps.

American Chestnut - Castanea dentate

ID: Deciduous tree with saw-toothed leaves that are 5 to 8 in. long.

Produces chestnuts that are edible raw or roasted; wood is excellent for lumber.

White Oak - Quercus alba

ID: Leaves are simple with many lobes and smooth edges.  Trees grow up to 24 meters (80ft). 

Lumber used in ships, furniture, flooring, and barrel-making.  Vernors ages their ginger ale in white oak barrels.  Bark is used for tanning leather.  Acorns can be eaten raw, roasted, boiled and dried. 

Pollinator Garden

In today's post, Andrea Lazarri talks about the new pollinator garden and its growth throughout the season. (NOTE: This post was written in the early spring of 2013. Check out the plants that are in bloom today!)

If you’ve spent any time at Fenner Nature Center in the past few months, you’ve probably noticed the beginnings of a brand new pollinator garden here. This garden was made possible by the work of master gardeners, Fenner employees, interns, volunteers, stewardship workers, and even campers. While it may look dead and drab right now, I can’t wait to see how it looks in the upcoming months.

As the environmental education intern here this semester, I’ve been working on interpretive signage for the pollinator garden. These signs, when complete, will go in the garden and provide valuable information on some of the plants and pollinators you may find there.

Pollinator gardens are important anywhere. But in an urban setting like Lansing, they are especially important. A variety of plants and animals count on pollinator species like bees and butterflies for resources like food and shelter. These pollinators help plants to reproduce, giving many animals a place to live. By helping plants spread and grow, they also provide a food source for many animals – even humans! Did you know that one third of all the food we eat is pollinated by honey bees? This spring, when the snow begins to melt and plants begin to bloom, be sure to drop by and check out what’s going on at Fenner Nature Center’s pollinator garden. You’re sure to be amazed by all the beautiful plants and creatures you’re bound to see.

The Morning Cloak Butterfly

In today's post, David Martin talks about the arrival of spring

 with the habits of the Morning Cloak butterfly.

Bird enthusiasts will often claim that spring has finally arrived once certain birds migrate back to Michigan, like the American Robin, the Red-Winged Blackbird, or the Sandhill Crane. However, the emergence of a much smaller winged creature might actually be a better harbinger of warmer weather – the Mourning Cloak butterfly.

The Mourning Cloak butterfly is

the earliest butterfly you can see at Fenner in the springtime.

The Mourning Cloak butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa) is one of the toughest butterflies in Michigan. Unlike many other species of butterflies, the Mourning Cloak butterfly overwinters at Fenner instead of migrating south. It nestles into dense brush, behind loose tree bark, or even under roof shingles to survive the cold winter temperatures. When the daylight hours start to get longer, the Mourning Cloak butterfly will emerge from its hibernation, often when snow still is on the ground. You may even see them at Fenner in late March.

The Mourning Cloak butterfly has large, dark colored wings that soak up sunrays and keep them warm on the chilly spring days. You can see them in sunny areas with their wings outspread and droopily relaxed, trying to warm up their cold wings before flying. This behavior is called “basking”. The bottom sides of its wings are a mottled brown and gray color that helps it blend into its habitat and camouflage it from predators.

Mourning Cloak butterfly basking

on a newly budding branch in early April 2012.

In the early spring, the Mourning Cloak butterfly emerges and begins to look for its springtime meal of tree sap. It likes the same sugar maple sap collected at Fenner during the Maple Syrup Festival. The Mourning Cloak butterfly also likes the sap of many other trees, especially oak tree sap – definitely not the kind you would put on your pancakes! As the sap slows later in the spring and other sources of food emerge, the Mourning Cloak butterfly will get its nutrients from rotting fruit and sometimes flower nectar. Like many types of butterflies, the Mourning Cloak will also land on certain types of damp soil to lick up minerals and even do the same with animal droppings. This behavior is called “puddling”.

Mourning Cloak butterfly puddling

on the gravel portion of a trail at Fenner.

When spring turns to summer and the weather gets hot and dry, the Mourning Cloak butterfly will find a good place to hide away and go into a type of summer hibernation called “aestivation”. As the weather cools in the late summer and autumn, the Mourning Cloak butterfly emerges again to feast on the late summer fruits before finding a place to nestle down for winter. It is not uncommon to see this butterfly in October or early November at Fenner, especially if we have mild and damp fall weather.

The bottom side of the Mourning Cloak butterfly’s 

wings are patterned to provide camouflage to hide it from predators.

In addition to its early spring emergence and late fall hibernation, the Mourning Cloak butterfly tops the record books in a couple other ways. It has a wingspan between 3 to 4 inches, making it one of the larger butterflies you may see at Fenner. For comparison, the Monarch butterfly has a similar wingspan size. The Mourning Cloak butterfly also has one of the longest lifespans of butterflies and can live up to a year. Most will not winter over twice, but they do outlive most of their butterfly counterparts.

This Mourning Cloak butterfly photographed in the early spring 

has tattered wings and probably overwintered at Fenner from the previous autumn.

You can find Mourning Cloak butterflies all over Fenner, but they prefer the more wooded areas because those contain their source of food. Just east of the Woodland Pond along the east side of the Tamarack Trail, there is a low area where it stays damp much of the spring and fall. There are plenty of the Mourning Cloak’s favorite trees in this area and you can almost always find a few of this type of butterfly flitting around or sunning themselves in the spring or fall. Some of them are very friendly and may even land on your clothing if it is a color similar to the tree bark!

Insects of the Spring and Summer Seasons!

In today's post, David Martin talks about the emergence of the warmer seasons and the tiny winged creatures that we can expect to see at Fenner!

As winter finally releases its hold on us, and spring arrives, I start to get the itch for the warmer days that soon will arrive and the amazing little creatures that will begin emerging at Fenner.  While many people frequent Fenner for its diversity of birds, I love the equally diverse, albeit much smaller, winged creatures that also call Fenner home – dragonflies and butterflies.

Fenner has good habitat for both types of insects with its open fields, wooded ponds, and deciduous and coniferous forests.  From mid-March to early November you can find a large number of butterflies around the grounds, but the dragonflies wait until a bit later in the spring to emerge.  The first butterfly tends to be the Mourning Cloak butterfly, a Michigan native that overwinters under the bark of dead trees.  You can almost always find a dark-brown Mourning Cloak just to the east of the Woodland Pond.  Soon afterward, the Eastern Comma and Question Mark butterflies start to emerge in the wooded areas and along the edges of the fields.  The Red Admiral butterfly with its bright red stripes on dark wings also can be found in early spring and some years they will seem to be everywhere at Fenner in large numbers.

  (Question Mark butterfly, courtesy of David Martin)

As spring slowly turns to summer, the dragonflies start to emerge.  You see them about the time you start seeing the pesky mosquitoes on which they feast throughout the summer arrive.  At Fenner, the small Dot-Tailed Whiteface dragonfly and the large Common Green Darner probably will be the first dragonflies you will encounter.  Several different species of Clubtail dragonflies will also emerge in late May and early June, but soon will be gone until next year.  The large Mosaic Darner dragonflies, like the Green-Striped Darner and the Lance-Tipped Darner, start arriving and will hang around until September.  They like to patrol the fields for meals and frequent the ponds for laying their eggs.

In May and June the variety of butterflies explodes.  The fantastically colored American and Painted Lady butterflies arrive.  You can see them in the big field flitting among the wildflowers.  The ubiquitous orange and black Monarch butterfly also starts to make itself known along with its doppelganger, the Viceroy butterfly that mimics the Monarch in order to take advantage of its reputation as a bad-tasting meal.  Tiny Skippers of species too numerous to name and the miniscule Summer Azure butterflies zip by nearly unnoticed because of their diminutive size.  The American Copper, equally as small, grabs your attention with its bright orange on its upper wings.

   (Viceroy butterfly, courtesy of David Martin)

Summer brings with it several similar species of Skimmer dragonflies.  The aptly named Twelve Spotted Skimmer, Widow Skimmer, White-Tailed Skimmer, and Slaty Skimmer begin their summer-long flights at Fenner in mid-June.  The magnificently ornate wings of the Calico and Halloween Pennant dragonflies look almost like stained glass windows.  In mid-July the Meadowhawk dragonflies emerge and quickly dominate the fields at Fenner for the rest of the summer.  Several species of Meadowhawk dragonflies with names like Ruby, White-Faced, Autumn, and Cherry-Faced quickly outnumber most other dragonflies at Fenner.

The summer months also welcome large Swallowtail butterflies.  The yellow and black Eastern Tiger Swallowtail will probably be the largest butterfly you see at Fenner, but occasionally the reclusive Giant Swallowtail will flit by with its never-stopping, erratic flight pattern.  Black Swallowtail and Spicebush Swallowtail butterflies also frequent the wildflowers in fields.  As summer slowly turns to autumn, the wildly spotted and colorful Common Buckeye butterfly arrives and seems to fit right in with the changing foliage.  The Mourning Cloak butterflies from the early spring show up again in the cooler weather that they prefer.

Occasionally, Fenner even hosts a few special guests.  In the spring of 2012, I happened to photograph a number of Darner dragonflies that I could not identify at first.  Their species, the Spatterdock Darner, generally does not venture this far north, so my books did not show them in this area.  Their bright blue bodies and eyes were quite the sight to see.  In the late summer of 2012, I caught some fleeting photographs of a very special guest, a Laura’s Clubtail dragonfly.  These dragonflies are a special interest species in Michigan and are an endangered species in Canada.  I only captured a few photos, but this encounter was probably an once-in-a-lifetime experience.

 (Spatterdock Darner, courtesy of David Martin)

 

The next time you visit Fenner in warm weather, make sure to look out for the little winged creatures that play a vital role in our ecosystem.

Fenner Volunteerism and Development: Why I give to Fenner Conservancy.

In today's post, Mark Ledebuhr, a long-standing volunteer and supporter of Fenner Conservancy shares why he gives back so much to Fenner and to his community.

I don’t talk about this often, but something happened recently that inspired me to share my motivations for serving the Fenner community.

Mid-January I was at the Stewardship Network annual conference in East Lansing, looking around at the crowd of about 400 people. About 1/3 of them were professionals. The rest were simply private citizens, so passionate about improving their environment that in some cases they came hundreds of miles to improve their land stewardship knowledge and skills. Sitting in that group it seemed obvious that someone would want to be part of such a positive, pro-active group, yet the attendance numbered in the hundreds, not millions. Why? As I scanned the crowd, two things become fairly obvious quickly: this crowd of environmentally aware, eager land stewards are a) fairly educated and affluent, and b) not ethnically diverse. One of the keynote speakers even commented on the lack of diversity and the need for us to change that. He was right. Environmental awareness is everyone’s birthright!

The next weekend I was at the Auto Show in Detroit. The 100,000+ people that day were definitely diverse; in fact it was one of the most diverse crowds I’ve seen in a long time.

Why the disparity? I would argue two things: Access and Tradition. Cars are a part of everyone’s life, and the value proposition is universally clear: transportation, entertainment, a show of status. How many people can state such a clear value proposition about what nature and environment mean to them? There are so many of us never really take the opportunity to know nature. Too many children these days grow up with a disconnection from their natural world, and you can’t value something that you have no connection to. When we miss the opportunity to instill this connection, this wonder, in every child, we are all poorer for it.

I had the fortune of growing up at the edge of suburbia with miles of woods and swamp literally out the back door. I can no more envision a world without salamanders, crayfish, wild plums, and grouse than I could envision a world without roads and skyscrapers. Because of my experiences as a child and as a conservationist, I want every child to have access, to develop a personal connection to the diversity and wonder of nature. Environmental awareness is every bit as critical a skill in modern society as reading, writing and arithmetic- but it can’t be taught wholly in a classroom. Growing up without environmental awareness is like eating white bread- you’ll get by on it but it doesn’t really sustain you over the long haul. And, eventually, if that’s all you eat, you might become really sick. Where will our 13,700+ urban children in Lansing learn to connect with Nature? Who will lead them?

They can get it at Fenner. It’s not just kids. Nearly every Lansing area resident I talk with has a “Fenner Moment”- something positive that happened to them at Fenner, sometime in their life, which in some way made their life better.

Most residents in the greater Lansing region still don’t know that Fenner is a Public-Private partnership; leveraging scarce tax dollars into bigger impact with community support. I am proud Lansing supports this critical component of our community with tax dollars. And I am proud to do more. I teach a fishing class at the nature center in the summer, fix things around the center, and help out with festivals. I’m also a member of Fenner Conservancy’s Development Committee. My wife and I make annual donations, she serves on the board, and also volunteers in the Explore Store. It sounds like a lot, but it takes a lot. We don’t do it for praise; we do it because it is making a difference.

We are only two among hundreds of volunteers and donors that support the staff and programming - the heartbeat of this organization. Fenner is moving forward and needs your support more than ever.

Please, take stock of your time, talent, and perhaps your treasure, and engage deeper if you can- it’s worth it.