Join the staff at Asbury Woods in a search for salamanders April 12 from 7-9 p.m. at Brown’s Farm barn, 5774 Sterrettania Road.
Bring your flashlight, wear waterproof boots and be prepared for a 1-mile night hike.
Cost is $3 for members, $5 for nonmembers (adults and children 6 and older).
The second in a series of occasional profiles of birdwatchers who are from or spend a lot of time in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Bonnie Ginader/Contributed photo
Family: daughter, Aimee Gevirtz, and son, Geoff Ginader. Four grandchildren, one great-granddaughter.
Lives in: Millcreek Township
College: B.S., mathematics, Grove City College
Profession: RealtorR, Pennington Lines Real Estate.
Originally from: Erie
Favorite bird: Woodcock
Favorite places to bird in northwestern Pennsylvania: Presque Isle State Park, Erie Bluffs State Park, Siegel Marsh, Pymatuning State Park.
Rarest bird I’ve seen: Piping Plover
Take a free tour of the Audubon Center and Sanctuary in Jamestown, N.Y., on Jan. 19.
Free admission hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the center, 1600 Riverside Road
Jamestown, NY 14701, as part of Doors Open Jamestown. Reservations are not required.
The center features hands-on exhibits, live animals, a nature store, plus 5 miles of maintained trails for hiking or cross country skiing. Another big draw is Liberty, the center’s resident and non-releasable bald eagle.
For information, call (716) 569-2345 or visit the center’s website.
FYI: If you’re thinking about combining a trip to Audubon with a stop at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, sorry — RTPI is closed until Jan. 22 for computer and exhibit upgrades.
This mild winter has done more than merely let you kick your warm tootsies up instead of shoveling snow. Birds and animals at Presque Isle State Park and around the region don’t have to work as hard to survive.
It’s difficult enough trying to catch a steelhead in toe-deep, 70-degree water. Try doing it with baseball-sized black walnuts crashing down around you.
My wife and I dodged them Saturday at Boro Park in Girard. They didn’t seem to bother the steelhead, but then nothing bothered the steelhead, especially our flies. The walnuts did bother me, though.
These are heavy-duty, no-acorns-allowed-at-this-party nuts. When they detach from the tree, they announce themselves with a crash or thud, depending on what they hit. One very nearly hit my head, which I can’t imagine would have been good.
A few years ago we watched an industrious and clownish red squirrel separate the walnuts from their trees at Elk Creek Access, yards from where anglers lined the south wall at the edge of the parking area. The squirrel leaped from branch to branch, tree to tree, fast as those little legs could move.
It’s funny until a black walnut almost conks you in the melon.
Stunning night time-lapse photography from Crater Lake National Park. Did you know the sky could hold that many stars?
Crater Lake Under the Star -Reprocessed from Ben Canales on Vimeo.
A recent vacation took LJ and I to Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park. The scenery awed, the wildlife quickened the heartbeat, but images of the people we met linger, too:
1. The locals — as in northwestern Pennsylvanians. On the western end of Going to the Sun Road, a voice behind us at a turnout where our license plate was visible asked, “where in Pennsylvania?” Erie, we said. Girard, he replied. At Old Faithful, we dragged ourselves back to the vehicle for lunch and found a “hello” note under the wiper left by Waterford residents also spending the day in the park.
2. Everyone else. There was the couple from West Lafayette, Ind., spending two gloriously dry, warm nights at Many Glacier Hotel after camping in GNP and at Yellowstone. From our shared balcony, we watched a moose cow feed in the lake below us, soon joined by a massive bull, and finally by a calf. At a construction stop on Going to the Sun Road, all doors opened on a van with a Pennsylvania plate. A rental, it turns out; the four passengers were from Massachusetts, Florida, Illinois and California. I gave it one more try at a fuel station near Mammoth Hot Springs; a car had a Pa. plate, and so I asked. “Rental,” the driver said in a rich brogue. “I’m from the U.K.” I doubt he’s telling stories about the Pennsylvanian he talked to at the pump.
3. The most fun were the young hikers we chanced upon at transcendentally beautiful Bowman Lake in GNP, about 20 miles south of the Canadian border. They were soaked and cold, and one’s otherwise bare feet were patched by duct tape for blister protection. They’d come out of the wilderness hours early after a weeklong through-hike starting near Logan Pass, and wondered if we couldn’t drop them nearer Polebridge, a secluded crossroads where their ride would have to pass on the way to the appointed pickup site. We packed their gear and made room for them in the backseat, and no sooner had we started talking about their adventure than we made room on the tight road for a passing van they were pretty sure was their ride. “I think that’s my dad,” one said. We caught his attention, said hello, transferred the gear and bade them well. “God bless,” the second hiker told us with a smile. It was the same day we saw our first-ever spruce grouse and also met a backcountry rescue type who tried to put us onto a pack of wolves that roamed his valley. We never saw those wolves, but the day was wild in a way that couldn’t have been better.
Who are the memorable people you’ve met in your travels?
Back in 2006, opponents scuttled the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ plans to build a “nature inn” at Erie Bluffs State Park.
That hardly was the end of the matter for the DCNR.
The state’s first “nature inn” — that is, a $7.5 million, 18,500-square-foot, for-profit hotel on taxpayer-owned land — had its grand opening today at Bald Eagle State Park. Cost for rooms ranges from $110 to $300.
This is considered a pilot project. Sierra Club Pennsylvania indicated plans also have been discussed for an inn at Parker Dam State Park in Clearfield County. Earlier attempts to place them in S.B. Elliott State Park in Clearfield County and Prince Gallitzin State Park in Cambria County were shot down by the DCNR itself.
Pennsylvania’s state parks are held in trust for the people of the state. According to Section 27 of the state Constitution:
“The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and (a)esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”
These lands belong to residents, not to government officials. The notion that the money generated from inns and other private entities is necessary to fund the parks is a laughable, cyclical argument; once infrastructure is built, of course upkeep is needed. But the state parks and other public lands in their native (or at least second-growth) skins are the draw. Bald Eagle State Parks’ inn boasts of Blu-Ray players. How about blue sky?
I’ve stayed at aged hotels in our grand national parks. I plan to do so again. But I’d argue against any proposal to put up new buildings. Modern convenience isn’t the reason I visit national or state parks. The occasional glance around suggests other visitors aren’t in it for in-room movie rentals either.
Pay-to-play fees arrived at federal and state recreation sites over the past two decades. Pay-to-stay ought not to get the same chance in Pennsylvania’s public lands.
One of the pleasures of spending time in the outdoors is getting lost.
For some that means getting gone, vamoosing, being somewhere else. And those all are good things. Especially vamoosing.
But getting lost sometimes means truly getting lost — taking the path less traveled, followed by the road never before seen and the trail that really isn’t there. Those efforts invariably lead to places and sights you’ve never before encountered and make your world at once a little bigger and all the more unique.
