Nature Hour and Sunnyside

Hats off to Kelly and Keith and the whole team at the Lancaster Conservancy for producing their Nature Hour series! What an awesome resource! Click the links to check out what’s on offer for the rest of winter!

The January 8 installment featured Dr. Dan Ardia, a biology professor at Franklin and Marshall College who studies habitat disturbance and how wildlife responds. His presentation gave an overview of his field of study and research on Conservancy properties where he and his team are trying to determine how habitat supports biodiversity and how we can care for these spaces in order to strengthen bird and mammal populations. 

How cool is it to interact with space and species like Dan and his team do? I absolutely love getting out and noticing patterns in behavior or getting the chance to see something cool and or/new, but Dan and folks like him take it to a whole new level. I mean, really - their job is to literally learn about beautiful spaces and the awesome things that live and travel through those spaces.

While not really discussed during the presentation, Dr. Ardia has also conducted research on the Sunnyside Peninsula within the proposed 70-acre nature preserve which surrounds Lake Lancaster, a non-Conservancy property that I see from the water all of the time.

Concerned about the increased human activity and infrastructure that will accompany the establishment of this preserve and the proposed 80-house development on Sunnyside just upstream, I asked Dr. Ardia his thoughts about possible impacts on wildlife.  

While I was hoping that he would say impacts would be minimal, it didn’t hear that. To be clear, he didn’t sound any alarms, either, and did not explicitly say what he thought the effects on Sunnyside would be.

Through the course of his talk, however, he did touch on possible ways that some birds and mammals react to increased human activity. These include a shift from diurnal to nocturnal patterns of activity and(?) or moving to other locations. Fox and deer behavior is an example of the former and I would imagine that the sizable geese population that hangs on the lake may be a species that seeks out other space if things get too busy. Bummer. As I write this there are probably thousands of geese out on the lake and with trails and bikes and hikers and people, it's hard to imagine that the geese will want to hang in the numbers that they do currently. But, hey, I have no idea. 

I do know that change is coming to Sunnyside. I just hope we can figure out how to do everything that is planned with minimal impacts on all of the awesome creatures that currently live there. People, too.

Geese of Lake Lancaster