Outreach to Local Schools

Our new land gift has enabled us to broaden the use of our land as an outdoor classroom and to provide opportunities for students, as well as the general public, to become better educated about the local flora and fauna and the importance of preserving forest cover to protect water quality. We are currently working on several projects that provide “hands-on” learning opportunities for students to take a deeper dive into the local ecology of the Ten Mile Creek Watershed.

These are some of our ongoing and proposed projects:

• Trail maintenance

• Non-native invasive plant removal

• Setting up fenced deer exclosures to foster native tree seedling and sapling regeneration

• Installing nesting boxes for cavity nesting birds (e.g. bluebirds)

• Quarterly monitoring of the stream macro-invertebrate populations

• Continuing our inventory of the flora and fauna

In addition to these projects, our seasonal watershed walks in the spring and fall are an excellent opportunity for students to broaden their plant identifying skills, and our creek and roadside clean-up events in the spring and fall along West Old Baltimore Road are a great way for citizens to help keep trash and pollutants out of our streams and Little Seneca Lake Reservoir.