Page 20 – Virginia Outdoors Foundation

Turkey Island Creek, Henrico County

The James River Association (JRA) wants to help Virginians get to know the river better, one paddle at a time. That’s why, in partnership with the Capital Region Land Conservancy and VOF, JRA has acquired a 12-acre parcel along Turkey Island Creek just before it flows into the James, meeting up with the river right across from the Presquile National Wildlife Refuge.

JRA is developing a canoe and kayak launch on the site, which lies in an area where river access is scarce, but natural views abundant. “It’s really a wonderful stretch leading up to the river, and it compliments Presquile perfectly,” says Justin Doyle, JRA’s Community Conservation Manager. “Once you approach the mouth of the James from the creek, the sky really opens up and you can see a lot of territory. It’s a great birding spot.”

The Virginia Capital Trail passes by or through the site for nearly two miles, and there are plans to create trails and other amenities for cyclists, giving them access to the creek and riverbanks, as well. The parcel contributes to roughly 1,000 acres of land protected in the area by conservation easements. Presquile National Wildlife Refuge provides an additional 1,300 acres of pristine habitat on the other side of the river.

JRA is planning to improve the existing driveway and to install rubber matting to improve traction for paddlers getting in and out of the creek. They will also provide interpretive signage about the area’s natural and cultural resources.

“There was some archaeological survey work done in 2013 that shows that the site was likely used by humans throughout history,” Doyle says. “If you’re standing on the bank, you can see how easy water access there must have been. It’s always been the logical place for humans to get on the water.”

The property was until recently part of the privately owned Malvern Hill Farm, an 878-acre property encompassing farmland and historic battlefields in Henrico and Charles City County. The owners protected a portion of the farm with an open-space easement deeded to VOF in 2001. They then transferred ownership to the National Park Service, which manages the land as part of the Richmond National Battlefield Park.

The smaller parcels to the south side of Route 5 and fronting on Turkey Island Creek were left out of that agreement, but JRA saw the potential for river access, and VOF was able to help, using a $100,000 grant from its Preservation Trust Fund to enable the Capital Region Land Conservancy (CRLC) to acquire the entire Malvern Farm property. CRLC then transferred ownership of the parcels along Turkey Island Creek to JRA.

While waiting for permits on improvements, JRA is organizing two guided canoe trips (the first leaving at 3:00pm and the second at 5:30pm) on the first Wednesday of each month. For more information and to register, check out their website.

Cultural history fellow researching Bull Run Mountains’ peopled past

The seemingly untouched wilderness at the Bull Run Mountains Natural Area Preserve holds secrets. If you look carefully, you might notice some forest stands that are younger than others, evidence of long grown-over agricultural fields. You might come upon remnants of dwellings, or a group of gravestones poking up from the forest floor.

Evidence of people who settled in the mountains long before it became a preserve, these sites are waiting to be deciphered, their hidden histories yet to be revealed. BRMNAP’s cultural history fellow, Barinaale Dube, is working to uncover some of those histories for the rest of us. Specifically, the history of free Black settlement in the mountains, beginning in the 1820s.

Dube is working with Joe Villari, preserve manager, Karen White, president of the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County, and Patrick O’Neil, NOVA Chapter head of the Archeological Society of Virginia and associate professor at NVCC. She is sifting through slave schedules, receipts for payments, Civil War soldier registers, census documents and deeds, images from aerial photos and oral histories from neighbors and descendants, in order to piece together the stories of this unresearched community.

An economics major with minors in classics and Africana Studies at Howard University, Dube says her fields of study have helped prepare her to do this work.

“Economics is about figuring out what resources you have and making them work for you, and classics gives me the tools I need to observe and understand the context of what I’m seeing,” she says. Her coursework in Africana Studies also makes her especially attuned to the untold stories of the Black families who resided on the mountain.

“I want to break down the lives of these people and give them their own narrative, outside of the lens of colonialism and imperialism,” she says.

Revealing their secrets, she states, is a way to reclaim valuable histories and practices. “I’ve really been influenced by the work of Wangari Muta Maathai,” she says, a Kenyan environmental activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize. “She was able to reclaim environmentally conscious cultural practices. She advocated for them and integrated them into her work.”

Like Maathai’s reclaiming of her own cultural history, Dube hopes to reveal some of what might have been lost, until now, on Bull Run Mountain. “These cultural practices are so valuable. We need to find them and share them; otherwise we lose so much.”

Dube is posting her progress on the Bull Run Mountains Blog, where you can see the work that she and others are doing to uncover the secrets of the Preserve.

Insects, the Apocalypse, and Everything In General

Hello everyone! It seems like this summer has gone by in a flash! I am already done with my trapping and have continued on to insect identification. Being out in the mountains every week was such a fantastic experience, and I am definitely going to miss this view (even if the view is 102 degrees out…)

My favorite things about field work this summer were:

The abundance of frogs I found
Getting to meet some wonderful people and volunteers who appreciate the Preserve
SEEING ALL OF THE BUGS AT THE PRESERVE! For examples of all the fantastic finds, check out my #ScienceFellowshipSaturday posts on the Preserve’s Instagram or read my last blog post.

My last day of field work was super intense! I hiked a 9-mile circuit in 98 degrees and finished during the onset of a summer thunderstorm – talk about going out with a bang!

Since field work is over, I have shifted focus to identification and analysis of the specimens I have collected over the past several weeks. It’s nice to be working back in air conditioning. At the end of this project there will be information on which species are found in Catharpin creek (hint, it’s a super healthy creek!), lots of terrestrial insect analysis (ant species density, ground beetle presence, the MASSIVE amount of daddy longlegs that found their way into my traps- yes I know they’re not insects), and some good, old fashioned rows and rows and rows of data!

I have found three absolutely vital things that help me through insect identification:

- - Tea
  - Three entomology dictionaries
  - My cat on my lap!

My cat has to stay on my lap, though, as he has displayed an ALARMING and impassioned desire to consume ethanol-soaked insects. I have no idea the potential that such a snack holds for him, as I do not think (personally, as a human) they are all that appetizing. Entomophagy (the practice of eating insects) is supposed to be the new “thing” though, so liquor infused insects may replace liquor infused chocolates!

The 6th Mass Extinction

Speaking of insects, I would like to speak briefly on the 6^th mass extinction event that is currently happening on earth. Pesticides, urbanization, climate change, and other factors are causing insect species mass to decrease by 2.5% each year. This may seem hard to visualize, but insects actually make up 17x the mass of all humans on earth. To avoid calculating how many insects we lose each year, I’ll convert it to humans. The collective mass of all humans is 17 million tons. 2.5% of that is 425,000 tons. There are about 15.38 humans in one ton: 15.38 x 425,000 = 6,538,455 people. That’s just two million less than the population of Sweden- and insects are WAY better for the environment than we are.

Insects are fundamental ecological cornerstones of agriculture, medicine (we have a faster way to develop vaccines thanks to an insect protein!), and maintaining ecology. They perform various ecological roles, from breaking down dead tissue, recycling nutrients, being a food source for other animals in the environment, and pollinating! It is important to remember how necessary these creatures are for our environment. I know a lot of us have a knee jerk instinct to kill the spider in our bathroom or apply heavy pesticides to our yards (and don’t get me started on green lawns…), but right now we are only in the beginning of this extinction, and drastic steps must be taken to prevent a total insect wipe-out within the next century.

The work I am doing at Bull Run Mountains Natural Area Preserve is necessary to establish a baseline for species presence and density. The data I am collecting now may be compared to data acquired from next year, next decade, or next century as scientists observe ecological trends over time. I can’t put into words how excited I am for my research to be used in the future, and to share it all with you in just a couple of weeks.

I am also looking forward to my upcoming (drum roll please………) ENTOMOLOGY WALKS! I will be leading interactive guided hikes for groups on our South Section trail system in August! I will be exhibiting a few different trapping techniques to find bugs in different environments, talk about insect plant ecology, insect presence on the Preserve and what that potentially means about larger species presence, and some fun bug facts. Keep an eye on the Preserve’s Facebook page for the advertisement of these hikes!

Lastly, I will leave you with one of my favorite bug facts. This fact is inspired by the movie I recently watched, the Disney classic “A Bug’s Life.” I noticed that in the movie, the queen ant keeps an aphid as a pet- so cute! Well, in real life, ants also keep aphids as “pets”, or rather, they tend to them and maintain them because the aphids secrete a sugary substance that the ants eat!

As always, if anyone has any bug questions or needs an ID, you can reach out to me at meredith.hart16@gmail.com. I have had a few ID requests come in and it has been SO much fun sending them back. I love to see the insect enthusiasm! Especially for those MANTIDS, right? I know I’m not the only one seeing these gorgeous bugs meandering around – I have seen praying mantids, Carolina mantids, and Chinese mantids on the preserve!

Well, this looks like it for now everyone- be kind to bugs and have a fantastic week!

Filling in the Gaps; African American Genealogical Work in the Bull Run Mountains

In a conversation with Karen White, the incredible and extremely skilled co-founder of the African American History Association of Fauquier Country, I learned how she got into the work she currently finds herself in. 35 years ago, she took her young daughter into the New Leaf book store in Warrenton, looking for books that looked like herself and her children. The store owner directed her to where she could find what she was looking for, and there she stumbled upon a book that would start her down a journey that she’s still on. As she thumbed through the selection of books, she stumbled upon an abstract of birth records, by Joan Peters. Looking through this book, she found her grandmother’s two sisters. Thus began the deep and winding journey into her family’s history.

In the genealogical work that I’ve been doing for the Preserve so far, I’ve learned a couple of things. Because of the composition of the United States at that time, and specifically Virginia, I’ve had to be very creative when looking for information about African American people. Primarily because legally, African Americans were viewed and legislated as property.

For example, one of my research subjects, the Cole Family appears on the 1830 census as free people, but don’t show up on any other previous census logs. If they were enslaved, they were not logged on their own, but essentially in the inventory of a white person. Meaning that a lot of my information ends up coming from various receipts, deeds, letters, and other mediums where these people are mentioned offhandedly.

Even after the United States official end to chattel enslavement, there were people in my home state of Texas, that did not know that they’d been released from enslavement until 2 years later, on the day now known as Juneteenth. Because emotions, personal opinions and ideology cannot be legislated to change, a white male enslaver by the name of Andrew Fenton, squats in the home of Hampton Cole, a free black man who was working for the Confederacy.

When Cole returns home after the war, Fenton threatens to shoot him if he dares come back and try and reclaim the land he bought and the house he built. We only know this because of correspondence we see sent from one Confederate lieutenant to his superior on Cole’s behalf.

As my conversation with Ms. White continued, she asserted that idea that African Americans cannot ever be successful in their own genealogical work is a myth. She just had to learn where and how to look. Because she only found her grandmother’s sisters and not her grandmother herself in the abstract, she went to the foreword and found out that Virginia did not have to record births after 1896 and didn’t start again until 1912 or 1913. Her grandmother was born in 1896, explaining why she did not appear in the abstract. She went to family gatherings and started talking to older members and collecting information as well. It was actually at the 80^th birthday of a family member that she met the co-founder, because they shared that relative.

Decades later, the work that began with finding out about their personal histories, provided opportunities for other Black people to find out about their own families, and furthermore, for this Black person to discover details about a family she doesn’t even belong to. Ms. White explains that, “any group of people that could survived that they had survived needed to be put on up pedestals, and that we need to learn how to follow in their footsteps of having that strength and endurance. So with that, I just felt like I should share this information because it’s not just my family, but everybody’s family and everybody’s family is equally important.”

Although the words are not my own, the sentiment expressed is definitely one that I hold close as I continue this work. Affirming the inherent value and worth of the people that I am trying to bring to life for those who interact with the Preserve now and in the future. The more we are able to fill in the gaps when it comes to the history of the Preserve, the more vibrant, inclusive, and beautiful our future will be.

Folk Life in the Bull Run Mountains: an Introduction to our Folk History Intern and her approach to studying an iconic mountain figure

Hello!

My name is Annie Mickum and I am your Folk History Intern, currently collecting oral histories on the life of Jack Dawson, a local to The Plains, Virginia from his birth in September of 1917 to his death in April of 2012. As someone who also grew up in The Plains, I am very grateful for this opportunity and really excited to get to know the folks who knew Jack Dawson. Hopefully, some of those reading this, that means you!

If you or someone you know would be willing to share their stories, experiences, memories or memorabilia of Jack Dawson – I would be thrilled to hear from you! But in case you’d like to know a little more about who you would be speaking with, keep on reading!

Growing up in The Plains, I was raised by a community of local characters whose warmth, humor, and unending supply of stories shaped my understanding of the world beyond our small town. After graduating from Foxcroft, I inched out a little farther past Fauquier County and moved to New York City, where I studied Culture and Media Studies at The New School.

Living and working in an urban environment sometimes felt worlds away from the farm where my family lived, as well as the mountains, fields, and friendly faces that made it home, but it encouraged me to think deeply and critically about community – how it is fostered, and who enables it to flourish.

Having returned home with an academic and professional background exploring these key questions, I’m excited to turn my energies toward understanding the life of Jack Dawson. In an effort to capture an honest portrait of his life and spirit, I’m relying on those who knew him best to help me by sharing their knowledge on this local legend – whether it’s a funny story, a visit to his home, a good conversation, or a ride into town – any moment shared will bring us closer to seeing Jack Dawson through the eyes of his community.

By collecting interviews, photographs, and information of any kind, my job as your Folk History Intern is to not only represent Jack Dawson, but also the world around him, with an emphasis on accuracy and a commitment to care. Searching through various databases and creating a family tree is of tremendous importance in this process, but even more crucial is connecting with individuals like yourself and preserving those memories to ensure that the project uplifts and honors the life of Jack Dawson and the stories of those who crossed his path.

As we head into another month of summer, and another month of pandemic pandemonium, I’m looking forward to having great conversations, reconnecting with our community, and helping to preserve a piece of its history for the generations to come. If you are willing and able to join me in this project, all are welcome!

Wishing you all good health and a good breeze amidst this heat,

Annie Mickum

Ronnie Nuckols, Overhome Farm, Goochland County

When Ronnie Nuckols and his brothers inherited Overhome Farm from their father in 2008, they split the land and the herd of cattle between them. The land handled the transition well; the cattle did not.

“Cattle socialize, they form groups, so they became unsettled and more difficult to handle,” Nuckols remembers. “I was so inexperienced, and I think they fed off the stress they could see in me. It was traumatic for everyone.”

That was the first step on a steep learning curve, and Nuckols has been learning ever since. “The first year I just tried to survive. But I started to ask myself, how can I turn this around so that I’m managing the cattle and they’re not managing me?”

Tips from more experienced cattlemen led him to the Monacan Soil and Water Conservation District(SWCD), serving Goochland and Powhatan counties. “They came out and gave me hands on instruction on how best to do things. They also led pasture walks and farm visits on other operations so you could see how they were managed.”

Nuckols has 16 permanent pastures on the property. His cattle get a balanced diet by dividing their time among them.

With the help of that knowledge base and the cost-share programs available through the Monacan SWCD and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Nuckols improved the 60-year-old boundary fencing on the property, added interior fencing to protect the streams and ponds where cattle had done some serious damage, and installed alternative livestock watering sources. He says that the improvements, along with designating some wooded buffer zones, meant that about 50 acres of land were no longer available for livestock use.

That may seem like a lot, but what the cattle lost, his family gained. “Once we got the cattle out, we could use those areas for other things,” he says. “We created a trail by the river that my wife, Cheryl, and I really enjoy walking along. We were able to put in a playground, a tree house and a zipline for the grandkids. It’s been a great opportunity to let them enjoy what nature provided.”

Nuckols’ grandchildren enjoy the protected stream banks on the property.

Nuckols completed his stream-exclusion practices with the Monacan SWCD in 2010. He was so impressed with how well they assisted the farm community, he says, that he ran for a four-year director position. First elected in 2011, he is now serving his third term.

In order to protect his 175-acre portion of Overhome, Nuckols donated an open-space easement on the property to VOF in 2016. The easement eliminates the possibility of dividing the land, makes the stream buffers permanent, and limits the impermeable surface allowed on the property. Nuckols converted the tax credits from the donation into cash so that he could invest in additional fencing, pasture reseeding, and improvements to farm structures.

Field days at Overhome sponsored by the NRCS and local agencies give farmers a chance to see how new seed mixes perform.

Nuckols now hosts farm visits at Overhome to help other landowners manage their cattle sustainably. Because he practices rotational grazing, he has been able to turn some of his surplus pastureland into wildlife habitat. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association recognized his efforts in 2019 with a regional award as an outstanding land steward in the cattle industry.

With all he’s achieved at Overhome, Nuckols says he isn’t done learning yet. “I hope it never stops changing. I want to keep trying new things, even if they might not all work. I want to keep that open mind in the future.”

Pulling Back the Curtain; An Introduction to the Cultural History Fellowship

Introducing yourself to a group of people who will likely never meet you in person is a very interesting task, but I believe we can get through it together.

I’m Barinaale Dube, your inaugural Cultural History Fellow. The End.

Now you know my name, the job I’ll be performing this summer, and nothing else. This is where I’m starting with a lot of the cultural information about the Preserve. People’s names and the work they did to survive. This summer, and a little bit into the fall, I’ll be working to introduce you to many of the people who lived and worked on the Bull Run Mountains Preserve, starting with myself.

In the backyard of my childhood home, we had all kinds of edible things growing. Sugarcane, oranges, bananas, guavas, okra, peppers, bitter leaf, scent leaf, and whatever produce scraps my mother threw in the backyard. Many things that people wouldn’t necessarily group together thrived in this space because my mother provided the attention, space, and care necessary for them to grow. The only plants that were prioritized were the ones that were struggling and not quite reaching their full potential. Everyone that ever visited our backyard constantly told us how rich we were. What my backyard taught me is that richness is not necessarily the abundance of one thing, but the brilliant mix of many things, all existing together, and enriching one another.

The preserve has a plethora of things to offer and teach us, but foundationally it shows us how diversity isn’t just nice but necessary for survival. The Preserve would not be the Preserve if it only housed, one plant, one insect species, and one animal. It’s teeming with life because thousands of different organisms exist together in beautiful chaotic harmony. This is a lesson that I was, fortunately, able to learn even before I came to the Preserve. Growing up in the best city in the world, Houston, Texas, I picked up a number of skills and lessons that only contribute to the work that I do. One of the first ones being, how to deal with Southern Virginian heat and humidity. Houston has four seasons like every other place in America, the 9th circle of Pandemonium, the 5th circle of Pandemonium, Hot and Warm. On those especially hot days, you can take a deep breath outside and get a lovely gulp of water at the same time!

In addition to heat training, I was surrounded by representatives from practically every continent in the world. Standing at the intersection outside my neighborhood was equivalent to walking through a major airport. I had a local passport to places like Nigeria, India, Vietnam, and El Salvador. It taught me the value of an authentic narrative. No one can tell a story better than the person who lived it. Even though many of the people I’ll be looking into have long passed away, I’ll be taking the oral histories of descendants and other people who have lived in the area.

Through a combination of preliminary archaeological work, scouring through census, marriage, birth and death records to name a few, and talking with the descendants of the Preserve matriarchs and patriarchs, We will begin to tell the story of the Preserve in living color. Not only do we hope to uncover the narratives of the Black people that literally carved a life for themselves out of stone, but we will be working to incorporate these stories into the long-lasting legacy of the Preserve. As I surround myself with information about the lives of these marvelous people, I can see myself.

I imagine that they enjoyed the same or an even greater level wonderment and tranquility that I experience out on the Preserve. I consider it a sort of inheritance and believe that it’s available for all who want it.

So grab a water bottle, put on your bug spray and sunscreen, get a good notetaking device, and join us as we look at the legacy that has been left for us.

July Bug Love: Meredith Hart’s introduction to insects on the Preserve

Hello all! My name is Meredith Hart and I am the Natural Science Fellow currently working on the Bull Run Mountains Natural Area Preserve studying insect distribution! So far, this fellowship has been AMAZING and I’m excited to share some insect love and updates with how the project is going!

Did you know that there are over 20,000 different species of bugs that call Virginia home? That’s quite a lot of critters- and even thought I am using 5 different trapping methods, I still might not get all of them, but here are a few of my favorites!

No. 1: Common meadow Katydid

I collect these beautiful boys with my sweep net: sweep netting is a trapping method where you take a large net and sweep it through tall grass or other foliage to collect the insects hiding inside. I do a lot of sweep netting in the meadow outside the Stone House on the North Section of the Preserve and I always find a ton of these little guys (and a ton of spiders…). Katydids are nocturnal, and there are over 200 north American species! This guy in the picture is actually still a nymph, which you can tell from the black stripe down his back

No 2: Jewelwings

Jewelwings are a genus found in the order Odonata (which also contains Dragonflies!). You have definitely seen them around, the more noticeable species have brightly colored bodies that are typically an iridescent green or blue, and jet black wings- one of the preserve volunteers called them the “goths” of the insect world, and if you ask me he is absolutely right! This jewelwing picture is of a beautiful Calopteryx maculata found in Jackson Hollow.

No. 3: Carpenter Ant

I have no aesthetic reason for liking these BUT I want to study myrmecology (the study of ants) and every time I find one of these girls it makes me so happy! There are 24 species in the US, and they are a common pest species- a very noticeable one at that because nests can reach up to 50,000 individuals! That’s a lot of ants. They are one of the most common and plentiful species of insect- myrmecologist E.O Wilson hypothesized that all of the ants in the world put together weighs as much as all the humans! Since a human weighs about as much as one million ants, that’s one million times 7.8 billion which is (calculation pending…) VERY many ants! Carpenter ants are my favorite because they are the first insect I ever worked with for research at the collections room at George Mason University!

So, now that Insect Introductions have happened…project update!

Trapping is going really well, for me and the wildlife! Bears in the preserve have really been appreciating my pitfall cups lately- I have one site that is consistently mauled….guess those soapy insects are pretty yummy (FYI, pitfall traps are cups- I use red solo cups- placed in the ground and filled with soapy water- the insects that fall in help to provide a terrestrial analysis of species present!). I have yet to see Mr. Bear in person, I don’t know if I’m tough enough to give him a talking to in person though!

Sweep traps are my favorite, though, it’s so much fun to sweep a big net through the grass and look inside to see the Crazy Bug Party happening inside! This week I forgot my tweezers and needed to pull them out by hand…and then it was Crazy Bug Party all over my arm- for those of you who do not habitually roam the outdoors in search of bugs to hold, allow me to describe how it feels. Imagine that a group of 6 toothpicks becomes sentient. Sentient and attached to a wiggly grape which is ALSO sentient- and make it 10 times smaller. Now imagine that someone has dusted the sentient Toothpick-Grape (Grapicus Toothpicidae) with itching powder, causing it to frantically run around in delirious circles. At 100 mph. That’s pretty much what it feels like when a scared bug is running around on your arm.

We received GREAT news this week that Copper Fox, a local distillery, is providing us with the ethanol needed to finish this project! Ethanol is used in entomology to preserve specimens (which is what I am using it for), but also to bait several different types of trap- I initially used isopropyl alcohol instead of soapy water for my pitfall traps, and Mr. Bear seemed to enjoy that a LOT more. I am so grateful to Copper Fox for their generous donation! The ethanol will be useful for decades, as I am establishing a collection (both wet and dry preserved) for the Preserve that can be used in the future for comparison and use by different scientists on different projects!

One of the hardest parts of this project is definitely identifying all the species- one of the specimens I was working with recently had an identifying characteristic marker that the key wrote out as “a setigerous scrobe on the mandible”. I wish I could say I am not often confused (I am in fact, confused all the time), but I am not often THIS confused. Turns out that setigerous means bearing setae (a stiff structure resembling hair or bristle), and a scrobe is a small groove! The beetle did not have a “setigerous scrobe” on its mandible, and so I moved on, and learned the importance of keeping an entomology dictionary next to me at all times..!

But for every bear and setigerous scrobe annoyance there is something really good. Last week I saw about a THOUSAND little baby American toads during my trapping route! Fortunately none of them fell into my pitfall traps, and they were such great company on the hike. Last week I was also lucky enough to see a termite mating swarm! You may have already seen this on our social media, but for about 3 square yards, the ground around me was covered with tiny winged termites- this is because the number of alates increased so much that they were forced out of the nest and into the world to reproduce. It was so incredible that I got to witness this.

That’s all for now folks! Happy July 🙂

2020 Brook trout reintroduction season closes with highest number of releases the Preserve has seen yet

The Preserve and its staff were geared up for another trout re-introduction and stream restoration season at Catharpin Creek. Typically, release and restoration season for the Preserve runs from March to May. However, the COVID-19 pandemic looked like it was going to shut down our reintroduction program this year as school facilities began to close and access to their classroom brook trout started to look dire.

Thanks to the efforts of teachers, students, and volunteers, we were able to have a successful release season at the Preserve, safely releasing over 400 fish into Catharpin Creek. Let’s take a look back on some highlights of this year’s trout season and stream restoration efforts:

A total of 486 brook trout were released into Catharpin Creek – the highest number of releases the Preserve has seen since it began the program. Seven schools participated and released their fish into Catharpin this year.

James Madison High School students planted 20 Black willow (Salix nigra) trees along the banks of Catharpin to introduce more native, shade providing species. The students also removed invasive species crowding the banks of the stream to make room for their native trees and reduce the pressure of these unwelcome plants.

Thomas Jefferson High School students were able to continue their stream monitoring project throughout most of the 2019-2020 school year, surveying for macroinvertebrates, testing water quality, and releasing their own trout before their school closure.

The effort and ingenuity of each of our participating teachers was incredibly admirable as they went to great lengths to incorporate releases into their new online-learning curriculums. Pre-pandemic closure, students would join their teachers in releasing their well-cared-for brookies into Catharpin. However, due to school closures & safety measures taken at the Preserve requiring students’ absence from the releases, our partnered teachers came up with new ways of incorporating their students.

Many teachers took photographs and copious notes to fill in their students and give them a visual lesson on how their release was conducted. Teachers Chris Mills of Hillside Elementary and his wife Carol Schwartz of Burgundy Farm Country Day School created this amazing film for their students to educate and include them about their brook trout release.

While students could not physically join, this video gives a great virtual educational experience of their release. You can view the video below, featuring our very own Preserve Manager, Joe Villari, talking about the pristine environmental conditions in Jackson Hollow that make Catharpin Creek a suitable environment for the trout.

We thank our partnered teachers, their students, and volunteers for making this strange and unprecedented time our most successful trout release season at the Preserve!

Dominion, Duke cancel Atlantic Coast Pipeline project

Dominion Energy and Duke Energy have cancelled plans to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project, a natural gas pipeline that would have stretched for hundreds of miles across West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.

The Virginia Outdoors Foundation began working in 2014 to ensure that the ACP would avoid VOF easements and were successful in this endeavor when pipeline route changes avoided 33 open space easements. In 2017, VOF learned that the federally approved pipeline route would send it through 10 of its open-space easements in Highland, Bath, Augusta and Nelson counties. VOF required the developers to follow a process under state law known as “conversion of open space,” which kept the easements in place but permitted a highly specific and restrictive underground right-of-way for the pipeline. The process also resulted in VOF’s acquisition of two large, pristine open-space properties—Hayfields Reserve in Highland County and Rockfish Reserve in Nelson County.

Now that the Atlantic Coast Pipeline Project has been cancelled, VOF will continue to own and manage the Hayfields Reserve and Rockfish Reserve for the public’s benefit. Additionally, we are working with our legal team, our landowners and the developers to better understand the impacts of the ACP cancellation on the right-of-way agreements on the 10 easements. We will provide updates as we learn more.