the barn is well stocked with split black cherry firewood and the slender poles await the saw. those are the remains of the round corral that the cowbow manque' across the road built. when finally the big collapsed barn was taken down in september, several of us scavenged wood, as most of it was just being burned up in fires night and day. now we have a different view from the front of our house, a long view across the fields to the distant forest.
we're hoping that the shed on the right will collapse on its own, leaving only the shabby deteriorating house across the road. it has been suggested that the most useful future for the house would be to donate it to the volunteer fire department for practice.
the work i did this summer on nine different assessments for the huron river watershed's bio-reserve project was so interesting and i learned so much from the truly experienced scientists on the project. of the nine sites , only one area was really quite pristine and happily it is near here a few miles to the west on six mile road. most of it is wet forest, a flood plain along a winding creek, and there were almost no invasive species. we found a stand of endangered wildflowers, the brilliant blue closed gentian. we hope that the owners will be interested in preserving it with a conservation easement.
but the other eight sites were less encouraging. some were abandoned agricultural fields with solid monotypic stands of autumn olive, canada thistle, goldenrod or, worse, wild parsnip. some were second-growth forests with a ground cover of garlic mustard, which eliminates native spring wildflowers like trillium, bloodroot, and may apple. others were over-grazed and full of spotted knapweed. a well-established hardwood forest was flooded as the result of a large virtually abandoned housing development adjacent that changed the flow of water onto the neighbor's land, killing the trees and plants.
the organizers of the bioreserve project assured me that there were many promising sites among the 80-some surveyed; the degraded ones i'd seen were just a coincidental luck of the draw.
next year i'm planning to contact the four owners of the forest across the road, which extends all the way west to earhart road, to get their permission to do an assessment. my own informal look makes me think it's in pretty good shape. there is a stand of large beech, now relatively rate in s.e. michigan. now all we have to do is find the money to buy the 80 acres and build a small modern house well back off the road, keep the fields in cultivation, and put a conservation easement on it all. anyone want to chip in?
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