by Mindy Quintero
Six and a half years sure have flown by! I arrived at Trailside Nature Museum excited and overwhelmed with the idea of managing the oldest and busiest county nature center. The museum is held to high standards and I wasn’t sure how I was going to fill the shoes of past curators. Over time I found my place and realized that I had an amazing opportunity to put my own stamp in the history books. One of my main goals was to create a space where people wanted to spend their time (one can only spend so much time looking at taxidermy). Most of our exhibits were not interactive, which made visits to the museum short. As a mom, I knew exhibits needed to be kid height and hands-on. Adding more interactive, kid-friendly exhibits like the AR Sandbox, chalkboard, flip-up seasonal exhibit, black bear mural, microscope station and video clips from our trail cameras on the television increased the time spent inside the museum. Don’t worry, more exhibits are on their way! Not only will we be adding inside exhibits in the near future, we have also been slowly adding outdoor exhibits. It started with the new wigwam in 2017 which has been a big hit with everyone who visits. We always had a wigwam, but we moved the location so it was more easily accessible and noticed by the public. One of my favorite memories is from 2017 when we invited our Lenape friends from Ontario to visit and had a day filled with stories and music. We also added an insect hotel by the Meadow parking area. This spring, we are adding a Story Book Trail at the top of Pell Hill and informative signage at the end of Michigan Road. I always believed that every major parking area should have an exhibit for educational purposes, as well as to encourage the public to visit our museum.
In addition to exhibits, I’ve had such a great time creating educational programming. One of the first programs I started was our maple sugaring family tapping experience. From the start, family tapping was a huge hit and continues to be one of our most popular programs. With the pandemic environment, I was able to offer safe and fun family camp programming. When we found out school field trips were canceled we got creative and found a way to offer an outdoor early learning program. Again, as a parent, I saw a need. I had a four-year-old at home with nothing to do and wanted a safe space for him to learn, socialize and make friends. Our test run turned into a nine-month-long adventure. The success of that program led us to offer additional preschool camps beginning last summer and that will continue this summer.
Thanks to all of the past and current museum staff our research projects have also increased. Although I cannot take direct responsibility for all of this amazing research, I have always tried to allow my staff to pursue their interests and take on projects they are interested in. We now have a multi-year wood turtle research project that started with wanting to know if any wood turtles called the reservation home to numerous wood turtles being tracked so we can use that information to create and adjust our land management plans. We have used active and passive bat monitoring equipment to discover we have eight species of NY bats including the Indiana Bat and the Northern Long-eared Bat, both listed as federally and state endangered. Trail cameras have been used to monitor wildlife in the park, including a bobcat survey to get an idea of population size. We also have continued to monitor bluebird boxes with more effort put in this past winter/spring to fix, replace and remove boxes. Bluebird box maintenance will continue this fall once nesting has ended. One of the most interesting research projects we started a few years ago was sugaring-related. We now have every sug-ar maple we tap numbered so that we can record data such as sap temperature, amount of sap produced and sugar content of the sap. With weather/climate changes, it will be interesting to look at trends once we have a few more years of data. We also will be able to tell more easily what trees may no longer be producing, so that we can retire that tree and only tap trees that produce sap. A huge thank you to our Friends’ board and all who donate to the Friends for the support we have received to do this research!
One of the last projects I want to talk about is the Luquer-Marble Wildflower Garden. The wildflower garden has always been a meditative space for me, not only in the early spring when wildflowers are in bloom, but year round. After a few years of monitoring what wildflowers were present, I realized how much the diversity has declined since the garden was originally installed. I reached out to our county landscape architects with the intent of opening up the canopy and possibly planting more native plants. What happened next was nothing short of a miracle. Out of the blue, the president of the Bedford Garden Club, Elizabeth Sachs, called the museum to see if we could lead a program for their members. I talked to her about the garden and how we were hoping to revitalize it. That conversation turned into a much larger conversation with Taro Ietaka, Recreation Supervisor, and resulted in the Bedford Garden Club making a large donation of time and money to the project. In the near future and maybe before this newsletter goes out, a tree crew will be removing a large dead Ash tree among other smaller trees (funded by our Friends group); the old fence will be removed and a new fence installed. Once the new fence is installed, a large variety of native plants will be planted. Volunteer opportunities are available to help out with planting, invasive removal and continued maintenance of the garden. Give us a call at the museum if you’re interested in helping out!