Rotarians learn about county’s natural history

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Craw­ford parks nat­u­ral­ist Josh Dyer holds up a coy­ote pelt at the Rotary meet­ing Jan. 25. He gave the Rotar­i­ans a pre­sen­ta­tion sim­i­lar to what he brings to area schools.

By Sarah Einselen

Inquirer Reporter

Galion Rotar­i­ans learned how Ohio’s ani­mal land­scape has changed over the last few hun­dred years from Craw­ford Park Dis­trict nat­u­ral­ist Josh Dyer at the Rotary meet­ing Wednes­day, Jan. 25.

He wanted to show the Rotary club why the park district’s March levy would be worth sup­port­ing by demon­strat­ing what the dis­trict pro­vides for the area. The dis­trict was estab­lished about 15 years ago, Dyer said, and he’s been to every school in the county, pub­lic or pri­vate, giv­ing talks like the one he began for the Rotarians.

Dyer asked the Rotar­i­ans to think about how Ohio’s nat­ural land­scape has changed within their mem­ory. He then said that humans have brought about changes in the Ohio land­scape that had both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive consequences.

“We’ve been here 400 years and let’s face it, we’ve changed it,” he said.

Dyer held a num­ber of nat­ural arti­facts for club mem­bers to touch as he described what they sig­ni­fied. While pass­ing around a deer antler from the Bur Oak Savan­nah that a rodent had chewed on, he described how Ohio had far fewer deer 200 years ago. “We’ve cre­ated a habi­tat suit­able for deer,” he said. At one point a hun­dred years ago, there were absolutely no deer in Ohio because they had been hunted exces­sively. Then they were rein­tro­duced and will likely num­ber about 750,000 by the begin­ning of the next deer hunt­ing season.

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

A tiger sala­man­der vis­its the Galion Rotary club Jan. 25. Its cousin shown on the screen behind, the spot­ted sala­man­der, is a bio-indicator, which means it lives in a vari­ety of envi­ron­ments. It drinks water through its skin. If it’s not some­where it should be, nat­u­ral­ists can tell that there’s a prob­lem with some­thing in that envi­ron­ment, said Craw­ford Parks Dis­trict nat­u­ral­ist Josh Dyer.

Sim­i­lar human actions helped the coy­ote pro­lif­er­ate, too, Dyer said. While he passed around a coy­ote pelt, he said the ani­mal had been intro­duced in Ohio 80 to 100 years ago and are now present in all 88 counties.

“Why are they here? Because of us,” he said. Coy­otes like a more arid habi­tat. “As we cleared the land and changed it,” Dyer explained, “these highly adapt­able ani­mals, they liked Ohio.”

Then Rotar­i­ans got to feel rac­coon and opos­sum pelts. “These guys also like how we’ve changed the land­scape,” Dyer said. They flour­ish par­tic­u­larly in larger, met­ro­pol­i­tan parks where trap­ping is lim­ited. They also tend to eat eggs of ani­mals that are already endan­gered species, like cer­tain turtles.

Otter and beaver pelts fol­lowed. The otter was elim­i­nated from Ohio’s land, Dyer said, but then the state signed an agree­ment with Mis­souri and Arkansas to catch otters there and rein­tro­duce them here. “Hardly two decades later, we have a trap­ping sea­son for otters,” they’re so plen­ti­ful, Dyer said. And beavers “were almost trapped to extinc­tion,” he con­tin­ued, so their pelts could be used to fash­ion men’s top hats. “For­tu­nately the silk trade came about,” he said, so silk replaced beaver fur for hat manufacturing.

Humans’ impact wasn’t lim­ited to intro­duc­ing or exter­mi­nat­ing ani­mals in the state, though. Before set­tlers moved into the Ohio val­ley, the state was 95 per­cent forested, but by 1900 only 5 per­cent remained so. The state used to be cov­ered in tall prairie grass, too, of which a few acres at Unger Park in Bucyrus now remain.

“A man on a horse would look like he was just float­ing across the grass,” Dyer said. “That’s how tall the grass was.

“We have a great nat­ural his­tory to be told in Craw­ford County,” he con­cluded. “That’s why I’m here. I like to edu­cate peo­ple about this stuff.”

That’s the park district’s pur­pose as a whole, as well, he said. The dis­trict pro­vides numer­ous pro­grams in schools and for the gen­eral pub­lic and main­tains sev­eral pub­lic parks. Besides that, the dis­trict mon­i­tors changes in local plants and wildlife, and is unique for the access it pro­vides for what he ten­ta­tively called “under­served” peo­ple, too, he said.

“We have a handicap-accessible dock that will get peo­ple out into the woods,” Dyer men­tioned, that makes uneven or rocky ter­rain no prob­lem for the wheelchair-bound or for peo­ple who are unsteady on their feet.

The Rotar­i­ans also con­ducted busi­ness dur­ing their weekly meet­ing. They voted to main­tain their asso­ciate mem­ber­ship with the Galion Area Cham­ber of Com­merce and dis­cussed sell­ing some kind of food dur­ing the Inde­pen­dence Day fire­works they’re plan­ning in Galion.

The Galion Rotary club meets every Wednes­day at 5:30 p.m. For more infor­ma­tion about the club, e-mail pres­i­dent Stephen Novack at psnova@yahoo.com.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Jan 27 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.