Metroparks Toledo – Nature Is My Therapy

A couple months ago I mentioned that Metroparks Toledo (“Metroparks”) had recently been named the best park system in the country but I want to expand upon that little tidbit today. I just participated in a volunteer meeting on Zoom, along with about 150 other volunteers who help make our park system the gem that it is.

The volunteer coordinator staff expressed appreciation for all we do, whether it’s monitoring invasive plants or breeding raptors or dragonflies (me!), or being a trail safety monitor, or helping with the manor house at holiday time, or any of the hundreds of other things that volunteers do for Metroparks. It felt good to have our contributions acknowledged like that, and it made me proud to be part of it.

One of the many rustic trails in Oak Openings Preserve

The story of how I ended up here is long and complicated, but I’ll just say that it’s ironic that I settled down in a place that I used to scorn as I drove through it on my trips back and forth from Michigan to visit my family in southeastern Ohio. For 15 years, I drove past the city thinking it looked kind of…um…uninviting. From the highway, you see big, dirty oil refineries, and lots of other industrial stuff associated with the major shipping port activity that goes on here (cargo ships and railyards). But if you get off the freeway and look beyond that, you discover that this city has a lot to offer, even when you’re used to living in much larger cities with their ample cultural and recreational opportunities.

Grapeleaf skeletonizer moth on yarrow – Oak Openings Preserve

We’ve got a wonderful art museum with free admission, a zoo, a symphony, community theatre, the University of Toledo, the beloved Toledo Mud Hens (minor league baseball), lots of ethnic restaurants, and so much more. I’m not much of a sports fan these days, but I absolutely adore our art museum and community theatre. But the thing that made me decide to move here was the metropark system, hands down. And seeing the park system continuing to shine as it is, well, that helps to reinforce in my mind that I made a good decision. Recently I was reading a thread on social media in which somebody claimed that Metroparks were an important factor in convincing people to move to Toledo. Somebody else mocked the idea, and I just couldn’t let that stand…so I stepped in to set him straight by telling him that I, in fact, am a person who chose this city primarily because of the fantastic park system. So there.

Pileated Woodpecker, Oak Openings Preserve

In recent years, Metroparks has been telling us they had a goal to build a park within five miles of every resident in Lucas County. At the end of last year, with the opening of Manhattan Marsh in north Toledo, they achieved that lofty goal. It’s hard to keep track, but I believe we have about 20 metroparks now. And they’re not done yet. They’re nearly finished with the first phase of a new park on the riverfront in downtown Toledo; Glass City Metropark will eventually be part of a majorly-renovated riverfront along the mighty Maumee River that should reap big economic rewards for the city. Apparently for each dollar a city invests in riverfront improvements, it can expect a return of $7-20. And already there has been construction of nearly 400 luxury loft apartments right beside the park; the builder has said that he was only able to make this investment because of our metropark system.

And as if that’s not amazing enough, Metroparks recently opened the largest treehouse lodging in the nation, with Cannaley Treehouse Village. The various accommodations there are already being booked nearly a year in advance!

I know that people have different priorities in life, and everyone doesn’t care about the parks in the way that I do. But these parks are central to my life — I spend hundreds of hours in them studying dragonflies and other insects, and walking the trails for exercise or just to give my brain a rest. (Ecotherapy, ya know?)

Flag-tailed spinyleg, Wiregrass Metropark

Metroparks also runs an award-winning nursery that grows native plants for the park system and for other restoration projects in our region. I’m so thankful for their leadership in demonstrating the importance of native plants in our community. Their Blue Creek Seed Nursery supplies many of the plants for our Wild Ones/Green Ribbon Initiative Native Plant sale that takes place each May during Blue Week. Last year we had to run the plant sale as an online event, but we still had huge demand, and are gearing up for this year’s online sale with even more plants. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the website for the sale, and can’t wait to see how it goes this year.

I hope I’ve not bored you by gushing about Metroparks Toledo. I just wanted to express how important these parks are to my life, and do a little bit to improve the image of my city for anyone who might think of it the way I did before I moved here. My friend Sherry is an avid urban birder, and when people are surprised at the birds she finds in the city limits, she always reminds them that “birds are where you find them!” I’m borrowing her sentiment to express how I feel about Toledo — you can find happiness anywhere if you look hard enough. I’m so glad I kept looking. Thanks for reading!

(All of the photos in this post were taken in the Metroparks system– I have thousands more of them and I’ve only been here four years so far!)

I had planned to write about my visit to Lynx Prairie after Odo-Con, but time is getting away from me and it seems every day brings something else new and exciting that I want to share. I’ve got a huge backlog of things to write about — and perhaps I’ll still write about Lynx Prairie later — but today I want to tell you about a recent day that was very special to me.

I’ve been on the board of Toledo Naturalists’ Association for about a year and a half now, and have often felt that I should step up and serve as a leader for one of our many field trips. But I was nervous about not having enough experience or knowledge to be a “good” leader, so I didn’t speak up and volunteer. At our board meeting last August, I was asked to lead the annual dragonfly field trip this year and, caught off guard without a good excuse, I agreed to do it. In the ensuing nine months, whenever I thought about it, I got a little bit nervous. Would anyone show up? Would I show my ignorance when I couldn’t answer all their questions? But I determined to be as prepared as I could, and to bring my natural enthusiasm and hope that would be enough.

Me leading my first TNA field trip (Photo courtesy of Marian Fisher)

On the designated Saturday I arrived at Wiregrass Metropark to find a half dozen people already there waiting for me, and we ended up with 19 people on the walk. I was so pleased at the good turnout, and happy to have many friends there to support me on my first leading experience. Those friendly faces eased my nerves quite a bit, and I started off the morning by giving the group some basic facts about dragon- and damselflies and showing them the field guides I use. I had obtained a supply of the excellent dragonfly field guide pamphlets from the Ohio Division of Wildlife, and handed those out to people who wanted them.

The plan was to spend two hours walking the 0.6-mile loop trail around the lake looking for odes and anything else interesting we could find. I was worried about the weather, because it was mostly cloudy, which isn’t optimal for finding flying dragonflies. As ectothermic insects, they can’t generate their own body heat and must rely on the sun to give them the energy to fly. I’m always amazed at how quickly they respond to the sun and clouds on a day when the clouds are moving a lot. I can be watching dozens of them flying over a pond in the sunlight, and then a big cloud covers the sun and they all disappear almost instantly. Then in a few minutes when the cloud moves past the sun, the bugs start flying again pretty quickly too. It’s really fascinating to see.

Our walk started out a bit slow, but very shortly things picked up and we had a grand time with good looks at more than a dozen species. I knew people would love seeing the flashier dragonflies, like Twelve-spotted Skimmers (below) and Calico Pennants (above).

Twelve-spotted Skimmer *(Libellula pulchella)*

But I especially enjoyed showing them the tiny little damselflies that flit around in the grasses, like this Double-striped Bluet. I explained that you have to train your eyes to watch for the movement of “little blue needles” in the grass. It was fun to see their joy when they finally locked in on one of them and saw how small they are. This one, for example, is only about an inch long:

Double-striped Bluet *(Enallagma basidens)*

And this Emerald Spreadwing was a real crowd pleaser too:

Looking at a dragonfly (Photo courtesy of Sherry Plessner)

Here’s a pic of the baskettail we were looking at in the photo above:

One of the baskettails, unidentifiable to species from this photo

This experience was gratifying for me on two levels: First, because everyone seemed to have a really good time, and, second, because it helped me overcome my fear of putting myself out there as a leader. I learned that I don’t have to have all the answers, and that enthusiasm can more than make up for any lack of experience. And I’ve got enthusiasm in spades when it comes to odes.

I seem to find a way to bring dragonflies into just about any conversation these days. Which is how I ended up volunteering to start an odonata monitoring program for Metroparks Toledo. Back in the very early spring, I was meeting with their research supervisor to talk about my work in their raptor monitoring program, and I happened to mention my love of dragonflies. She asked if I’d be interested in helping them track the odonate populations at one of our local parks. And I instantly said, “Yes, of course!”

The park happens to be Wiregrass Lake, the same one where our field trip took place. Wiregrass is a newer Metropark, having only opened to the public in 2015. Prior to the park opening, my friend Rick Nirschl made frequent visits to the site to study dragonflies, and he provided Metroparks Toledo with a great deal of initial data about the odonates on the property, as well as suggestions for managing it to protect their habitats. Largely due to his efforts, Wiregrass has become known as the Metropark with the largest number of odonate species. Since the park’s opening, though, there has seemed to be a decline in the variety of species as well as overall numbers. And that’s what prompted this effort to gather more data.

Over the next few weeks, we discussed what the park system wanted to achieve and then we set up a monitoring protocol loosely modeled on those used to monitor butterflies. We divided the park into transects, and once each ten days I go there and count the number of each species present. I’ve found that counting dragonflies is much more difficult than counting birds or even butterflies, but I’m doing my best to get an accurate representation of the populations.

Two years after moving to Toledo, I continue to view our Metroparks as one of the best parts of my life here. There are endless opportunities to volunteer in the park system and I feel like a valued member of the community when I participate. Just this morning I spent two hours with other volunteers (from my Wild Ones Oak Openings chapter) helping remove invasive honeysuckle and buckthorn at Wildwood Metropark. It was 90 degrees in the morning, and it was hard work, but the results were clearly visible when we were done. And that felt good.