Marc C. Hirrel, Leopold Education Project

Autumn is the season of the hunter. A good time to venture through the woods of South Fork. Look for red lanterns as you make your way through the yellows, tans, and browns of changing oaks and hickories. Let the red lanterns mark your path.

Red lanterns, to Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, were blackberry leaves lit by the October sun to mark his trail. Hunting was how he made connections to the land. And those connections was how he read the landscape and crafted a personal ethic on “how to live on a piece of land without spoiling it”, which was Leopold’s conservation cornerstone. And it began with a grouse hunt. In his essay Red Lanterns he is challenged to read the landscape connecting the brambled habitat and the clucking grouse in cover with the dog having analyzed thousands of smells then hitting olfactory gold and going to point.

In Smoky Gold, Leopold challenges us to read the landscape by going on our own hunt. The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody’s nose…..like South Fork.

This November go steal a hunt by following the red lanterns of SFNC, like:

What did you find? What did you read from the landscape to help your hunt? Did those red lanterns help you to return to the trail?

My hunt lead me to these dens and to some questions. Whose den is it? What makes this location so special? Next month we’ll see what my game cameras reveal and what I read from the landscape.

Great fun and interesting cooking techniques were on tap for the “Five-Star Dining around a 100 Year Old Cabin” event held at South Fork Nature Center on October 13, 2015.

Docent, Krissi Graham and Clinton’s Extension Homemaker’s president, Wendy Russ, worked hard to gather supplies and organize the event. Over 20 people participated in the evening’s program. The menu consisted of vegetables steamed in Kudsu leaves sewn together to make a cooking pouch, chicken or fish cooked on woven- reed (Yucca privet, Russian Olive and Muscadine vine) mats and baskets over hot coals, pine needle tea and Kudzu Lemonade.

One young family with two small children took a hike before dinner collecting pine needles while groups of participants divided up and started creating the sewn leaf packets, vine cooking baskets and woven mats.

Another group of participants mixed the ingredients for peach cobbler and poured it into the waiting Dutch Ovens. The ovens were placed in the fire ring and banked with hot coals. Approximately 1 and ½ hours later the evening’s activities wrapped up as the group devoured the delectable dessert! As darkness fell the last of the food packets were removed from the coals, a lantern was lit and stories started surfacing about “when we use to camp……” etc.

The evening was a great success. Primitive cooking techniques, using homesteader tools (and a little foil), were explored and fun was had by all!

Beth Tucker and the Fairfield Bay Garden Club visited the Nature Center September 29, sharing mutual admiration for the relationship between those magnificent Monarch butterflies and their Milkweed floral counterpart. Our outing featured hiking around those future butterfly zones with a casual assessment of the vegetation viability. Regarding the extensive planting project in June the term ‘nursery’ was clearly embraced as we gently coddled and encouraged the newborn growths. We look forward to our continued partnership and monitoring!