The common raven is a large, all-black bird with a shaggy throat and wedge-shaped tail; often found singly, in small flocks of young birds, or in mated pairs. The raven is not to be confused with the American crow, which is smaller in all regards, lacks the shaggy throat and wedge-shaped tail, and is much more gregarious, often appearing in small to large flocks.
A stroll around a dark-thicket woodland. A glimmer of hope! A window into the past and a vision for the future. Several years ago, Piedmont Discovery Center staff working at the Quarry Gardens at Schuyler made a rare and exciting observation. Shining in small openings and along the sunnier margins of a Virginia pine (Pinus virginiana) dominated woodland, we noticed small but highly diverse patches of heliophytic (sun-loving) grassland plants, including conservative species like hairy angelica (Angelica venenosa) and little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium).
Eastern chipmunks can be found living on the forest floor, where they forage for food and make their burrows. Quick and shy, they are most often spotted in motion as they run along the ground and fallen logs. Their genus, Tamias means “treasurer” in Greek, as they forage for seeds, berries and nuts, which they store in their burrows, a behavior known as “caching”. They also will eat insects, mushrooms, earthworms, and even smaller rodents such as mice! They mate in the early spring, and typically have between 1-8 young. In the fall, they spend much of their time foraging for food to cache in order to survive the winter. During prolonged cold periods, they enter a state of torpor, where their metabolism and heart rate slow down dramatically. In addition to being valuable dispersers of the seeds of many plants, eastern chipmunks serve as an important food source for foxes, raccoons, hawks, and owls.
Paul Cipriani, Meredith Frazee, David Bellangue, Joanna Currey, and Emma Stephens (left to right) in front of the north quarry at Quarry Gardens. Credit: Joanna Currey “In 2024, we planted […]
Interdepartmental seed collecting trip to a grassland remnant in Albemarle Co., VA. Left to right: Kate Walz, Drew Chaney, Emily Luebke, David Bellangue, Emma Stephens, Joanna Curry. Credit: Devin Floyd […]
PDC Field Tech, Drew Chaney and Phoebe Judge collect data in a remarkable remnant grassland in Campbell County, VA with over 100 native species! Photo by Emily Luebke. In 2024, […]
By David Bellangue, Nursery Manager, Piedmont Discovery Center Being an ecosystem dominated by warm-season grasses and wildflowers, Piedmont grasslands can look somewhat drab in early spring, especially when compared to […]
Every day, I see people asking in person and online, “What natives should I plant in my yard?”
Oftentimes, the answers given are very generic and do not serve biodiversity. We have lived our entire lives under the paradigm of Euro-colonial horticulture, where the value of a plant in the landscape is dependent upon its “performance”, by which we mean how well an individual species can grow under certain conditions in the domestic landscape, and how closely it adheres to the aesthetics of the formal style of American landscaping popularized as a way of imitating the British aristocrats of yesteryear (who collected plants from around the British empire and were able to maintain unnaturally perfect lawns and gardens through armies of servants). This individualistic method, focusing on selecting an assortment of individual species based solely on novelty and/or appearance, results in what are known as novel ecosystems, which contain mixtures of species from around the world with little or no shared evolutionary history, and which would not exist without modern human behavior.
As I sit by my computer, I glance out the window at the cold landscape outside. Trees bare of leaves stand like solemn sentinels against an overcast sky that looks down on a drab world of grays and browns. You can almost feel the chill just by looking out the window, and I dream of a winter getaway in some tropical land filled with all manner of strange and wonderful plants that would never survive winter in temperate North America.
Of the many types of grasslands occurring in the Virginia Piedmont, wet prairies, marshes, and seepages are some of the least common. Ditching and draining for agriculture has destroyed many of them, and since an estimated less than 1 percent of the modern day Virginia Piedmont remains as natural grasslands, these wetlands, which likely always existed predominantly as small-patch communities, are especially rare to find intact today.