One of the many benefits of BRMNAP’s Fellowship Program is the constant influx of experts in all manner of fields. This year’s Natural Science Fellow, Lauren Fuchs is a connoisseur of all things slimy and scaled, so we knew we had to ask her to lead a herp-focused BioBlitz during her time at the Preserve. On a chilly morning this September, twenty-plus eager citizen scientists gathered behind a single mission: Find and document as many herp (reptile and amphibian) species as possible!
Young Blitzer Patrick Smith holds a Red-Spotted Newt!
The day started slowly with the herps safely tucked away from the cool air. However, as the sun started to warm the forest, more and more reptilian residents made their presence known. Highlights included an uncommon Northern Dusky salamander, no less than 8 Eastern Wormsnakes, and an adorable Spring Peeper frog. Throughout the morning and afternoon, participants carefully rolled logs and rocks and scoured the leaf litter. With Lauren and assistant Erica’s guidance, Blitzers were able to safely locate, identify, and return 29 individual herps from 14 total species!
A wormsnake gets its picture taken while being swabbed for fungal spores to aid in Lauren’s dissertation research
These images and data have all been uploaded to the Inaturalist App, where they can be utilized for scientific research. BioBlitzes like this one provide critical snapshots of species presence and abundance that inform conservation and management practices. Not to mention, they are a ton of fun!
Keep an eye on our meetup, facebook, and instagram pages for future guided hike and BioBlitz events. All ages and levels of experience are welcome and encouraged to join! Check out the infographic below for a breakdown of all the species observed.
The restoration of a music and community hub at Mount Rogers School will start with a walking path made possible by a grant from VOF's Get Outdoors Fund.
The Crooked Road is a 330-mile driving trail in Southwest Virginia that explores the region’s musical heritage. Each community it passes through has its own stories to tell.
Albert Hash donated many of the violins he crafted to the Mount Rogers School for its string band program.
One of the most enduring is about musician Albert Hash of Whitetop, who built his first fiddle in 1927 when he was just ten years old. Hash became a master fiddler and instrument maker, making some 300 fiddles, many elaborately carved and all made of locally sourced wood.
Late in his life, Hash and other area musicians began offering music classes at the local school, Mount Rogers. Students learned to play traditional mountain music on instruments Hash donated. After his death in 1983, these informal music classes became part of the curriculum, and Mount Rogers had the distinction of being one of only two K-12 schools in the U.S. with a string band program. The building was the site of traditional jam sessions, a place where the area’s musical heritage was maintained and celebrated.
The original 1930s-era school structure is made of tumbled rocks, brought in from the nearby creek by horse and sled.
But the county closed the school in 2011, says Tracy Cornett, tourism economic developer for Grayson County. “A lot of folks were upset and disappointed when that happened. It was a community hub for them.” Now Whitetop students are either home-schooled or have a long commute along mountain roads to the two nearest county schools, and the building has fallen into disuse.
That could have been the end of the story. Instead, community members are poised to add a new chapter. Virginia Tech’s Community Design Assistance Center (CDAC) has drawn up plans for renovating the school and its surrounding five acres into the Western Grayson Music and Craft Museum/Information Center. The center will highlight the local musical tradition with exhibits, concerts, and demonstrations of the craft of making violins. A Virginia Outdoors Foundation Get Outdoors grant will jumpstart the project, funding the excavation work for a walking trail that will surround the site where the school now stands.
One of the designs in the CDAC report shows a potential route for the path.
The strategy, Cornett says, is to go after smaller grants to start. “After we get a few smaller chunks [of the project] completed, we might be in a better position to go after the larger grants” that will pay for renovating the school and adding more landscaping to the grounds, completing the CDAC’s vision for the project, shaped in consultation with a stakeholder group of eight area residents. There are plans for a second path, an overlook for the nearby creek, and native plantings. The expansion of an existing playground will serve both locals and tourists who come to the area on the Crooked Road, stopping to enjoy nearby attractions like Whitetop Mountain, Grayson Highlands State Park, Jefferson National Forest, Mount Rogers Recreational Area, the Virginia Creeper Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and US Bike Route 76.
Virginia Tech students took a tour of the property with Cornett and spoke to stakeholders about their vison for the school complex.
The addition of a satellite location of the Whitewater Center in the western part of the county will add to these attractions and increase tourist traffic, says Cornett. “We want to get ahead of and be ready for that.”
Change is on the horizon, and the area’s cultural heritage won’t be left behind. “You build for the future not for the past,” Cornett states, “but the past definitely informs how and what you build.”
The Wildlife Foundation of Virginia works to inspire present and future generations of sporting enthusiasts by providing public access to properties like Fulfillment Farms, nearly 2,000 acres of land protected by a VOF easement since 1997.
Jenny West was newly married and six months pregnant when she went duck hunting for the first time. “I grew up in urban environments, Los Angeles and then Northern Virginia,” she says. “I didn’t eat anything that didn’t come wrapped in cellophane from the grocery store.”
When her husband, a wildlife biologist and lifelong hunter, had a friend cancel right before a hunting trip, he surprised West by asking her to come instead. She’s never looked back. “I loved being up, watching the sunrise over the water and listening to the sounds of the marsh waking up,” she remembers. “It was fascinating.”
Now an avid hunter, West’s love for the sport led her from positions in environmental consulting and development to her current role as executive director of the Wildlife Foundation of Virginia (WFV), a nonprofit organization that works to inspire present and future generations of sporting enthusiasts by providing public access to multiple properties the organization owns across the Commonwealth. One of the largest is Fulfillment Farms, nearly 2,000 acres in Albemarle County donated to the organization by its owner, Thomas Forrer, in 1997. Forrer also protected the property in perpetuity by donating a conservation easement to VOF the same year.
At nearly 2,000 acres, Fulfillment Farms encompasses varied terrain, from open fields to wooded slopes. An old slate quarry, as well as a beaver pond complex also lie on the property.
“Tom was a very strong advocate of providing outdoor enthusiasts with places to recreate,” West says, “and we take to heart what he really wanted to see out there.” WFV manages the property for no-fee public access, providing hunting, birding, and hiking opportunities to individuals as well as organized groups such as the Boy Scouts and Wounded Warriors.
WFV has built infrastructure to support those activities and users, including an ADA-accessible hunt cabin, completed in 2019. There are no hotels near the property, West says, which made a pre-dawn start to the hunting day more difficult for participants in their Wounded Warriors program, among others. “It has opened up some great possibilities for us,” she says. The next project in the works is an ADA-accessible boardwalk that will serve as both an observation and hunting deck.
A new AdA-accessible cabin on the WFV's Fulfillment Farms property means that Wounded Warriors and others can enjoy full days on the property.
Now in her 19th year in the role, West reflects on what led her WVF. “A lot of the reason I moved into this [field of conservation] is because of what it can teach kids,” she says. “From my own experience raising two boys, I saw the way learning to hunt and spending time outdoors instills intrinsic values like patience and respect. You can’t control nature. You have to learn to work with it.”
WFV issues two types of permits to potential visitors to the property: a hunting permit, issued per hunting season; and a general use permit for those who wish to hike or birdwatch on the property, valid for a year from purchase.
WFV will accept hunt permit applications for the 2022-2023 hunt season until October 30, 2022.
VOF's new easement on a parcel fronting the Appomattox River in Colonial Heights will contribute to the development of the Appomattox river Trail.
The Virginia Outdoors Foundation (VOF) has completed its first conservation project in Colonial Heights, thanks to a conservation easement granted by the Capital Region Land Conservancy (CRLC).
The 0.934-acre property is adjacent to the Appomattox River at the site of the former Harvell Dam and is mostly surrounded by land owned by Virginia State University (VSU) and its main academic campus.
The conservation easement protects approximately 200 feet along the Appomattox River, a designated state scenic river. The land was mapped in ConserveVirginia as Virginia’s highest conservation value lands that are unprotected, based on 24 mapped data inputs. ConserveVirginia is also a key tool in guiding state investments for land conservation to ensure the highest conservation outcomes. Such consideration was important to the Board of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation in awarding a grant from its Open-Space Lands Preservation Trust Fund to assist CRLC with its acquisition of the property.
“We are thrilled to add this parcel to our portfolio of conserved land,” said VOF Executive Director Brett Glymph. “We look forward to continued partnership with CRLC, the city, and river enthusiasts to make the river and adjacent trails more accessible to the community.”
VOF now protects open space in 113 of Virginia’s 133 counties and independent cities.
In addition to the scenic qualities of the property, the Colonial Heights parcel is also essential for connecting the planned 25-mile Appomattox River Trail at its proposed intersection with the Fall Line Trail. The conservation easement ensures that the property will be available for public access in perpetuity. This is important for an area where the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation Nature-based Recreation Access Model ranks the area as “high” for land-based and water-based recreation needs.
Capital Region Land Conservancy’s acquisition of the Colonial Heights land was part of a larger transaction with Josh and Ingrid Greenwood that included more than 40 acres of upland and islands located in the Ettrick portion of Chesterfield County at Campbell’s Bridge as well as in the City of Petersburg. All the land was essential for the development of the Appomattox River Trail. CRLC will celebrate this historic acquisition and the work of VOF, Friends of the Lower Appomattox River, and other conservation partners on October 16 with tours of some of the properties during the Closing Ceremony of the 2022 Conservation Games at VSU’s Appomattox River Overlook. The Games run between September 30 and October 16. For more information about the Games, visit www.capitalregionland.org/conservation-games.
Downtown Tappahannock has a new place for kids to learn and play thanks in part to a grant from VOF's Get Outdoors fund.
When the ceiling of their historic building in downtown Tappahannock collapsed in May, the team at the Essex County Museum and Historical Society (ECMHS) had a backup plan: they took the museum outside. The grand opening of their new courtyard wasn’t scheduled until June, but volunteers and staff were able to move some activities and scheduled events to the space during the month-long repair period. “We switched gears and were able to stay open while repairs were happening,”says Meg Hodges, ECMHS’s executive director.
The Get Outdoors grant paid for walkways and solar lights that make the courtyard easier for all to use.
That quick thinking was instrumental in ECMHS’s acquisition of the courtyard two years ago. “We found out that the folks who owned the lot behind the museum were interested in selling. It was too good to pass up—right out our back door and not even a block up from the [Rappahannock] river.”
ECMHS started a capital campaign that attracted the attention of the Silver Foundation, a local nonprofit named for Max Silver, an immigrant from Ukraine who had settled in Tappahannock in the 1930s. The foundation acquired the lot on behalf of the museum, which now holds a 99-year renewable lease on the property. The lease stipulates that the property’s intended use as open space cannot be changed.
With the space secured, Hodges says, “We returned to our capital campaign and created a game plan as to what we would do with it. Here in Essex County there’s not a lot of access to the river or outdoor space. It’s mostly private land and there’s no state or county park. We wanted to create something that could be used by all.”
A grant from Virginia Outdoors Foundation’s Get Outdoors Fund helped ECMHS build walkways and solar lights. “It’s one thing to erect a gazebo and pavilions,” says Hodges, “but if they’re not connected by walkways, not everybody can access them. And that’s what the grant did for us: it helped us finish out the space and make it more user-friendly than it would have been.”
The Get Outdoors grant also helped pay for an educational kiosk that tells the story of an African American riverboat pilot who lived on the site in the late 1800s, as well as the construction of a back entrance to the courtyard that leads to city-owned property on the river. Plans are to develop natural history and conservation programming to get visitors down to the water.
Children learned about 17th-century leisure time with hoops, jump ropes, jacks and horseshoes at one museum event early this spring.
Other ideas for future programming include seasonal history walks starting from the courtyard, and an outdoor exhibit curated in collaboration with youth members of the Rappahannock Tribe. “The courtyard really frees us to do a lot more of the things we want to do,” Hodges states. “One of the activities we’ve been able to add is outdoor play with 17th-century toys. Children roll hoops, jump ropes, play jacks and horseshoes. These activities feed into other conversations.”
The activities are also just fun, Hodges adds. She remembers one little boy who approached her that day. “He was all out of breath from playing and was so excited,” she says.” He told me how much fun he’d had, and said, ‘I’ve never spent so much time outdoors!’
“That’s what we hope to do a lot more of. This space is for them.”
Continuing our series on the people that make the Preserve such a special place, today we’ll be meeting the ever-adventurous Jeannan Foster. Like so many of the people involved with this evolving project, it is hard to characterize her role in just one way. Over her 6+ years of service, she has been a trail-maintainer, a surveyor, a guide to new discoveries, and a true champion of the Preserve’s value to the community.
She first began volunteering with us during Second Saturday cleanups hosted by local naturalist Janis Stone. Since then, she has helped cut in new trail, survey cemeteries, and recently guided Conservation Assistant Deneith Reif to some intriguing historical artifacts. She has a knack for plant identification as well and is a particular fan of some of the Preserve’s more lush, green settings.
For Jeanann, the Preserve is a family affair. She and her kids have been hiking this area for many years, and her husband is an intrepid member of our Stewardship Council! She is looking forward to the many improvements we have planned, including a brand new trailhead and parking area set to be built in the near future. We are looking forward to Jeanann joining us on more adventures, and could not be more grateful for all the time and dedication she and her family have shared.
If you’d like to get involved with Preserve happenings, make sure to follow us on facebook, Instagram, and meetup!
Governor Glenn Youngkin recently announced two appointments to VOF’s board of trustees.
V.B. “Tack” Richardson III, of the City of Alexandria, is a management consultant for the McLean-based MITRE Corporation and former staff member for Senator John W. Warner, where he worked on conservation and environmental issues affecting Virginia, including land preservation, increased public access for the Chesapeake Bay, and enhancing tourism for the Commonwealth’s natural, cultural, and historical assets. A native Virginian, Tack spends much of his free time enjoying Virginia’s Northern Neck with his family, as well as in the Warm Springs Valley and Virginia’s Western Highlands. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.
Elizabeth Copeland, of King William County, is a senior director in U.S. Regulatory Submissions and Compliance for Juul Labs, Inc. (JLI). Prior to joining JLI in September 2020, Elizabeth worked at Altria Client Services Inc., a subsidiary of Altria Group, Inc., for 15 years. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in animal and poultry sciences from Virginia Tech and a Master of Science degree in regulatory affairs from San Diego State University. Elizabeth also dedicates time and focus to community service and helping others. She was appointed to serve on the King William County Wetlands Board of Directors (term ending September 30, 2027) and she serves on the Board of Directors for the James River Horse Foundation and Aylett Country Day School. Elizabeth also remains active in the Virginia Tech community, where she served on the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Alumni Organization Board for six years and is a lifetime member of the Virginia Tech Women in Leadership and Philanthropy Council. Elizabeth grew up and currently owns a farm that has been in her family for multiple generations in King William County. She is a passionate outdoorswoman and an avid animal lover and enjoys spending quality time with her many rescued dogs, cats, and horses.
The wide-open spaces along the Potomac are the site of camps created through a partnership between Fairfax NAACP, United Community and Calleva Outdoors that address inequities in access to safe outdoor spaces.
“Just take one more step.”
For a kid on their first day rock climbing, that’s a lot harder than it sounds, says Chris Knowles, art director for Calleva Outdoors, a Washington, D.C.-area non-profit that specializes in outdoor education. This summer, Calleva partnered with the Fairfax NAACP to organize week-long camps for young people living in communities without access to safe parks in Fairfax County. For many, it was their first opportunity to get out into nature and rock climb, swim, kayak, raft, and stand-up paddleboard.
Camp organizers say their primary goal is to get kids to take home what they learn about themselves and the environment at the camps.
Knowles went out the first week of camp to take pictures and to talk to campers about their experience. “There was one kid who said he wasn’t going to climb at all when I asked him,” Knowles says. “He was nervous about falling. But then it came time to try, and he did it.” Encouraged by counselors and step by step, he made it halfway up, Knowles recalls, but fears overcame him and he stopped there. “He was disappointed and quite emotional because he didn’t make it all the way. So, we talked about what success looks like, and he eventually understood that he was a success. That’s what success is. It doesn’t mean getting to the top; it just means stretching your boundaries, going farther than you thought you could.”
Getting kids to challenge themselves outdoors is just the beginning, says Lydia Lawrence, environmental and climate justice chair of the Fairfax NAACP. “Our number-one goal is campers taking this knowledge [about themselves and the environment] and bringing it back home,” she states.
A grant from the Virginia Outdoors Foundation Get Outdoors Fund helped with planning and provided funding for 30 campers to attend. “Being able to apply [for the grant] during the planning stage gave us the luxury of time,” says Lawrence. “You have to consistently show up and get to know people,” she says. “Every community is different.”
United Community, a Fairfax nonprofit, helped with outreach to two specific Fairfax communities, Creekside and Sacramento, where there was no safe space for kids and families to gather outside.
“There is a park adjacent to the Creekside Community, Mount Vernon Woods, but it wasn’t maintained,” Lawrence says. “It got to the point where the community considered it unsafe. So, part of the project has been to help these communities gain a voice in advocating for safe spaces to be outside.”
Calleva Outdoors staff brought gear to demonstrate for future campers during the careful planning process.
There are ripple effects to this engagement that Lawrence says she never anticipated. Each community now has an active youth environmental club that conducts cleanups of the nearby creek. The elementary school adjacent to Mount Vernon Woods Park has added environmental education to its curriculum and is building a community garden on the premises. And finally, an environmentally themed “Family Fun Day” organized by the Fairfax NAACP and United Community at Mount Vernon Woods helped to highlight longstanding inequities and neglect, reigniting community interest and feedback in the Park Authority’s proposed vision for the park.
None of this could have happened without planning, Lawrence says. “It was the long planning process leading up to the camps that engaged people. It was excitement for the camps themselves that created this engagement.”
Watch a video of Chris Knowles’ interview with campers and United Community’s Niema Knight below.
VOF protects 636 acres of Loudoun County's 1,000-acre backyard, including the historic Davis mansion, its grounds, and the Ridgetop Trail extending into the forest behind it.
With an annual visitor count of 500,000, Morven Park has earned its nickname as “Loudoun County’s 1,000-acre backyard.” But executive director Stacey Metcalfe just likes to call it her “happy place.”
After a decade of enjoying the trails through the park on her weekly runs, Metcalfe was married in front of the historic Davis Mansion on the property. Not long after, she was asked to join the park’s board, and in 2021, she assumed her current role. “It’s such a special place. I was its cheerleader long before I was ever sitting at this desk.”
Metcalfe’s tenure as executive director began with a reassessment of the park’s mission after the pandemic. “It became more focused,” Metcalfe states. “We wanted to make sure we continued to be relevant.”
Part of that reassessment included updating tours of the historic Davis Mansion on the property to match the evolving interests of visitors. The mansion was home for 39 years to Westmoreland Davis, Virginia’s governor from 1918-1922, and tours used to concentrate on his and his wife Marguerite’s lives and the art and antiques they collected during their travels. That changed, Metcalfe says, when people began to ask questions about the world outside the family at the time. “Now, the tours are not only about the people and things inside the mansion, but also about the country. Marguerite Davis couldn’t even vote for her husband when he ran for governor. Reminding people of that history is important.”
Six hundred and thirty-six acres of the property, including the grounds of the mansion and the Ridgetop Trail behind it, have been protected since 2005 by an open-space easement granted to the Virginia Outdoors Foundation. The challenging 1.3-mile trail ascends 232 feet through forest to Catoctin Ridge, the highest point on the property. Miles of natural surface and gravel trails extend through the park. All trails are free and open to the public daily.
Educational programming coordinated with Loudoun County’s elementary schools and the Morven Park Foundation’s Center for Civic Impact brings schoolkids out to the park’s pollinator garden to learn about monarch butterflies and the importance of habitat preservation.
The park’s refocused mission, Metcalfe says, is to get all sorts of people out to the park to understand how special it is and how it’s worth preserving. “We’ve learned that public engagement ensures sustainability,” she states. “Ideally, I want everybody to have Morven Park as their happy place.”
For more on what Morven Park has to offer, go to the park’s website and calendar.
Carter Family Farms is working on inspiring a new generation of farmers with funding from VOF's Get Outdoors Program.
Michael Carter, Jr., is sowing seeds. A fifth-generation farmer in Orange County, Carter grows indigenous African vegetables like amaranth, Nigerian spinach and gboma. But he’s also laying the groundwork for future farmers.
“My father taught agriculture and I am a lifetime farmer,” he says. “It’s always been my desire to plant seeds in others.”
Carter’s family has owned the property since1910.
After five years in Ghana as a consultant to farmers transitioning from conventional to organic growing methods, Carter returned to the family farm and started Africulture, a program that melds his love of African culture and agriculture together to educate others.
“You don’t realize how much people don’t know,” he says. “The most common thing I hear when I’m talking to people is ‘I didn’t know that’ or ‘I learned a lot.’ It’s refreshing because it means that they were listening and it resonates.”
Now Carter hosts Africulture events on the family farm. Most recently, he celebrated Juneteenth there with over a hundred people in an event that was designed to attract families. A Virginia Outdoors Foundation Get Outdoors Fund grant helped fund that and future events this summer. “The VOF support made it possible for us to come up with some concepts that really helped us engage the audience we were trying to reach, which was younger people as well as their parents.”
Activities at the Juneteenth celebration included making banjos out of African gourds.
Activities at the Juneteenth celebration included a presentation and African libation ceremony with representatives of the United States Colored Troops, a painting workshop with paints that participants made themselves from vegetable dyes, another workshop where people learned to make banjos out of African gourds, and educational sessions learning about heritage vegetables. And, of course, plenty of opportunities to eat good food.
Everything at the event, Carter says, was designed to “engage your senses, your connection with the land and the gifts the land gives you. With the right creativity and the right processes, you can create something, too.”
To further this engagement Carter utilizes all resources, including technological ones. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is one of his favorite apps to get kids to slow down and listen. “You want to give them the opportunity to appreciate the frequency of joy and peace. It’s at the heart of what we do.”
In the end, Carter aims to inspire young people to reconnect to the land and foster a new generation of Black farmers, whose numbers are in decline at the rate of 20 to 25 percent every agricultural census. “That’s every five years,” Carter notes. “We need to help folks understand that this is a crisis. And we want to bring attention to that crisis in a meaningful way.”
Carter was named the Small Farm Agent of the Year by the Virginia Cooperative Extension. His mission is to share his knowledge with others.
Carter leads tours of the farm for one to two groups of students from Charlottesville every week, aiming to get them to understand where their food comes from. “Even just yesterday,” he says, “there was a group of young African American students here and the conversation we had was really in-depth, really intriguing. They weren’t afraid to ask the hard questions. I tried to answer.
“I can’t say I know what will happen in the future,” he says, “but I know that I planted some seeds.”
