Superstorm Sandy on October 30-31 1012 caused a lot of blowdown timber in the EcoPreserve. Students in Natural Resources Management are undertook an inventory of the damage (see map above). We will be clearing the trails over the next several months.
A joint clean-up event was on Saturday September 29 with participation of 2 dozen students from the RU Outdoors Club, the Naturalist Club, Principles of Natural Resource Management class and local homeowners through the Friends of the Rutgers EcoPreserve. The stream corridor to the east of the Ross Hall neighborhood was our target. We hauled out a ton of dumped trash – a lot of metal and glass was recycled. Other junk was trashed. Its amazing what you can do with many…
MUDRUN-2012 The RU Recreation Program ran the 2nd annual RU Muddy Run this past Friday (September 28). The course wound its way through the EcoPreserve and finished up in the nearby rec park with a series of hurdles, a wall, barbed-wire army crawl and of course, the mud pit. Over 500 students participated.
Late in August, the trail crew spied an unusal wildflower, slender ladies’-tresses (Spiranthes gracilis), blooming in the large meadow. Ladies’ tresses is a native wild orchid with white blossoms (with a green interior lip) in a spiral along a twisted green spike of about a foot long. When I checked today, the blossoms had withered but the basal leaves and spiral flower spike were still evident. Photo by Daniel Torres.