Legacy Magazine

by Sonya Welter

Photo by Sonya Welter

Most recently, this spot was an overgrown field, slowly filling with invasive tansy and buckthorn. Before that, pastureland for the dairy herd at the old Allendale farm occupied this land during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And before that, it was just another chunk of the mixed hardwood and pine forest that covered most of northern Minnesota in the presettlement era. Now it houses Hartley Nature Center, a state-of-the-art building that is a model of sustainability, and the surrounding Hartley Park, a 660-acre oasis of wilderness smack dab in the middle of the city of Duluth.

Today, it is a glorious spring day, sunny for the first time in over a week, and my friend Chris and I have come to Hartley with a few hours to spend in the park before heading back to the nature center for an Audubon-sponsored program. Park volunteers have built some new boardwalks over the marshier bits of Tischer Creek, so we take a little walk to see what we can see. Insect life has started to buzz awake in the sudden warmth of this late May day, and the warblers are having a feast: yellow-rumps are flycatching in the air, and Cape Mays and black-and-whites nose around in the leaves and bark for tasty spiders and bugs. Red-winged blackbirds and swamp sparrows sing from the cattails, and young boys are fishing in the pond, their bicycles haphazardly piled next to the dock. Every green thing has exploded in fresh leaves, and marsh marigolds are just starting to bloom. The trails are still muddy and our pant cuffs are getting stained with red clay, but it’s the sort of day where you want to keep going, just to see what’s happening around the next bend in the trail, and then the next one, and the one after that.

Back at the nature center, the solar panels are sucking up the sunshine power and the geothermal coils underground are busy absorbing the heat of the day to help keep the building warm after the sun goes down. Nearly every part of the building contains some recycled content, from the paint to the carpet to the roof shingles, and new materials were produced or harvested sustainably. We record our warblers in the communal “Recent Sightings” notebook and walk through the nature center, still warm and sunny even as dusk is approaching. Photos and artifacts of the park’s history line the walls; there are pictures of cows grazing perhaps exactly where we’re standing right now, and vegetables growing in what has since become a cattail marsh after beavers dammed the creek and flooded the fields. We also say hello to the rescued, rehabbed, but unrereleasable painted turtle and snapping turtle basking in their separate tanks.

It’s hard to decide what to do tonight. At the nature center, author and field biologist Kurt Mead is giving a presentation on local dragonflies and damselflies, but there is also a guided hike through the park looking for ephemeral spring wildflowers. Kurt is a charming and charismatic speaker, so we head into the classroom—there will be another wildflower walk next month.

Sonya Welter is a freelance writer living in Duluth, Minnesota. She blogs at http://plainlivingandhighthinking .blogspot.com. For more information on the Hartley Nature Center, please visit www.hartleynature.org.