No Ice

Conestoga River - February 21, 2026

Beautiful day out on the Conestoga!

The temps are up, the water is high and the sun is out! Nothing better than to go out with Mr. Vogt and see what there is to see. Thank you Mr. Vogt!

Following a month or so of impassible ice, things are clear and after yesterday’s trip down to Conestoga Drive, I dropped the truck at the Rockford take-out in County Park (2.8 miles), cycled home and then paddled with the wrens and the finches and the cardinals and the herons and the hawks and the... 

Tomorrow they’ll be out again doing the same ol’ thing, but it’ll be totally different. And while I’ll look for that heron to fly like it did today, it won’t. It will still awesomely fly, it will just awesomely fly in a different way. 

These are the “free gifts” Annie Dillard writes about in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; gifts we never expect and that are gone (perhaps) before we even know what we saw. 

Down by County Park. Sun!

Nature Hour and Sunnyside

Hats off to Kelly and Keith and the whole team at the Lancaster Conservancy for producing their Nature Hour series! What an awesome resource! Click the links to check out what’s on offer for the rest of winter!

The January 8 installment featured Dr. Dan Ardia, a biology professor at Franklin and Marshall College who studies habitat disturbance and how wildlife responds. His presentation gave an overview of his field of study and research on Conservancy properties where he and his team are trying to determine how habitat supports biodiversity and how we can care for these spaces in order to strengthen bird and mammal populations. 

How cool is it to interact with space and species like Dan and his team do? I absolutely love getting out and noticing patterns in behavior or getting the chance to see something cool and or/new, but Dan and folks like him take it to a whole new level. I mean, really - their job is to literally learn about beautiful spaces and the awesome things that live and travel through those spaces.

While not really discussed during the presentation, Dr. Ardia has also conducted research on the Sunnyside Peninsula within the proposed 70-acre nature preserve which surrounds Lake Lancaster, a non-Conservancy property that I see from the water all of the time.

Concerned about the increased human activity and infrastructure that will accompany the establishment of this preserve and the proposed 80-house development on Sunnyside just upstream, I asked Dr. Ardia his thoughts about possible impacts on wildlife.  

While I was hoping that he would say impacts would be minimal, it didn’t hear that. To be clear, he didn’t sound any alarms, either, and did not explicitly say what he thought the effects on Sunnyside would be.

Through the course of his talk, however, he did touch on possible ways that some birds and mammals react to increased human activity. These include a shift from diurnal to nocturnal patterns of activity and(?) or moving to other locations. Fox and deer behavior is an example of the former and I would imagine that the sizable geese population that hangs on the lake may be a species that seeks out other space if things get too busy. Bummer. As I write this there are probably thousands of geese out on the lake and with trails and bikes and hikers and people, it's hard to imagine that the geese will want to hang in the numbers that they do currently. But, hey, I have no idea. 

I do know that change is coming to Sunnyside. I just hope we can figure out how to do everything that is planned with minimal impacts on all of the awesome creatures that currently live there. People, too.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/83ac1e_46a68871e1ca41b29c0a13c0c7244fed/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Geese of Lake Lancaster

Time Travel and Land Acknowledgment

I was thinking about time travel the other day, and specifically wondering who or what period I would visit if Time Safari, Inc. had a shingle hanging on King Street.

No doubt I would get a ticket to this place. 1400 CE? 

It would be incredible to see what this landscape looked like. Maybe not so different in some places, in others, unrecognizable. 

A view of place would be secondary, however, to the opportunity to talk to a fellow river nerd. What do they see? What cool things have they experienced? Given some leisure, where’s the hang out spot? 

I can’t pretend to understand what the Susquehannocks and others felt about the river; or the natural world for that matter. I know what I have read. I know what I have heard, but I won’t go on for fear of romanticizing something I know nothing about. Beyond that, even if I knew what an indigenous person in 1400 thought about place and space, I wouldn’t really understand since it’s outside my cultural experience. 

What I can assume, I think, is that people throughout time have enjoyed the beauty of the world’s natural spaces and the power of sharing these spaces with people they love. That’s what I want to know about. What about the river and all that happens on it do they think is beautiful and worthy of wonder? Have they heard the sound of a wake tinning against the ice pocket on the bank? Or do they know sounds I have never heard? 

I guess this is all, really, just a roundabout way to acknowledge thousands of years of native presence on the Conestoga River and its surrounds. Spaces that through displacement and murder they can no longer enjoy as their ancestral lands.

It's the best