Crow’s Nest: Welcome, Riley!

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager

We welcome Riley Clark-Long to Crow’s Nest as our long-term intern in Land Stewardship and Environmental Education. He’ll work here through four seasons including summer camp next year. Riley comes to us with a degrees in Environmental Studies and Anthropology and experience working on invasive plants at a nature center, working for a state farmland preservation program, staffing summer camps, and also researching horticultural history at Fort Ticonderoga.

Riley is settled in at the preserve and has seen almost every square foot of Crow’s Nest, and has already been working with our kids’ programs for a couple weeks. We’re fortunate to have his help, and hope you’ll welcome him here!

In other news, the cable bridge Riley is pictured on above, is no longer gracing Pine Creek. About two weeks after this photo was taken, a nearby tree that was clinging to an undercut stream bank fell on the wires, breaking two of the three. We don’t plan to replace the cables at this location, since one of the anchor trees chosen many years ago is ash (Fraxinus pensylvanica), and we know that Emerald Ash Borer, an accidentally-introduced insect pest sweeping across Pennsylvania—and now present in counties around us—will be killing most of the ash trees in our region. The cable bridge would only have had a couple more years left at most anyway.

So this post is both a welcome and a goodbye. The preserve is ever changing!