Habitat Squiggles

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager.

Photo: Daniel Barringer

Who says we don’t have fun? These squiggles are patches of mowed areas in a meadow at Crow’s Nest Preserve. You can see the meadow from Bethesda Road, but you can’t see any of these shapes from the ground.

Mowing this reminded me of walking behind my dad as he mowed the backyard with our Snapper push mower. He would take arbitrary paths around the yard for me to follow until the yard was finished.

In this meadow these are not walking paths. I mowed random areas of the meadow because I noticed that wildflower diversity in this meadow increases in areas that occasionally are mowed. Unlike our other meadows, this one doesn’t get mowed annually, and it has never been burned as part of a prescribed fire. In the winter, when we normally mow meadows, this one is so wet with groundwater surfacing that it doesn’t freeze hard enough to support the weight of the tractor. But this summer, with it so dry…

If you’re just passing by you might think this is a flat field, but upon close inspection it has a unique microtopography of swales and rises. It is generally wet enough that few woody plants grow there (mostly multiflora rose and autumn olive), and those I’ve been able to manage individually.

I didn’t want to mow the whole meadow and remove most of the vegetation. This meadow is dominated by just two species: Canada goldenrod and reed canary grass (the swath of lighter green at the top of the photo).

For years I’ve mowed a little parking area access on the higher ground here and noticed the arrival of black eyed Susan, New York ironweed, asters, and milkweed on the edges. So I thought I’d see if I can create the conditions for these additional species throughout portions of the meadow. I’ll check back in a year and share what it looks like.