Workday report by Topf Wells
With reference to the basketball and hockey playoffs, HESS SHOOTS AND SCORES.  Jim organized another most successful work day.  Almost 20 volunteers cut, limbed, hauled and stacked truckloads of invasive honeysuckle and box elder on the County’s new Davidson Property on the Sugar River (between Verona and Paoli).   That material now waits in carefully arranged piles to be transformed into two very large brush bundles at our mid-June work day at this site.

“Brush bundles” doesn’t come close to conveying the size of these installations.  Extending for hundreds of feet, these devices will increase the width, depth and stability of stream banks, and create great refuges and feeding lanes for trout.  Removal of the honeysuckle will also enable several generations of native oaks to thrive.  Over time we should also welcome the return of a greater variety of native vegetation where the dense honeysuckle canopy stifles everything.

Birders among our workers really enjoyed the site because several migrating species of warblers were visiting.  Lots of us were impressed by the quality and sizes of the runs on this part of the Sugar.  The quality of doughnuts, cookies, apples, coffee, pork sticks and Jim’s well water continues to run high.

Knowing that everyone contributed to the work day, we always try to acknowledge some extraordinary efforts.  Today, a hats off to our sawyers.  Bob Harrison, Mark Horn, Jim Hess, and Mike Meier again had to battle aged and well-entrenched honeysuckle.  While the individual stems of an old and ornery honeysuckle might be 10 times smaller than the trunk of a medium sized box elder, the wood is twisted, fibrous, and tough.  It devours the chains of a chainsaw.  Those seemingly simple clumps of brush also require a lot more twisting, turning, and bending than many other forms of cutting.  Tough, tough work; thanks for our sawyers of taking it on.

Photos courtesy Jim Beecher. View the full album.