Lake County Forest Preserves’ Ryerson Woods is home to Brushwood Center, an environmental education and arts center, “a center for discourse about nature and culture.” Brushwood features an ongoing variety of programs bringing nature lovers together to paint, watch birds, practice yoga, or simply enjoy a concert against a backdrop of wood, field, and farm.
On May 14th, Brushwood Center will host the Smith Nature Symposium, a benefit dinner with a keynote by Clemson University’s Dr. J. Drew Lanham, a self-described “a man of color in love with the natural world.” Dr. Lanham is a nationally-respected voice on the deep connection between ethnicity, land, and conservation and he will be addressing the link between minority communities and critical bird habitat. Click here to register for the benefit dinner.
Ryerson Woods is an amazing place with its pre-settlement flora and fauna, a place, thankfully, where we can enjoy the beauties of spring unencumbered by garlic mustard…
On a recent visit, my first, I birded for a few minutes in a field in preparation for the weekend’s Spring Bird Count, spotting blue jays, bluebirds, a field sparrow, an unknown sparrow (I need to get out more), and a swallow atop a nest box, surveying its environs.
I then enjoyed a long walk around the woods in the company of an enthusiastic denizen of the place, enjoying carpets of white trilliums and wild geraniums in a deer-excluded area of the woods, plus scads of mayapples just ready to blossom and a host of other species of wetland and woods. The fungi was also fascinatingly lovely after the recent rains; green elf cups (Chlorociboria aeruginascens) stained some of the rotting branches littering the peaceful, complexly-structured woodland.
—Stephen Constantelos