Newsletter

<div class="ck-content">Well, actually, it's been a mixed start to the new year. After our amazing total of 71 tree rescues at Brumley South in 2023, we had the misfortunate of having our first three Brumley events rained out in 2024. OK fine that's not great, but to compensate, when the rain finally stopped on January 6th, I headed over to Old NC 10 and removed a bunch of privet at the edge of Brumley North. Photos <a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tNjr2qaT2_F1HOzd3Mdw85FTG2K69ZPR">here</a>. Even better, on the 13th of January, 15 volunteers came out for a great privet pull/cut led by Sam Wright. And the real reason I went with “great start” for the subject of this newsletter is that I have added a new park to our list of “Places on Planet Earth That We Will Heal”: the <a href="https://www.piedmontwildlifecenter.org/">Piedmont Wildlife Center</a> and the park it is located in, <a href="https://www.dprplaymore.org/Facilities/Facility/Details/Leigh-Farm-Park-40">Leigh Farm Park</a>. This 82-acre park is owned by the City of Durham, but they've pretty much ignored it for years. Piedmont Wildlife Center was established in 2003 “with a mission to conserve native species and nurture wilderness connections.” Unfortunately, they haven't had the bandwidth to tackle widespread privet, as well as multiflora rose. Rewild Earth to the rescue! On January 10, I met with Camryn of PWC and Christa Evans (who, with her husband, Lawrence, has helped me tackle biofg challenges in Merritt's Pasture and Brumley) to come up with a plan. Then I did a short round of privet/rose removal; photos <a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ym72qz34p-EkdjhYt2hNVS9ezEdq_jBw">here</a>. We're going to be at PWC every other Thursday, starting February 1st at 3 PM, as well as the first Sunday of each month, starting at 10 AM. I'll be sharing the group leader role with Christa, a longtime volunteer at PWC, who was instrumental at getting the connections made.I'm so excited about being invited into another large natural area that will never be developed, but is threatened by invasives. 2024 is going to be a year of great change at Leigh Farm Park. Hope to see you there!<h4>Nandina really needs to go</h4>I've been removing invasives since 2010, and in the Triangle area since 2018. And I still have so much to learn. Every second Thursday of the month,  host a Zoom call with other native ecosystem obsessives. If you'd like to get an invite to join our call, let me know. On our January call, we talked a lot about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandina">Nandina</a>. Nandina has been planted widely in our area. It is an attractive bush with bright red berries (and bright red leaves in the fall), a favorite of developers when building out large communities. It is also not only invasives, but incredibly poisonous to birds, seeing as it contains cyanide. I didn't even realize this until our call last week.It's not an uncommon sight to find several dead Cedar Waxwings under/nearby Nandina shrubs. These birds gorge on the berries, so the poison hits them quickly, sometimes killing them instantly.This is not only horrible, but so horrible that we might be able to get people concerned enough to remove their Nandina.We talked about starting up a campaign this year focusing on HOAs and their Nandina problem. If you are a member of an HOA and are aware of Nandina in your community, please reply to this email so we can talk about possible actions to take. And if you happen to work in marketing or know someone who does, we'd really really REALLY  love to talk to them about putting together a marketing campaign around this issue. Something like this:<div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=11Llga4xSjhC0mS2EP9yxhwKlw7sdn-NT" alt="Nandina kills cedar waxwings" width="600" height="400"></div>Stay warm! Stay healthy! Sign up for a tree rescue at <a href="https://rewildearth.net">Rewild Earth</a> soon!</div>