Week of August 4, 2024 – August 10, 2024
by Kaylen Iorio, Environmental Educator
During the chaos of summer schedules, you can’t help but notice the calmness and the sense of balance in nature.
There is harmony amongst the plants and animals at Baltimore Woods – everything in an ecosystem gives value to one another while adapting to changes and persevering. Feeling the sun shine down on the preserve breathing life into all the plants, watching squirrels find nuts and berries and scurrying quickly away, seeing woodpeckers deliver food to their babies nestled in their tree cavity in a nearby snag is evidence of that harmony. Everything has a role in their ecosystem and their interactions with one another may benefit and impact other creatures within their community. A fox may be hunting a rabbit and that rabbit stows away in a chipmunk hole at the bottom of a tree. In that same tree a beetle is laying its eggs underneath the bark and a few weeks later the larvae begin eating away at the tree and weakening it. Soon enough that tree becomes a snag and the perfect place for a woodpecker to excavate a cavity. That cavity may be used by the woodpecker itself, or maybe a squirrel or a screech owl will take up residence because they cannot create one themselves.
I think about our role as humans in nature, as we touch many different ecosystems around the world. How are our interactions with nature benefiting or impacting that community? If we take the time to learn from the natural world, we will gain the ability to understand why things have value. Next time you see a large mossy log, don’t think of it as an eye-sore, think of it as a home for thousands of insects and understand that it is important in the ecosystem! If a chipmunk hole can provide safety for various prey species fleeing a predator, surely we can provide habitat or shelter for animals in our yards. We have the capacity to understand that our actions have consequences, so together let’s make conscious decisions that we know are going to benefit the environment.