Our Staff Pandemic Stories
August 8, 2020Over the past five months, most of the Schuylkill Center staff has been working at home. For us, being indoors is anathema to the spirit of our mission of connecting people with nature. But, we have pressed on with our Zoom meetings and online teaching while continuing to learn how to share our passion for the environment with our students, members and the public via a virtual platform. Here are three vignettes of how our staff is facing the Coronavirus head-on.
[caption id="attachment_271519" align="alignnone" width="640"] Teacher Ann with feathered friends Louis and Serena[/caption]
Ann Ward, Kindergarten Lead Teacher
When the…
Kindergarteners reboot their relationship with nature
August 6, 2020
“To Cattail Pond! To Cattail Pond!” several of the kindergarteners shout as they skip towards the Schuylkill Center’s serene, sunlit woodland opening at the edge of our forest, just a few quick steps outside our back door. This is one of our most active sites on the property in the late winter and early spring when water is abundant and vegetation is emerging.
For our 5- and 6-year-old kindergarteners, it’s an ideal place to set the outdoor classroom scene. Given the overwhelming evidence of the many health benefits of learning outdoors, especially in the context of the current health crisis,…
Schuylkill Center’s latest response to COVID
July 31, 2020While the Visitor Center remains closed during the week, we are open on Saturdays for the month of August. Hikers and visitors to our trails will be able to use our facilities and visit our gift shop from 9-5 on Saturdays only. The Visitor Center will remain closed weekdays
The gates to our main parking lot are now open 9-5.
The Wildlife Clinic is currently accepting patients for rehabilitation, but is unable to accept walk-in patient admissions. If you have found an injured or orphaned animal in need of assistance, please call our 24-hour wildlife hotline at 215-482-7300 x option…
Film Screening: The Story of Plastic
July 27, 2020As if the pandemic, the economy, and racial justice were not enough to worry about, as if last week’s hot spell doesn't remind us that climate change needs to be addressed too, the Schuylkill Center invites you to consider one more threat to your health and well-being: plastics.
On the cusp of the pandemic, Philadelphia was about to ban plastic bags in the city-- something many neighboring municipalities have already done, as the rising tide of single-use plastics has come under increasing scrutiny. But plastic bags are just, pardon the pun, the tip of the plastic straw.
For our planet…
Three Musketeers Walking our Trails
July 26, 2020If you’re out on our trails early on a weekday morning, most likely you’ll happen upon an energetic trio enjoying the sights and sounds of our 340 acre forest. Dr. Evamarie Malsch, Dr. Louise Lisi and Gail Harp are our neighbors from Cathedral Village, the continuing care community around the corner. As frequent visitors, they have come to know our trails intimately. “We’re really lucky to have the Schuylkill Center so closeby,” Evamarie comments, “and we’ve been going there at least twice a week to hike since the start of the pandemic.”
[caption id="attachment_271499" align="alignnone" width="640"] Three "masked" Musketeers walking…
Foraged Flavor: Eat Your Weeds!
July 9, 2020Visit almost any open space in Roxborough or Manayunk, and you’ll find a surprising cornucopia of wonderful taste sensations: dandelions and daylilies, Queen Anne’s lace and curly dock. That’s right, these are all weeds that simply taste great, and are free for the taking.
Wild plant forager Tama Matsuoka Wong has written a gorgeous cookbook, Foraged Flavor, featuring 88 recipes for the plants named above, and more. Recipes like chocolate-dipped wild spearmint leaves. Sumac and fig tart. Chilled mango soup with sweet spruce tips. Wild mustard greens and chorizo wild rice. Sound yummy? You bet.
Tama, a New Jersey resident…
Help us Restore our Damaged Pine Grove
June 30, 2020Pine Grove is easily one of our most beloved features, kids climbing in its many branches, parents inhaling the calming scent, everyone grateful for its cooling shade. But the grove was devastated in early June from a derecho-- a supercell thunderstorm-- that slammed into the region, knocking down trees and branches everywhere, causing massive power outages, and killing several people.
The storm sliced through Pine Grove like a knife cutting butter, a straight-line of trunks tumbling to the ground, more than 20 trunks snapping off and piled unceremoniously on the ground-- and each other.
We closed our trails for a…
Natural Selections: COVID at Cathedral Village
May 31, 2020As COVID-19 deaths in America hit the 100,000 mark, there has been a lot of attention-- TV news stories and front-page newspaper accounts-- on senior centers and nursing homes, and rightfully so, as fully one-third of those deaths have occurred at these sites.
So as Roxborough wrestles with the virus, it seemed especially important to talk with Charles Gergits, who for the last five years has been the executive director of Cathedral Village, the continuing care retirement community off Ridge Avenue by the Andorra Shopping Center. How has Cathedral Village fared?
“We're holding our own,” Charles told me last week,…
How We’re Navigating the Pandemic’s Whitewaters
May 14, 2020
Like all businesses, nonprofits, and even families, the Schuylkill Center has been struggling through the pandemic and the now-two-months-and-counting lockdown. While hikers and families have happily discovered the benefits of our 340 acres of forests and meadows, our staff is chafing to return, and we’re waiting for the science (and the governor) to tell us when this might happen.
It might surprise you to learn that we hire more than 50 employees: educators who lead school field trips on environmental science, rehabilitators who heal injured and sick wild animals, preschool teachers who use our forest as their classroom, artists who…
Manayunk’s Falcons
May 6, 2020[caption id="attachment_271399" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Female peregrine falcon eating[/caption]
Here's a good news story for these COVID-consumed times.
For Philadelphia’s birding community, spring means many things, especially the return of migrating birds to famous haunts like Carpenters Woods in Mt. Airy. To Roxborough’s Judy Stepenaskie, spring means the return of a pair of peregrine falcons – famously the world's fastest animal – to the nesting box tucked into the top of the steeple of St. John the Baptist Church, the tallest stone spire in Manayunk’s skyline.
As Judy has become the de facto adopted godmother of the peregrines that nest there, following them…
