May 19, 2014
Dear Friends Of Hayden Park:
The day-time temperatures are warming up, the birds are migrating and it is time to plant more trees. Rick Hall plans to have a tractor and tree planter available on Thursday morning, May 22. The weather forecast includes a 20 percent chance of rain. If the forecast worsens, Rick may move this event to Wednesday morning otherwise it is on. We will be planting another 700 trees next to last year’s plantings which are doing fairly well despite last year’s dry summer and a cold winter. Please come and help as you can. Bring a long a lopper if you have one to cut some Siberian elm saplings. The planting area is located along the upland trail northwest of the shelter and the north lake.
Dr. Thelma Heidel-Baker, Post-doctoral research associate in the Department of Entomology will be conducting a study on native bee conservation in Iowa prairies. She is interested in providing artificial nests for native bees to enhance conservation of these important pollinators. Native bees are important pollinators that are not well studied here in Iowa. She has designed a simple bee nesting tube and plans to place these in various prairies around Story County. At each prairie I will be setting out 12-16 of these small nesting tubes. These tubes will be set up in the spring (early May) and removed in the fall (October). There will be minimal other contact with these tubes during the season. The results of this study will be used to enhance our knowledge on native bee conservation and help develop conservation tools for the public on pollinators. Ada Hayden Heritage Park will serve as one of her study sites. She wishes to share information on this project with the Friends of Ada Hayden. A large component of this project is public education as well and making people more aware of this less known group of pollinating insects. We will be looking forward to hearing the results of this study next fall.
Dr. Robert Klaver, Leader of the Iowa Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at ISU has taken over the Tree Swallow study from David and Carol Vleck who retired and moved to Arizona.
For daily information and photos of the park go to: http://adahaydenpark.blogspot.
Erv Klaas
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