It was love at first sight when I visited Mill Creek Park for the first time. An active lifestyle led my husband and me to the park. We used the roads and trails as training for running and cycling. Then we realized there was far more to the park and began exploring more with our children.

Many children in the area, mine included, experienced Ford Nature Center on an educational field trip. My kids loved the nature center so much, we continued to visit as a family.

At the beginning of 2020, Ford Nature Center closed for renovations that would take many years and a large budget to complete. After a three-year and $4 million renovation project was completed, the Ford Nature Center reopened to the public on Earth Day, April 22.

The project had several goals, including preserving the historic and physical attributes of the manor house built in 1913. I have always admired the architecture of Youngstown. However, I didn’t realize the artistic vision featured in most of the buildings came from the same family.

Architectural masterminds
A father and son duo, Charles Henry Owsley and Charles Frederick Owsley were the masterminds behind many of the stately architectural masterpieces in Youngstown. Charles H. Owsley designed the Strouss-Hirshberg building on West Federal Street and the Dollar Bank Building on the central square, along with many other buildings in Youngstown and Warren built in the late 1800s and into the turn of the century.

His son, Charles F. Owsley, followed in his footsteps becoming an architect after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1903 where he studied architecture in their prestigious program. The Owsley architecture firm left its biggest imprint on the city of Youngstown with the design of the Mahoning County Courthouse.

At the time, Youngstown was one of the leading steel-producing centers in the country. The large tax base provided for a new and modern courthouse. The building was dedicated in 1907.

Manor house
A few years later, Charles F. Owsley was commissioned for another project. He was to build a residence for C.S. Robinson, an executive at Youngstown Sheet & Tube. It was quite a shift from institutional buildings, but a challenge as well.

The first-class manor house was to be built on land that backed up to Mill Creek Park. The design of the house must allow it to blend into the natural setting. The natural beauty of the park and the building itself were to be cohesive and balanced, accentuating each other.

The pristine park setting combined with the gorgeous manor house were the perfect home environment for the Robinson family. Mr. and Mrs. Robinson lived in their home for about 40 years until they passed.

Gifted to park
The home was then purchased by Judge John W. Ford who did his part to cherish and care for the home and the grounds. Upon his passing in 1968, the home and property were donated by his children to Mill Creek Park.

The Park commissioners transitioned the house into a nature museum, a place for young and old to learn and grow in knowledge about the natural elements of the park. Children were also able to learn about the creatures who called Mill Creek Park home. The nature center quickly became a gathering space for nature enthusiasts and bird watchers.

Another goal of recent renovations was to enable further educational opportunities at the location. Expansion and reconfiguration of the interior spaces created space for educational opportunities and interactive exhibits. Improvements to the interior space also made it accessible for all people. Outside learning spaces were added where students can be immersed in nature.

When my son and I visited the Ford Nature Center for the first time after renovations, we did spend some time inside exploring the displays and bird-watching in the bird observation room. However, we spent most of our time outside.

Stunning

Walking up the steps from the parking lot, we noticed the rooftop garden. Looking at the native species in the lush garden, we could also see the native wildflower meadow stretching out below us on the property. Sedges, alliums and bulbs in the rooftop garden will attract pollinators while simultaneously absorbing rainwater and reducing stormwater runoff. We sat for a few minutes in the rocking chairs, enjoying the soft breeze and listening to the birds at the birdfeeders.

We started exploring the grounds by taking the Axtman Trail for All People. The 0.1-mile paved trail weaves through the wooded habitat surrounding the nature center. We passed by Virginia bluebells as we enjoyed the warmth of the sunshine filtering through the freshly opened leaf canopy above us. I can’t emphasize it enough — the property is stunning.

Halfway along the trail, we meandered off the paved trail further into the woods. Ramps and garlic mustard were growing among fallen branches and leaf debris. Like most kids when they reach wide-open spaces, my son was off balancing on rocks, tree stumps and decomposing trees.

As I stood in the middle of the forest with the stately Ford Nature Center behind me, I couldn’t help but think, “I can’t believe this is Youngstown.”

With a soft breeze blowing through the valley and a bluejay darting from tree to tree, I realized nature and nature education is the heart of Youngstown, where the past is preserved, the present is enjoyed and the future is bright.

Read the original article at Farm and Dairy.

After picking up a small fishing rod and line, Nico Rogers didn’t catch any trout or bass, but he did reel in much excitement and anticipation.

“I think it’s amazing and extraordinary,” Nico, 9, of Boardman, said. “You can teach kids about nature. It feels great because there are so many new things, and things to experiment with.”

The Boardman Center Middle School student was referring to the reopened Ford Nature Center on Old Furnace Road in Mill Creek Park, which was the site of a ribbon-cutting ceremony and open house Saturday.

The event also coincided with Earth Day.

The stately building, which was constructed in 1913 and became a nature center in the early 1970s, closed in February 2020 to undergo about $4 million in renovations — work that was ongoing through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of the changes and additions left an impression on Nico, whose regular interactions with the park include playing sports and birdwatching.

“What a gift to give to the community,” the boy’s mother, Melissa Rogers, said.

In addition to adding new features, a top priority of the project was to rehabilitate and preserve many of the original historic and architectural components, Justin Rogers, the park’s planning and operations director, noted.

Rogers also is Nico’s father.

New portions include a large, bright and airy exhibition hall on the lowest level, two multi-use classrooms in the education building next door and a rooftop garden, Justin Rogers explained. The renovations also entail a history room, a gift shop, two outdoor classrooms, the paved Axtman Trail and a new conference room and offices for teachers and staff to plan educational programs.

Rogers also thanked the hundreds of people who donated money, time and talents to the project.

“We’re thrilled to have it finally finished and have it be an asset to the community for generations to come,” Aaron Young, Mill Creek MetroParks’ executive director, said.

Young noted that $3 million of the $4 million for the project came from private philanthropy, and the rest from Mill Creek MetroParks.

The exhibition hall area, which looks out onto a wildflower meadow and hiking trails, features an array of high-tech, interactive exhibits and poster boards that include information on different native trees, the wetlands area, the Mill Creek Watershed and park geology. Also in the room is an exhibit about Volney Rogers, the well-known lawyer who was pivotal in transforming the park in the late 1800s.

Adding to the overall greenery is the Green Roof Plaza, which has a square garden filled with small-leafed succulents and sedums, hydrangeas and rhizomes, and requires little maintenance. The garden was carefully crafted with rubber layers for additional protection and needs proper drainage, Brian Keith, the park’s operations supervisor, explained.

The square plot also is a microcosm of the Living Roof, a 454,000-square-foot drought-resistant garden atop the Ford Motor Co.’s Rouge Center in Dearborn, Mich., Keith noted.

“To me, it’s just a place for relaxation,” Nancy Brundage said about Nancy’s Nook, a small window-filled room that overlooks a few hiking trails as well as the wildflower meadow and several bird feeders and boxes at the rear of the nature center.

The space was named in honor of Brundage, who was one of the nature center project’s initial donors and who began volunteering for the park in the mid-1980s. For 27 years, she has conducted bird and nature walks; her volunteer efforts also have included booking school groups and answering calls, and she still serves as a volunteer naturalist, Brundage said.

Also happy with the reopening was Eric Cromwell of Poland, who worked three or four years as an attendant at the original Ford Nature Center.

“I’m glad to see they kept a lot of the historical nature of the house,” said Cromwell, who earned a degree in natural resources from Hocking College in Nelsonville.

Also on hand Saturday was Ed Komara, who runs a traveling reptile educational program called Komara Outdoors. Komara had in one of the indoor classrooms an exhibit that included a 120-pound alligator snapping turtle, a leopard tortoise and other animals.

“I came here as a kid to learn about nature and I wanted her to learn about nature,” Eric Cappy of Boardman said, referring to his daughter Ariana McCall-Cappy, 7, who was intrigued by the reptiles.

Read the original article at The Vindicator.

With spring just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about getting your gardens ready for the season.

Brian Keith, operation supervisor at Fellows Riverside Gardens, said now is a good time to begin prepping your outdoor areas. This includes cleaning up garden beds, leaves, sticks and any debris that’s been sitting over winter.

It’s also a good time to start preparing and decompacting soil and mixing in compost, but certain kinds may be better than others.

“Organic compost. A lot of suppliers around here carry what’s called leaf compost, stuff like that. That’s one of the best things you can till into your soil, especially if you are doing a vegetable garden,” Keith said.

He says it’s still too cold to plant outside, but some vegetables can be planted indoors now and transplanted later.

Read the original article at WKBN.

Nick Derico, natural resources manager for the Mill Creek MetroParks, told about 70 people attending Monday’s MetroParks Board meeting that he is proposing the park board carry out a deer removal program under the Ohio Department of Natural Resource Division of Wildlife.

One part would be “controlled hunting” and would involve hunting at “select MetroParks regional facilities throughout the county where it is deemed safe and appropriate.”

That type of deer reduction would involve “select hunters through a random lottery system conducted by the ODNR Division of Wildlife,” the MetroParks said in a press release given to reporters Monday.

Another part would be a “targeted removal program” that would happen at “select MetroParks facilities where controlled hunting is not deemed feasible due to safety concerns,” the MetroParks statement said.

That type of deer reduction would involve “professional marksmen” in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The more than two-hour meeting included 40 minutes of information on the proposed deer reduction program and about 90 minutes of public participation with each person getting three minutes to speak.

The statements during the public-comment period suggested that most of the public does not want to see the number of deer reduced. Many said they believe the park has far fewer than 387 deer per square mile.

Lee Frey, MetroParks Board president, said the board will vote on whether to implement the program at the 6 p.m. April 10 board meeting at the MetroParks Farm in Canfield, where Monday’s meeting took place.

The goal of the program would be to reduce the deer populations to within recommended densities and to restore plant life previously damaged by the “over browsing and other negative impacts associated with an overabundance of white-tailed deer,” the parks system states.

Derico and Aaron Young, MetroParks executive director, have said that the park district has an average of 387 white-tailed deer per square mile in the park system. The number is 355 deer per square mile in Mill Creek Park, which occupies land from Fellows Riverside Gardens to U.S. Route 224.

They have said the data came from an aerial survey carried out in on two dates in early January 2022.

Among the most passionate speakers was Pearl Sinistro, who told the park board members to “listen to the taxpayers. We pay you, our tax dollars.”

“We love the animals. They’re harmless. They’re timid. They don’t do anything. They come in the yard. We feed them.”

She said people who complain that the deer eat their flowers should move to the city.

She said it’s wrong to “blacktop everything” because it shows no respect for nature.

Kathy Maine spoke with emotion about her attachment to specific deer and the deer in general.

“With the ugliness in this world, the wars, the killings, the bombings, why can’t we have something God given that is so beautiful and so heavenly,” she said. “Life is so short. We don’t need to make it shorter for those beautiful deer.”

Michael Colyer said he has gone to Mill Creek Park after work to spend time in nature.

“We need to preserve the whole fauna and protect the trees that protect the birds and everything else. The deer eat all of our gum trees,” he said.

Read the original article at The Vindicator.

Mill Creek MetroParks’ deer numbers are wrong, Mickey Drabison of Youngstown said.

He led a group of people on a walk in Mill Creek Park on Feb. 19 to look at the deer population after they heard MetroParks officials talk about overpopulation of deer. The group plans another walk today.

He said the reason for the walks is to show people and let them decide for themselves whether the deer are overpopulating. He said he believes the number the MetroParks has given — 387 per square mile — is not accurate.

He thinks the number is much less.

The group will be back out again today from 10 a.m. to noon for another look starting near the parking areas across from the Mill Creek Golf course, which is on West Golf Drive.

The group previously walked north of the golf course near the Morley Pavilion and the Lily Pond and did not see deer, but Drabison said the area near the golf course has more. He said the area where the group walked Feb. 19 generally has two herds of five deer each. “And another group of six that come up and do their eating.”

He was surprised his group did not see any deer, but noted dogs do scare them off.

Drabison, who lives close to the park, said he has walked nearly every day in the park for the past 10 years. He said he typically sees about 15 or 20 deer in a few herds.

“I follow the white deer,” he said. A white deer named Faith is in that area, he said.

He said 387 deer in a square mile “comes down to 10 herds of 38 deer per square mile. I’ve never seen deer like that in this place. There are deer, but their number is not quite right, in my opinion,” Drabison said of the MetroParks.

“These people out here see it. I see it,” Drabison said of the real number of deer. He said he does not have personal knowledge of the deer population south of U.S. Route 224.

He said he is familiar with area from McCollum Road to Shields Road and thinks there are maybe 100 deer in that area, which is about 4 miles long.

“I could walk you or draw you a map and show you right where they are at. You could go there and see the deer I am talking about. That’s it,” he said. He thinks more are south of Shields Road near the golf course, where he saw a herd of about 16 deer about a month ago.

“That’s the biggest herd I’ve ever seen there,” Drabison said. “The rest are maybe six or seven walking around together.”

ALBINO OR NOT

Drabison said he disagrees if the MetroParks is saying that the white deer in Mill Creek Park are albino deer. “There is not an albino deer in the park. There hasn’t been,” he said.

A leucistic deer can be all-white coat — but commonly retain some level of normal pigmentation in their hooves, noses or in their eyes.

One named Queenie died in 2021 at Schenley Avenue and Bear’s Den Road. Drabison found the deer after it died. He saw her born — one of 11 deer he has seen born in the park. Her death was related to not being able to birth a calf.

“The deer trust me,” he said.

Queenie was not an albino because she had yellow eyes, Drabison said. She was healthy except for a two-week issue with parasites.

Drabison said he believes the presence of a white deer like Queenie does not indicate any genetic issues that would suggest overpopulation of deer, because he believes white deer are “just like the brown deer” in their health.

He’s heard the argument that vegetation is being destroyed by the deer, but doubts that, too. The only type of damage he hears about or observes, he said, is deer coming into yards and eating flowers.

Drabison said he thinks the MetroParks is making plans to reduce the deer population to get money from allowing hunters to reduce the herd.

COUNTERPOINT

Nick Derico, MetroParks natural resources manager, was asked about Drabison’s opinion about the park district’s data on the number of deer.

A key part of data collection was an aerial, infrared survey carried out at night from an airplane Jan. 21, 2022, in Mill Creek Park and Jan. 26, 2022, in the rest of the park’s facilities.

Derico said the type of survey done for the MetroParks numbers has been “used for years, even the late 1900s,” and in the 2000s the park district did the same type of survey.

He said the surveyor who provided the data “went painstakingly for months, going through the data. Each (thermal) signature gets evaluated based on its size, its shape, its habit, meaning if there is a heat signature in the middle of Lake Newport, that’s not a deer. And then deer do give off a distinctive thermal characteristic based on how heat is reflected off of their coats,” Derico said.

He said the thermal imaging camera “can (or) will pick up more than just deer, but each signature was evaluated on its own merit and determined whether it was consistent with a deer.” He said there is a “confidence interval” of 85 percent, meaning the surveyor is “85 percent or more confident in his results,” Derico said.

He said the snow-covered, cold weather the two nights of the survey were ideal for the survey. The surveyor flew at about 1,100 feet, providing “great survey conditions,” Derico said. “We’re confident in the survey numbers. We don’t know what to tell people who don’t believe them.”

Derico noted that people are allowed to be in the MetroParks only during the day, not at night, and deer “are most active in the evening and at dawn and dusk and throughout the night. They bed during the day, typically.” They do sometimes feed even at mid-day but not typically.

“If you are walking in daylight on a trail, as you should be, there are plenty of areas where deer could be obscured from your vision,” Derico said. The way a person might walk in the park “is certainly not a comprehensive look at all areas of the MetroParks.”

When Derico was asked about Drabison’s theory that the MetroParks would reduce the deer herd to make money off of a hunt, he responded: “Absolutely not. Quite the opposite. There is no financial gain for the MetroParks through any of the methods (of reducing the herd.) In fact, it’s cost the MetroParks to gather this survey data and staff time to look into the issue. There is no financial motivation.”

Aaron Young, MetroParks executive director, said that “to imply that we are only looking at the deer overpopulation because of financial gain is simply inaccurate.” Young said the MetroParks will not decide what method would be used to reduce the herd until it hears the input from the public.

The MetroParks is trying to educate the public on this issue through the web site where the public can provide input at www.millcreekmetroparks.org/white-tailed-deer-in-mill-creek-metroparks, Young said.

“The presentation (Derico) gave at the last meeting (Feb. 13) was the culmination of two years of data collection,” Young said.

The MetroParks wants to create a white-tail deer management plan, which exists in many other park districts in northeast Ohio, Derico said.

The MetroParks board again will discuss the issue March 13. Derico will make recommendations to the park board on what to do.

Read the original article at The Vindicator.