Now that's not an everyday sight at the preserve. Tour organizers anxiously inquired about the preserve's accessibility by motor coach. I did prune some low hanging branches over the road; we don't get many tour buses down our country lanes (photograph by Bob Johnson).
Employees from the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) attending a national conference in Philadelphia took a field trip to Crow's Nest to see the cattle doing restoration at the preserve ("prescribed grazing").
NRCS, along with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and other partners sponsored the building of the cattle fence for this wetland restoration. A small number of cattle are being used to return a red maple swamp to an earlier state of succession as a tussock-sedge wetland.
The cattle obliged our visitors by coming when called and contentedly chewed while listening to Natural Lands Trust's Jim Thorne outline the project.