Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up on “Applause” We embrace the great outdoors of Geauga County, where the Cuyahoga River emerges from an ancient ravine.

Learn about a Mentor bird sanctuary that almost wasn't.

And listen for Cleveland bluegrass echoing through the Rocky River Reservation.

Hello and welcome to this edition of “Applause,” I'm Ideastreams Kabir Bhatia.

And right now we're getting in touch with nature.

We're here at Headwaters Park in Geauga County, which is where the Cuyahoga River begins.

That's the East Branch reservoir of the Cuyahoga.

And not far from here is a dam that helps protect the river from invasive species.

It's part of the Cleveland Museum of Natural Historys conservation program, which is usually closed to the public.

But now we take you on an exclusive tour of what's known as Kelsey's Ravine.

We're definitely up in the headwaters, close to the source of the Cuyahoga River.

If youre familiar with the way the Cuyahoga flows that goes south, It goes through the Akron area, and then it turns northward, flows through downtown Cleveland and then into the lake.

So we're way up near the source of it.

Some of the higher ground where smaller tributaries feed the Cuyahoga.

It's like a living laboratory where we don't just have the items in the museum's collections, but we have sites that support living populations of these various species.

Generally, a ravine is the deepest part of the floodplain through which a major river or stream flows.

In this case, it's referring to the main ravine that's down there by the dam.

The main course of the Cuyahoga River.

We are at the Kelsey Ravine in Geauga County, just southeast of Chardon.

It's named after the family that owns the property for many years.

We were grateful that we were able to work with to conserve this site.

My grandmother bought the property in 1935 and the dam was already here.

The lake was already here.

Oh, I love spending summers here, I loved it.

I spent hours and hours and hours in the canoe.

You could go off by yourself and do whatever you wanted, and nobody's going to even know you're there.

It's great.

Frogs.

Salamanders.

Turtles.

One summer we had osprey nesting up the lake.

My mother was Barbara Platt Kelsey.

She was very interested in the natural world.

She was interested in geology.

She was interested in birds, wildflowers.

And really kind of led the way about valuing this place and what it was.

She was adamant about native plants and not developing the place.

It was very fortunate that through the work of the Trust for Public Land and then the museum, that we were able to get this place to the museum.

Our program really was focused on protecting rare habitat and the rare species within those rare habitats.

So we wanted to have examples of all the different ecosystems that existed in our region before settlement.

Every once in a while, we try to take other departments out into our natural areas.

In this case, we were out there with our education division and it's really amazing what you can do when you get colleagues from different departments together.

Looking at a site and brainstorming the possibilities.

We normally in the conservation field don't celebrate dams.

They're usually not considered a good thing because they're a barrier for the movement of fish and other aquatic organisms.

In this case, this particular dam has been here for a really long time.

It's created quite a bit of wetland habitat adjacent to the lake.

In order to acquire this property.

We applied for a grant from Ohio EPA, and they asked us, why don't you think about taking out the dam?

And in this instance, we actually argued against it, even though it's a barrier for some good species, it's also a barrier for invasive species.

And there's a species of crayfish that is non-native, invasive.

And we found it on one side of the dam and not on the other.

So some cases dams keeps good species from moving, but it also keeps the bad ones from moving.

It's fun to see the Canada yew.

So it's this little evergreen.

It looks a lot like the yews that you you know, people grow in there.

That's listed as a potentially threatened plant in the state of Ohio.

So there's some cages all around the preserve that are protecting those Canada yew.

We're hoping they're here.

Five, ten, 20 or 100 years from now.

And that's really one of the main focuses of our program.

Vernal pools are also called ephemeral pools.

And they're wetlands.

They're usually in forested areas.

And they stay wet through much of the season as breeding habitat for amphibians and for salamanders and frogs.

In many cases, vernal pools are 12 to 18in in depth to support amphibians, but perhaps not to support some of the fish and things that would prey on the amphibians.

In many cases, they're a good measure of water quality.

You won't often have a good diversity of amphibians if you have poor water quality.

So they tell us a little bit about the kind of habitat we're in.

Just keep swimming.

So proud of you.

Oh, there's a nice big exposed Sharon Conglomerate ledges on either side there.

It's one of the bedrock types in our region.

So when we're talking about bedrock, we're talking about ancient rock.

This is what existed here.

Many, many, many millions of years ago.

But it exposes ledges and caves and other interesting features that we can see right here on the preserve.

Ferns and trees and other plants will come out of the cracks of this bedrock, and it's pretty unique thing to have on a preserve.

There's a big piece of Sharon conglomerate that essentially sloughed off, and it's sort of leaning to the side, and it's really quite a beautiful spot, an iconic kind of fixture here at the preserve.

300 and oh million years ago.

Three hundred million years ago, when we were under an ocean here, this bedrocks been here a long time, a lot of times what happens is the glaciers scraped over and exposed areas of bedrock.

And so we have these exposed areas where the glacier sort of stalled out.

So adjacent to that.

There's a cave.

It was one of the longest in Geauga County.

The cave had the reputation of having been where the bear was.

We all knew about the bear and the bear.

I believe the last bear was seen in somebody else's grandfather's time.

There's some pretty unique species of bats that were documented at this site.

We would go in the cave, and that was something you did.

If you were really brave.

Our focus is less on just, you know, recreation and more on habitat integrity.

We hope that the habitat remains, you know, in high quality state the way it is now for as long as possible.

I do have a passion for it.

I get pretty, pretty into these projects.

I enjoy the idea of leaving something behind.

I mean, the idea of conserving something in perpetuity is, of course, something we really grasp on to in this line of work.

My sisters and I are very happy to see that the museum is now stewarding this place, and there's no doubt in my mind that my parents are happy about it, and my grandmother as well.

This is what they would have wanted.

My doctor says to use these until I can get Lasik.

But if you have binoculars like this, you can visit another area protected by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Mentor Marsh, which is open to the public year round.

We actually visited this bird sanctuary back in 2018 and learned about its checkered history.

Oh, look.

A cell tower.

We are in Mentor Marsh.

Mentor Marsh is a pretty cool place.

This is a museum natural area, but also a state dedicated nature preserve, and it's over 800 acres of wetlands that have recently undergone amazing restoration.

And as you look around you, you see this land of water.

And we have this wonderful morning mist that's starting to burn off.

And you can hear a whole variety of birds that are occupying this wetland.

When we look at the marsh now, it looks similar to the way it looked originally when it was acquired.

In 1959, there was a development plan to develop this marsh, into a big marina.

And so a local nature club, the John Burroughs Nature Club, brought to the attention of the museum and the museum, along with, some partners like the black Brook Bird Club and the Nature Conservancy, started a campaign to buy up all the parcels in the marsh.

And in 1966, a football field sized pile of low grade rocks all got moved from the nearby Morton Salt facility to a creek called black Brook.

That same creek from black Brook Audubon and the museum's phones went off the hook.

Hey, the marsh is down, the marsh is dying, and within two years, dead.

Just dying.

Just leaves are dying.

And at the same time, our highways were being built and in jumps is non-native plant called Phragmites.

Phragmites or common reed that can grow to be 10 to 15ft tall and it grows as a thick vegetative mat.

And in a few years it basically occupied the entire marsh.

Totally changed the marsh.

And a lot of folks thought that that was the death knell for the marsh, that it was lost forever to these invasive species.

And it has created a perfect tinderbox.

And so the marsh has burned a about a dozen times with large fires.

The last big one was in 2003, and it burned this boardwalk the week Robin boardwalk that we're standing on, it made international news Museum members in South Korea saw the smoke went up about 3000ft, a black plume that coated nearby Chardon, 20 miles away, with soot and all the cars.

But there's been an exciting new program instituted over the last five years.

It's basically brought the marsh back at that point.

That's when the museum was like, we had to replace this $86,000 boardwalk.

And we're like, well, why don't we push this Phragmites back away from the boardwalk and out of the soil seed bank?

The very next year, all these native plants popped up and that's that Phoenix rising from the ashes moment that We're like, hey, there's some hope here.

We use an aquatic approved herbicide and in the very next season shows up these leopard frogs.

And so we knew that we were on to something.

And so we started to figure out how can we do such a huge project.

This is nearly four miles long.

It's almost 800 acres of Phragmites.

We used something called a marsh master.

Its 6,000 pound amphibious tank.

It essentially just floats.

It's got big aluminum tracks, and we came out here and we mashed around the perimeter and you can see the results.

We've got the Phragmites down.

We've got about 60 species of native plants coming out of the soil seed bank.

And it's this classic story of building.

They'll come and the Phragmites is gone.

The native plants are coming up.

Everything you see here is coming out of the soil seed bank.

And the birds have just loved it.

And now we've got all these rails and bitterns and sandhill cranes and all these other birds showing up.

Some are nesting, some are using its stopover habitat.

You can hear them in the background there.

birding is great here year round.

It's hot over the winter too.

This is great stopover habitat for a lot of birds that are moving their way up north to their breeding grounds in Canada, but also then the ones that are are moving south also.

So particularly right now, we've got some great shorebirds and some of our songbirds that are moving through.

But a lot of these bird's nest here also.

So we'll have views of the young throughout the rest of the early summer.

It's great birding all the time.

Even in the middle of the day.

Typically people say morning birding is the best, that men are marsh a part all day during this really great birding season, We have rails, we have ducks, we have geese.

We've got egrets, we have herons.

We have a whole host of songbirds which call this habitat home.

And if you didn't have this habitat, you wouldn't have those birds.

So it's really important breeding habitat for them.

And, it's also part of a really burgeoning an extraordinary birdwatching resource right here in Lake County, east of Cleveland.

It's great to see birds as far as we could see throughout the entire marsh, too.

So it's been fun and an awesome change.

This is one of the flagship properties for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Unlike really any other museum that I know of.

We have a collection, a portfolio of natural areas, almost 10,000 acres in extent, and this was our second natural area, and it was one of the biggest acquisitions at the time.

And it's also amazing.

It's a natural area, a nature preserve, but it's embedded right in the middle of the largest city in Lake County, the city of Mentor.

The Mentor Marsh State Nature Preserve is free and open to the public.

You can find it off Headlands Road in Mentor and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History offers tours of its other natural areas.

If you'd like to pay a visit in person.

I'm going to relax here for a minute while we check out this next segment about some nature lovers that are dancers, musicians, visual artists, and they're all inspired by birds.

But at the National Center for Choreography in Akron, these creative birds don't flock together.

They dance together for something called “Avimancy.” Oh, White-breasted Nuthatch.

It's very cute.

I think that being outside and listening for something is really magical.

He got close to a very nosy.

They want to know what's going on.

Oh.

I see.

Oh, there you.

So, looking at birds as an omen.

And as we look at bird populations declining, it kind of is an omen.

So I feel like bringing, you know, this project to life hopefully will kind of cause people to say, oh, that's not just something flying or moving around, like they have this poetic way of seeing and moving and being that's really magical.

We were camping in the Valley Overlook in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and we were awakened by the sound of the wood thrush.

I, being birder, knew what this sound was coming from there.

Very beautiful, ethereal sounding bird.

And Chris, not necessarily a birder yet, but a fabulous musician, was inspired by the wood thrush.

So I would say that is his spark bird.

So a spark bird is a species that kind of gets you into birding, gets you excited about learning more about birds, getting out there and listening to or seeing birds in the wild.

After hearing the wood thrush, it was just like, oh, I think I'm going to transcribe this.

So this is this is like another sample.

This is from the original wood thrush recording that we made.

And I just put like a simple filter on and I think as I started like working on this and like learning like what the notes actually are and like some of the devices that the bird uses and things like that.

I presented this to a faculty member here, and we did a short little study on it.

And then Monika took it further and was like, well, maybe we should do an actual film and or try to lean towards creating a film with all types of multimedia things present being, you know, sculpture and dance music, spoken word.

Put all these things into one project.

Christopher said, I'm interested in transcribing birdsong, and I'm interested in finding dancers that might improvise the way that he does as a jazz musician.

That got me really excited because this year we happened to be working at NCC Akron with a mostly percussive dance artists who are both dancers and musicians, and this gave them a shared task to explore something together.

Souls of Duende is an all female percussive dance trio.

We have a guitar player, we have a percussionist, and we have a trumpet player, and we have three forms of dance.

We have tap dance.

We have kathak and we have flamenco, all from different places.

But sharing the same stage at the same time, having conversations.

He said, hey.

In its song, it has, you know, a few basic parts.

And while they may not have like, pattern that you would follow, things do repeat.

They do come back, just not in it, not in any systematic way.

So I think music is perfect for that because we can mimic all things through music.

I mean, we've been doing it every culture across many millennia.

Have tried to use sound to connect all things in life.

So I think it's a perfect medium for that.

So what I'm doing while they're dancing is gathering up ideas for a longer piece.

We're going to be working on a film that kind of shows the juxtaposition of the outdoor world where birds are free, and then our indoor cooler world where there's less of that natural sound.

I'm trying to blend and kind of contrast those.

Birds have been used in art for millennia.

I think it's a great way to bring people together, and it's a great way to bring us out into nature.

It's just so nice to be in this short moment of collaboration with “Avimancy” and talking about nature and what's here.

And because place matters, you know?

So not only are we learning about Akron through coming here in this choreographic center, but we're also learning about nature and what is surrounding the choreographic center and what what is housing the house that we're currently in, which is giving us more information about the music that, you know, gives us an ambiance of the energy of the space in which we cook.

Looking ahead to next time on “Applause.” Impressionists leave their mark on each other's work.

Learn how Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot forged a creative friendship at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

They both shared this desire to do something new and important and memorable and significant with their art.

And we share the sultry and soulful sounds of Columbus vocalist.

Cherimondis J. All that and more on the next round of “Applause.” Well, I hope you enjoyed this outdoors edition of “Applause” Im Ideastreams Kabir Bhatia, we're going to leave you with music from another outdoors destination, the Rocky River Reservation.

Our friends over at the Akron Recording Company captured Lea Marra and the River Boys with their tune.

“Goodbye, Cecilia.” Now does anybody have a Bobby pin... or permission?

Yeah.

Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.