Jennings Environmental Center

August 21, 2018

Jennings Environmental Center

Blazing star on the Jennings prairie.

Jennings Environmental Education Center is a really unique place. It's the easternmost prairie in the USA. It's only 20 acres, but has a high concentration of special plants and animals that love this habitat. We decided to go and check it out during their annual "Celebrate the Bloom" festival.

Can you picture western Pennsylvania in the remote past with extensive prairies? Neither can I. But it's thought that retreating glaciers scoured away the topsoil, and perhaps left a lake here which eventually dried up. A thick layer of clay known as fragipan lies just beneath the surface, making it impossible for most trees to grow taller than saplings. A warm and dry period extended the range of midwest prairie plants and brought them here to western Pennsylvania. More recently, Native Americans may have helped to preserve the prairie with controlled burns. This little 20 acre prairie remains. It was established as a state park specifically to preserve habitat for a rare wildflower, the blazing star. It's also vitally important habitat for threatened massasauga rattlesnakes, which still exist in only 3 places in Pennsylvania.

"Celebrate the Bloom" is a marvelous annual festival that brings together many experts to give walks at Jennings to teach visitors about this special place, and to admire the prairie at the peak of its summer bloom. Jasper and I were excited to join former park manager Dave Johnson for a walk around the prairie and a talk about the massasauga rattlesnakes he has studied for many years. Visitors with some common sense have nothing to fear from massasaugas. They are secretive and shy, and do not approach people. If you are not inclined to disobey the rules and tread off trail, squashing the plants, you aren't likely to step on a massasauga either. Having their ribs crushed does make them inclined to bite. If you do glimpse one crossing a trail, consider yourself lucky.

Massasaugas emerge from hibernation in the spring, which is the best time to actually get to see them, since the vegetation is not yet dense. Mr. Johnson explained that every spring, when the broad-winged hawks return, the massasaugas come out of hibernation reliably a day or two later. How the broad-winged hawks know the exact time that their favorite snack is emerging, is a mystery. When massasaugas are young, they love to eat amphibians, but when they get bigger their favorite meal is small rodents. Their venom is a mixture of blood poison that is designed to work on amphibians, and nerve poison that is designed to work on mammals. They will bite and then retreat to wait for their prey to die. They can tell when mammals are dead because they can sense heat, so it's clear to them when their victim is cold. Mammals will fight tooth and claw and can inflict heavy damage, so this is a good strategy. When they do massasauga surveys, they weigh them, measure their length, determine if they are male or female (and if they are pregnant), and tag them. The tags are PIT tags (Passive Integrated Transponder) which can be read with a barcode and last for the animal's lifetime. Photographing or sketching them can be useful because every snake has individual patterns.

Mr. Johnson said he is often asked why he studies these snakes, and what value they have. He said they are surely valuable to people because many visitors come there hoping to see these unusual snakes. It also seems clear to me that everything has value to the web of life in ways we often don't begin to appreciate until an animal goes extinct. What would happen to the broad-winged hawks if this important food source disappeared? Would the rodent population explode if this important check likewise disappeared? I wonder if rodents would eat so many of the seeds that they would outcompete seed eating songbirds, and rare plants would start to disappear from Jennings as well, followed by butterflies... So I think it's thoroughly worthwhile to give some love to massasaugas!

Sweet Joe-pye weed with a tiger swallowtail visitor.

A scientific model of the massasauga.

Blazing star.

Daisy fleabane.

Blue vervain.

Bee balm.

Ironweed.

Groundnut.

Thistle.

Downy skullcap.

Square stemmed monkey flower.

Swamp milkweed.

A goldenrod gall, where the eggs of a goldenrod gall fly will hatch.

Agrimony.

Queen Anne's lace.

This little guy has been driving me buggy! I didn't get the greatest picture of it before it hopped away, but it really intrigued me because it was hot pink. Whoa! It looked and moved like a leafhopper nymph, so I'm thinking it's this one I found on Bugguide.net, which does live in PA.