Wildlife Flourishes at Conservation Area in Upper St. Clair

The facts flow engagingly and effortlessly as Shannon Powers shows visitors around the Wingfield Pines conservation area in Upper St. Clair.

She seems to know most of what goes on around the area’s 80 acres, right down to where a northern water snake is likely to be getting some sun amid tall blades of grass. Name an animal that you might find at Wingfield Pines, and she’ll give you the rundown: why it’s here and, in most cases, why it’s a good thing that it’s here.

Such expertise is all in a day’s work – or more accurately, all in a day’s studies – for Shannon, a New York University environmental sciences student who is a summer intern with the Allegheny Land Trust, which owns Wingfield Pines.

She has been a nearly constant presence there for about a month and a half, assisting the land trust with its mission of returning the 80-acre onetime golf course to as close to its natural state as possible. And with such efforts comes an influx of wildlife.

“Now that it’s being left as a conservation area, there is definitely more diversity here than there has been in the past 50 years.” Some examples:

Bluebirds

Once in decline because of competition from other, invasive species, bluebirds have made a comeback thanks to widespread efforts to ensure their survival.

“We have a lot of bluebird boxes, about a dozen or so,” Shannon says. “In some of the area where we used to have the boxes, the woods and trees have grown over, and bluebirds like to be on the edge of open space so they can feed in the meadow.”

A Boy Scout is working on his Eagle project to refurbish the boxes for the fervent insectivores.

Other birds

From hawks to hummingbirds, Wingfield Pines visitors generally can expect to see a wide variety of feathered friends.

“People come down here and bird all the time,” explains Shannon, a South Fayette resident. “They’re interested to see what birds are coming back to the area. It’s a nice, central location for people in this area to come and bird without going too far.”

If they’re lucky, they might catch some especially interesting birds.

“There’s a great blue heron that hangs out here,” Shannon says. “And we had a green heron, obviously not as popular as his blue relative, but people were excited about that because there hadn’t been one seen here yet.”

Among the others that have made their presence known recently at Wingfield Pines are cardinals, chickadees, warblers, swallows, nuthatches and flocks of “loud and boisterous” red-winged blackbirds. Along with the herons, waterfowl include kingfishers, ducks and the inevitable Canada geese, which hadn’t arrived until this summer.

Bats

The only mammals with wings are encouraged to hang around Wingfield Pines. And like the bluebirds, the bats have their own boxes: They can hold about a hundred of the creatures, according to Shannon, packed in tightly and hanging upside down

“It gives them sort of an artificial mini-cave to live in,” she says. “We put the boxes on the edge of open space, so the bats can feed in the meadow. They fly out at night, feed, and just go back in for the day.”

At least, that’s when bats are present. With this summer’s above-normal heat, they seem to have taken refuge in a nearby cave.

When they want to return, they’ll be welcomed back.

“They eat an immense amount of bugs,” Shannon explains. “The fact that we have bats here is just really exciting because they’ve been struggling so much throughout Pennsylvania and really throughout the Northeast with white-nose syndrome. It’s decimating the bat population in a way nothing else has.”

Named for the white fungus on the muzzles and wings of affected bats, the disease adversely affects their hibernation.

“It doesn’t actually kill them,” Shannon says. “It changes something about their biology so that they either wake up earlier, before they’re supposed to be done hibernating, so they either freeze to death or starve.”

For those that survive, another Scout has a bat-box improvement project in the works.

Snakes

A boardwalk extends through the wetland area at Wingfield Pines, giving visitors an opportunity for close-up views of aquatic life.

At the boardwalk’s northern terminus happens to be a spot where a northern water snake happens to like to catch some sun, as Shannon has seen it doing on many occasions.

“Northern water snakes aren’t venomous, but they have characteristics that are similar to water moccasins,” she says. “And some of them have like a saddleback pattern on them, so people might think that they’re copperheads.”

She does caution: “They are very, very powerful biters.”

Frogs

The guttural, almost humanlike croaking of bullfrogs often reverberates through the Wingfield Pines wetlands, and that’s a sound the conservationists like to hear.

“Frogs are a really interesting indicator species for the health of the water,” explains Shannon. “The presence of them normally means the water is healthy and the chemistry of the water is balanced, and everything’s in good shape.”

Insects

Colorful butterflies, dragonflies and damselflies flitter through the vegetation, but others that usually are considered as pests benefit the environment, too.

“It’s great to have insects because that means we’ll have birds and other things that feed on the insects,” Shannon explains.

And so that circle of life, as they say, can continue, thanks to the efforts of the Allegheny Land Trust.