Cleveland Museum of Natural History to preserve 723 acres in Geauga County that include

CLEVELAND, Ohio – We think of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History as a collection of galleries and exhibits, but it may surprise many to learn that the institution also manages more than 65 natural preserves across northern Ohio.

From bogs to wetlands to hardwood forests, the museum is the caretaker for nearly 12,000 acres of diverse habitat and the rare plants and animals that reside there.

“I don’t know any natural history museum in this country that has this much real estate under their care,” said Patrick Gallagher, president of Gallagher & Associates, which is helping to plan a massive transformation of the museum’s exhibits and gallery space to be completed by the end of 2024.

The most recent addition to the museum’s inventory of natural areas is a 723-acre patchwork of parcels in Geauga County near the intersection of Fairmount and Sperry roads.

The property is a welcome addition, said Gavin Svenson, director of research and collections at the museum, with its most remarkable feature being shelf-like sedimentary outcroppings called ledges.

The ancient rock formations are tucked back in a wooded corner of the donated property and beg to be explored, although the public is not welcome to visit, at least not yet.

“It might make sense to put a trail through there and set something up that the public can access,” he said, but the museum may also want to limit visitors if the site is deemed too fragile.

Ledges are alive

Ledges can be found around the region on private property and in public areas with perhaps the most notable example incorporated into the trail system of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Svenson said. But having control over its own habitat gives the museum the ability to study flora and fauna for the effects of climate change.

“When you start to do the monitoring, you’re able to document what might be appearing or what might be disappearing,” he said.

The museum’s newly acquired ledges are somewhat brooding in appearance. Wind, water and glaciers have scoured the gray chunks of conglomerate into a hillside bunker of crevices and passageways, smothered in moss, lichen and ferns, each in different shades of green. The rock is pitted with bits of quartz leftover from when the sea covered eastern Ohio 320 million years ago.

What makes these ledges particularly interesting, Svenson said, is the water that drips off the rocks and oozes up from the ground, creating spongy seeps that migrate beneath matted leaves. The water eventually makes its way to a stream that flows into the Chagrin River.

“The cool thing” about the seeps, said Robert “Bort” Edwards, the museum’s newly hired assistant curator for environment, is that they don’t dry up. “So, animals living in there can have a more reliable habitat.”

During a recent visit to the ledges, Garrett Ormiston, the museum’s preserves manager, found a two-lined salamander in one of the more robust seeps. He said it was both a sign of good water quality and something you won’t find in urban streams.

On the same hike, Svenson, an insect specialist, spotted two moths mating on the underside of a rock and took their picture. He identified them later as a native species called Bruce spanworm.

A thorough assessment of the biodiversity in and around the ledges has yet to be conducted, but the outcroppings likely provide a refuge for bats in the winter, Ormiston said. And when the weather warms, those bats will raise their young under the exfoliating bark of “nurse trees,” such as the shagbark hickory.

Nature’s variety showcased on 723 acres

There are other compelling elements to the 723 acres known as Crosscavan Farm that are mostly woodlands but also include fields that have pastured horses and grown hay in the past.

A beaver dam accentuates the seep-fed stream before it reaches the Chagrin River. There’s also a narrow stream gorge north of Fairmount Road called a “slot canyon,” where Edwards also found the two-lined salamander, but on the heights above it some English ivy, which is invasive and undesirable.

At the western edge of the property, closer to Ohio 306, a wildlife official with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources recently spotted what he believes were fisher tracks. A fisher is a very large weasel that disappeared from the area long ago but appears to be making a comeback, having been spotted in surrounding counties in recent years.

The land encompassing the new preserve was once owned by Lucia Nash, a prominent supporter of conservation, who died in 2017. Her name is already attached to a preserve owned by the Nature Conservancy of Ohio near Burton that includes a wetland bog and glacial lake and is open to the public.

Only three of the Natural History Museum’s preserves welcome the public, including Mentor Marsh in Lake County, the North Kingsville Sand Barrens in Ashtabula County, and the Scheele Preserve on Kelleys Island. But that could change.

Svenson said the museum will be evaluating its holdings to see whether more of the natural areas should be open to visitors, whether through supervised field trips, limited access or more free ranging hikes.

“There are some that are going to be so fragile that if you want to develop infrastructure for public access it will be astronomically expensive to make the balance,” he said.

If not, the public can learn about the natural areas from related exhibits inside the museum, where an array of re-imagined and interactive offerings are under development.

What the museum doesn’t want to do with its natural areas is compromise the biodiversity represented at the various sites.

“I think we view them as living laboratories or living collections and we have to steward them to maintain those living collections,” Svenson said, “because we’re dealing with invasive species, we’re dealing with environmental change, and the reason why they’re living laboratories is they’re the canary in the coal mine for what’s happening here.”

And sometimes those invasive species are humans. While hiking to the slot canyon, the museum officials discovered two deer blinds and fresh all-terrain vehicle tracks.

While sharing nature with the public is important it’s also critical that such areas remain as they are to prevent disruptions to the ecology and – in the case of the ledges – to filter out sediments that might otherwise get into streams and rivers and pollute Lake Erie.

“The more of this we have, the better we are,” Svenson said.