If you live in Boone County or you have landed in Boone County and use a natural resource, The Boone County Conservation District is a service for you.
At least, that’s according to Conservation Education Specialist Susan Brown.
“Our mission is to promote the wise use and protection of natural resources in Boone County,” Brown said. “We are essentially involved with anything to do with any natural resource: forest, streams, soil, air and habitat.”
The district has many active initiatives employed to accomplish just that, including watershed planning, forest health initiatives and partnerships with various community organizations and residents.
“If you want to encourage more pollinators in and around your yard, you can come and ask us. If you have a farm and you need to fence your cattle away from the stream, we can help you with that,” Brown said. “We can offer financial, educational and technical assistance.”
Additionally, the organization engages the community through citizen science in a variety of programs. Over the past couple weeks, Brown has held several monarch tagging events that were open to all ages. The goal of these events is to engage the public in the conservation of the monarch butterfly, a species that is currently listed as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“That’s why we at the Conservation District are interested in learning more about them so we can help protect,” Brown said. “As our communities start to urbanize and we lose that habitat, their populations are not doing so well.”
In fact, scientists have asked for the group’s help in monitoring butterfly populations.
“We want to know how many butterflies there are, is their population getting stronger, and we want to know where they’re migrating,” Brown said.
The tracking of these monarchs is an effort to identify the specific paths the butterflies are taking in order to focus conservation efforts along these routes.
“If lots of people are doing this all across the country, we’ll have a really good idea of how this population migrates,” Brown said.
Over the four monarch programs this year, the district has only caught and tagged two butterflies.
“I just haven’t seen that many monarchs this year,” Brown said. “I don’t know if there are not as many flying through here, or maybe they’re just a little bit later.”
Brown also mentioned that the low sightings might be indicative of the species’ decline. Scientists estimate that the global monarch population has dropped between 20% and 90% over the last several decades, as reported by the IUCN.
“So they really do need our help,” Brown said. Milkweed and other pollinator-friendly plants are available for purchase online from many vendors, including Monarch Watch.
“In addition to monarchs, we are really interested in knowing what species live here in our habitats- especially species like bats because they can be really good indicators of forest health,” Brown said. “They are very sensitive to environmental stressors: loss of canopy, loss of food, etc.”
On Saturday evening, Brown held a Bat Walk in partnership with the Boone County Arboretum that was also open to the public. Participants were given special equipment that could detect the echolocation calls of bats in the area and identify the species of bat.
After listening to a particular recording, Brown said: “This is an Indiana bat, which is an endangered species we have confirmed do live here in Boone County. So that’s great, we have some healthy forests.”
Over a dozen species of bats have been recorded in Boone County. “We do have a lot of bats here because we have lots of trees, almost half of our county is forested,” Brown said. “All of the bats that we have here in Kentucky are insectivores, so they’re great for pest control. Their populations are in decline due to a number of things, but particularly there is a fungus that spreads really easily in cave systems when they’re hibernating, and that loss of habitat. As we’re rapidly developing and urbanizing our communities, we’re losing the forests where they roost and we’re losing the insects that they eat.”
More information can be found on their website.
