November was a bit of a wild month for the NR Club.  We want the club to be a place where you can be as active as you want to be, and that mission was fulfilled with activities to choose from every single week all month. Normally there is the club meeting every other Wednesday at 5:15 in West Quad, but on top of that, we spent two days with the Red Tail Conservancy out at the Prairie Creek Nature Preserve Red Tail Site. 

The first meeting was a geocaching experiment.  Two teams of clubbers had to venture out into the beautiful Christy Woods on campus with GPS units and navigate to points listed as having a treasure.  The first team to find all five of their points and thus retrieve the "treasure" at each was the winner.  The next meeting was our first guest speaker for the year.  Allow me to introduce (or reintroduce for many) Mr. Barry Banks.  Singlehandedly he founded the Red Tail Conservancy, a land conservation which buys up land and works with landowners to set land aside as "conservation easements."  Barry is a busy man.  The only paid employee, he has made this organization his leading passion over the past decade.  He works with his committee of 15 board members to make wise investments and decisions.  When not organizing the board or volunteers, he's out personally with those volunteers (that's where the club comes in of course), clearing invasive species, planting native species as buffers, picking up trash, or the likes... anything to maintain the sites he protects. Specifically, this month, we removed bush honeysuckle one day at the preserve.  It's an interesting site because right across the street is land affiliated with the actual Prairie Creek Reservoir.  Thus, on one side of the road you have huge bushes of one genus (that dumb honeysuckle) monopolizing and on the Red Tail side of the road, you have a few invasive plants that are still trying to come back this year that got chopped at the base and sprayed with Roundup.  Usually it's a two year treatment process at least for an infected area. 

More recently, some of us clubbers went out on the nastiest coldest Saturday morning we could have chosen and picked some of the seeds off of native prairie grasses like Little Blue Stem or the cone flowers. Barry will go back out (on a nicer day) and plant those grasses as a buffer near the Cardinal Greenway section that leads out to the Nature Preserve in an effort to prevent erosion. As our guest speaker, his focus was on the power of networking and finding the right volunteers for certain internships/long-term positions.  He believes that every little effort in volunteering goes a long way to show an employee's potential in the field.  He knows this first-hand as he relies on over a hundred volunteers annually to keep the Red Tail properties as natural and healthy as possible.  

Finally, Red Tail aside, last Saturday the club had its monthly trip out to the Cardinal Greenway where we maintain a particular stretch we've adopted, keeping it free from litter especially and ripe for public use.  So that was just November for the NR Club.  Preparations for Earth Week 2009 underlie all the regular activities as funds and organizations must be determined well in advance in order for the big day to go down as a hit, bigger and better (and far different) from recent years.  As a reminder, the club would love your involvement at any time of the year.  Happy Thanksgiving!!!!!!