Designing a Greener Building

I'm back on a nice quiet Saturday morning to tell you about another cool feature of Old Woman Creek NERR & SNP: the vistor center.

When you walk up to the door, look down. The paving stones are shaped like interlocking frogs. They’re like the symmetry pictures by M.C. Escher. When you go in the first set of doors, to the left is a room where you can find sorts of good dirt like program schedules, trail maps, and fishing regs. (You only get to catch 30 yellow perch per day this year on Lake Erie!)

On the right is a window display of a cut-away wetland. You can see above and below the water. The display continues on the other side of the next set of doors. Look closely and see if you can spot the insects. I am a little short so it was kinda hard for some of them. (Hint! Hint!)

When you go into the main area, there are all sorts of displays about estuaries and the history of the area and NERR There’s a window where you can look out at bird feeders and a small pond. This is another place to keep your eyes peeled because there are a couple of Eastern Fox Snakes that hang out there. If you go back toward the classroom area, there's another window to look out of. Both windows have binoculars and bird guides. I saw some birds that either were female goldfinches or Prothonotary Warblers. I couldn't see if they had any white on their wings. They were gone by the time I grabbed the binoculars.

This place is pretty cool. It’s a green building. Not as in it’s painted green but as in it’s good for the environment. There is geothermal heating and cooling, recycled steel nails, recycled wallpaper made of phonebooks (look close and you'll see the print), and part of the parking lot is this neat plastic grid called Grasspave2. You can read about what else they did here. You can download the PDF here.

Out front, there's a weather station that NOAA uses to help track national weather. I just found out this morning that, even though we've not had any rain, there was 4 inches of dew recorded. I didn't know that you could record dew! There is a TV in one of the labs that shows what information is being recieved like temperature and radar. It seems that the temp is stuck but I know thy're working on it.

Speaking of labs, we are a research facility and there's at least 4 labs in the back that I'm sure most visitors don't realize are there. There's a wet lab, hot lab, microscope lab, etc. The folks at Crane Creek will often bring their otters and other research material here to work on in the wet lab.

In the back, by the classroom, there's a phenominal little library. I'm reading a book right now about Dr. Edwin Mosely from Bowling Green State Normal College (now B.G. State University) written by Dr. Ronald L. Stuckey (of Ohio State/Stone Lab fame!) and Relda E. Niederhofer (of Firelands, BGSU). You can also find all sorts of guides to mammals, insects, birds, plants, geology, and more. There's lots of ecology books and limnology books. Anything that a researcher could need is in there including copies of all the research papers that have been done here.

This is a groovy little spot on the Lake Erie coast. You should come visit.