{"id":21713,"date":"2024-02-12T21:33:24","date_gmt":"2024-02-12T21:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=21713"},"modified":"2026-03-13T20:25:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T20:25:06","slug":"an-annotated-field-guide-to-the-katharine-ordway-natural-history-study-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2024\/02\/an-annotated-field-guide-to-the-katharine-ordway-natural-history-study-area\/","title":{"rendered":"An Annotated Field Guide to the Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Julie Hessler \u201985 \/ Illustrations by Marjorie Leggitt<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sixteen miles from 1600 Grand, the college\u2019s Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area, commonly referred to as the Ordway Field Station or just Ordway, boasts a diverse landscape. The field station with its solar-paneled roof, is located on 278 acres, part of the National Park Service\u2019s Mississippi National River and Recreation Area protected corridor that includes a mile of riverfront along the Mississippi River; a backwater lake; several freshwater ponds; an oak-dominated forest; a restored prairie; an older intact prairie; an Aspen-dominated woodland\u2014and numerous vertebrates and invertebrates that dwell therein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Big Bluestem: Andropogon gerardii. Prairie grass that can grow up to eight-feet tall. Changes color across the seasons from green to blue-green to red.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Macalester established the field station in 1967 with a gift of $150,000 from Katharine Ordway, a St. Paul philanthropist who used her wealth to protect Great Plains prairies. The field station is named in her honor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Ordway\u2019s Inver Grove Heights property is ready-made for studying biology, \u201cit\u2019s not just a biology place,\u201d says Jerald Dosch, biology professor and Ordway\u2019s director. \u201cIt\u2019s a Macalester place\u2014our second campus. All of Ordway revolves around undergraduate liberal arts education.\u201d Its use proves him right. In addition to biology, the college\u2019s departments of anthropology, art and art history, educational studies, English, environmental studies, geography, geology, and media and cultural studies have all used the facility in recent years for teaching and research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The college\u2019s new comprehensive campus plan includes a request to expand Ordway in the coming decade. But to understand what Ordway could be and could mean for future students, we wanted to know what Ordway is now. Open year-round by permission to members of the Mac community as well as to visitors, Ordway is an outdoor classroom, a research hub, and a space for discovery. Our field guide provides a look at some of Ordway\u2019s flora and fauna\u2014and at the lessons that Macalester students learn on and off its trails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s start with wonder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wonder.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Coyote: Canis latrans. Canine species, native to North America. Smaller than a wolf (its close relative).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Bringing students to Ordway each winter is one of Dr. Mike Anderson\u2019s favorite things to do. Anderson, Ordway\u2019s associate director and resident naturalist and instructor for the Biology Department, lives onsite with his cat Nigel and knows the field station well. He uses Ordway for the Ecology and the Environment lab course that he teaches every spring. \u201cWe start in February, and there\u2019s often so much snow on the ground that we have to trek in snowshoes,\u201d he says. \u201cLast year it was fifteen below the day we went down for our first field trip, with a windchill of twenty-five below. Many of the students had never been on snowshoes before, and they were anxious about going out in the weather. But the sun came out, and we provided chemical hand- and foot-warmers for everyone so they wouldn\u2019t get frostbite. It was super quiet and there were [animal] tracks all around. You see the signs of life that are still happening, and it\u2019s beautiful in a really stark way. The students learn that they can do this and go out and enjoy this, even though it\u2019s so intimidatingly cold. To watch them change from that anxiety to a kind of wonder is really remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bringing the classroom outside.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of my favorite courses, and I\u2019m biased because I help teach it, is Outdoor Environmental Education,\u201d says Dosch. \u201cI\u2019m a deep believer in the importance of vocational exploration opportunities at Mac. In this course, students teach local elementary school children at Ordway. It gives Mac students an opportunity to try informal education outdoors, and takes it out of theory: Is this something I like or not? We\u2019ve had alumni from that class go on to become professional outdoor environmental educators.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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White-Tailed Deer: Odocoileus virginianus. Medium-sized deer native to North America.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ben Pritchard \u201923 (Milwaukee, Wis.) is one of those alumni. After graduating in June, he began a one-year position as the naturalist fellow at the Dodge Nature Center in West St. Paul, where he works with naturalist Mary Dybvig \u201914 and farm director Don Oberdorfer \u201991. His role includes feeding and taking care of the center\u2019s animals, and educating visiting school groups. \u201cI\u2019ll run anything from Trees to our Farm Tour class to Wilderness Skills and Introduction to Nature, which is just giving kindergartners their first experience of, \u2018Wow, look at how cool these leaves look! Can you tell me what color, what shapes? How do you describe this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pritchard describes the Outdoor Environmental Education course he took at Mac as \u201chands-on learning.\u201d The experiential course is interdisciplinary, drawing on education, biology, and environmental studies frameworks. Working in groups, students design and implement structured, engaging, and rigorous educational experiences for children at Ordway. Pritchard is proud of a seed game he created to help children learn how seed dispersal works. \u201cThe course is a great model for what I do right now,\u201d he says. \u201cI remember Jerald saying, \u2018When the students come off the bus, you have to be ready and have all of the materials out there.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the course\u2019s final project, students create a two-week lesson plan aligned with state education standards, around a topic of their choice. Pritchard chose Bdote\u2014the Dakota homeland at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers near St. Paul\u2019s Historic Fort Snelling\u2014and the history behind the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connecting the past and the future.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Honey Bee: Apis mellifera. Most common of the seven to twelve species of honey bees worldwide. Apis is Latin for \u201cbee\u201d; mellifera is Latin for \u201choney-bearing.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

According to the Macalester Archives Counterbalance project, Ordway is the site of four archaeological digs containing material culture from previous Dakota inhabitants. In 2018, Abby Thomsen \u201920 began a project to use these digs as a point of connection with contemporary Dakota communities. Thomsen\u2019s collaboration with Dakota descendants to produce new interpretive signs for the Ordway sites was the subject of her 2020 honors project in anthropology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2015, five students conducting an archeological survey with anthropology professor Scott Legge found a 2,500-year-old piece of pottery on their first day at Ordway. This was a particularly important discovery as pottery of that type had been found in southwestern Minnesota, but not in southeastern Minnesota. Later, in a second plot, they found stone-tool remnants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sculpting nature.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Art professor Megan Vossler took a group of students from her Drawing 2 course out to Ordway to create site-specific sculpture. They had studied the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy, who uses only materials he finds on site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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American White Pelican: Pelecanus erythrorhynchos. One of the largest North American birds. Prehistoriclooking large heads and huge, heavy bills. Flocks of 100+ pelicans are often spotted at Ordway\u2019s River Lake in spring and fall. Ordway\u2019s Mississippi River location means about 40 percent of North America\u2019s migratory birds fly by or through Ordway twice a year.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe wanted to experience that type of process,\u201d says Vossler. \u201cThe students were not allowed to bring any tools or materials with them.\u201d Students used what they found and rearranged the items into a visual design that would peacefully coexist with the surrounding ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a part of the hive.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

At a September Beekeeping 101 event hosted by the Sustainability Office, twenty Macalester students and staff learned about beekeeping from Erin Rupp \u201904, founder and executive director of Pollinate Minnesota. Rupp keeps approximately 100,000 honey bees at Ordway, using them to teach visitors about bees and how to make Minnesota better for pollinators and people. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to be a bee these days,\u201d says Rupp, as she and the students discuss threats to bees from habitat loss and pesticide exposure. Students learn about the number of different native bee species in Minnesota (approximately 500), as well as how to identify kinds of bees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, the students don white beekeeping suits and protective hoods and follow Rupp down into a prairie below the field station. At the beehives, Rupp lights a bee smoker, explaining that the smoke helps keep the bees calm, and then she carefully lifts out one of the hive\u2019s vertical trays housing hundreds of active honey bees. In turn, with Rupp\u2019s instruction and warm encouragement, students delicately grasp the sides of the humming tray and hold it, watching the bees in action, and working together to identify the drones, workers, and, finally, the queen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Northern Red Oak: Quercus rubra. Grows fifty-five to eighty feet tall. Leaves have deep lobes with pointed tips. Acorns are large and bitter.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Back in the parking lot, the group samples fresh honey straight from the hive, dipping their fingers in the tray\u2019s sticky golden pools and savoring the sweetness before returning home to campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeing the forest and the trees.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

While undertaking a ten-week internship at Ordway last summer, Lindsey Gould \u201925 (Sharon, Mass.) and other student research interns used twenty by twenty-meter plots set up across the Ordway forest, measured every tree\u2019s diameter, and cataloged each tree\u2019s condition\u2014tracking things like overall health and signs of pest infestation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Macalester belongs to the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN), a group of small, primarily undergraduate institutions that do the same research projects with the same protocols and then combine those data to do large-scale studies across larger geographic areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ordway data were added to EREN\u2019s Permanent Forest Plot Project (PFPP), which helps researchers address questions related to tree biomass, carbon accumulation, invasive species, and disturbance patterns across a range of sites and ecoregions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bald Eagle: Haliaeetus leucocephalus. Majestic! Adults have a blackish-brown body with white head and tail. There are at least two active nests at Ordway.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe fact that I\u2019m able to be here [at Mac] and have access to an urban area, and then go to Ordway and have that connection with nature is so important to me,\u201d says Gould. A biology and chemistry double major, Gould describes moments from her summer living and interning at Ordway\u2014eating breakfast each morning in front of the field station\u2019s large picture window that frames Ordway\u2019s prairie, exploring the muddy trails near the river, and watching a group of turkeys and poults meander across the property.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using EREN tree data from the past decade, Gould created a data dashboard with RStudio, a statistical analysis software, for her final internship project. \u201cI turned that into the first iteration of what could be a teaching tool for Ecology and the Environment, the intro-level biology class,\u201d she says. \u201cStudents go out to Ordway and investigate oak decline. It\u2019s kind of hard to notice if you\u2019re not counting the trees, but over the past few decades, oaks worldwide have been dying off, and the causes aren\u2019t well understood.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gould\u2019s dashboard could help illustrate the proportional change in oak decline for new students. \u201cI have three questions,\u201d she says. \u201cOne: Of the living trees, how fast are they growing? Two: Where are the living trees? And three: Where are the dead trees? The last question is one of the most important things to look at. I didn\u2019t make any conclusions; I didn\u2019t do a traditional research project where I had a question and an answer. My question was, What can we do with all of this data? And here is one answer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exploring civic engagement.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Butterfly Weed: Asclepias tuberosa L. A type of milkweed; bright-orange flowers, prominent in June; essential for monarch butterflies.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople who spend more time outdoors understand the outdoors more, value the outdoors more, and probably make voting and purchasing decisions based on that,\u201d says Dosch. \u201cSo Ordway is the sustainability of democracy as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To learn about visiting Ordway, go to macalester.edu\/ordway\/visiting<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julie Hessler is the managing editor of<\/em> Macalester Today.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Macalester\u2019s \u201csecond campus\u201d students observe and learn about the natural world. <\/p>","protected":false},"author":881,"featured_media":21733,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-21713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","tag-biology"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":false,"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/881"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21713"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29843,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21713\/revisions\/29843"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}