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The VMN program recognizes volunteers who complete 250, 500, 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 7,500, and 10,000 hours of service.  These are cumulative volunteer hours starting when a volunteer joins the program.  To offer some perspective, a volunteer who does the 40 hours of service annually to maintain status as a Certified Virginia Master Naturalist would take 6-7 years to achieve the 250 hour milestone and 125 years to achieve the 5,000 hour milestone!  

Below, we have listed the volunteers who have achieved these milestones between August 2018 and January 2019 (based on reports received by our chapters as of January 31.)  Some of these volunteers have demonstrated long-term dedication through many years with the program.  Others have joined the program more recently, but they have done extraordinary levels of service in a short time frame.  We are honored to have all of them sharing their time and talents as Virginia Master Naturalist volunteers, and we are pleased to recognize their efforts in this newsletter and with special milestone pins.  Their names are listed alphabetically within each chapter.

In addition, although we cannot list them all here, we are thrilled to recognize the 1,400 Virginia Master Naturalist volunteers who certified or re-certified for 2019, meaning they completed 40 hours of volunteer service and 8 hours of continuing education. Congratulations, everyone!

Thank you to Tiffany Brown, VMN project assistant, for compiling these lists!

We are busy in the VMN state office reading through the annual reports from our chapters.  Chapter leaders work hard on these reports to compile the membership and volunteering statistics for their chapters and to describe some of their most impactful projects from the year.  It’s exciting for us to hear about their accomplishments, and it is clear that Virginia Master Naturalist volunteers are continuing to make important impacts in their communities and to benefit Virginia’s waters, woods, and wildlife.

In 2018, 1,994 volunteers reported more than 190,000 hours of service, over 28,000 hours of continuing education, and nearly 145,000 face-to-face exchanges of educational information about natural resources.  The volunteers reported stewardship work at 446 sites across Virginia, including local, state, and national parks, local and state natural areas, trails, schoolyards, and more.  Their service in 2018 is valued at  more than $5 million, based on the value of a volunteer hour in Virginia as calculated by IndependentSector.org.

VMN-Historic Southside Chapter:  A New State Record of a Rare Liverwort and a Grant for Education Projects

By Lynn Wehner and John Bunch, both VMN-Historic Southside Chapter

John Bunch (VMN-Historic Southside Chapter) has found and identified a new STATE record of a rare liverwort, Fossombronia cristula.  This is in addition to the 20+ county records of various ‘worts’ he had last year and some 40+ plants total.  Liverworts, like mosses and hornworts, are non-vascular plants.  They are usually quite small and thus easily overlooked by most people, though not by this sharp-eyed naturalist who delights in exploring swamps in pursuit of botanical discoveries!  Learn more about John’s find.

Another piece of good news is that the ​Historic Southside Chapter was awarded a grant of nearly $2000 from the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund. This fund is from money collected from the sale of ‘Save the Bay’ license plates. The chapter will use the funds to purchase additional educational materials to be used in outreach and education about impacts on the Chesapeake Bay watershed. This grant was one of 90 awarded across the state to various organizations.

VMN-Historic Rivers Chapter Recognized By the Virginia Recreation and Park Society

By Adrienne Frank, VMN-Historic Rivers Chapter

The Historic Rivers Chapter Board is honored to announce that our chapter received the Distinguished Private Sector Service Award from the Virginia Recreation and Park Society, submitted by Alister Perkinson, celebrating all of the things that we have accomplished in our partnership with James City County Parks and Recreation.  He highlighted our contributions by saying that “In 2017, we dedicated over 2,500 volunteer hours in the James City County Parks at an estimated value of $61,725.” Projects in the parks included Bluebird and Prothonotary Warbler nest box monitoring, natives planting at the Williamsburg Botanical Garden, the Butterfly Festival, summer camps and nature programs, educational displays at the Rec Center, signage for Living Forest Interpretive Trails, and the Powhatan Creek waterways guide. These projects had an impact on thousands of visitors to our parks. 

VMN-Fairfax Chapter Volunteers Recognized by the Fairfax County Park Authority

The Fairfax County Park Authority established the Elly Doyle Park Service Award program in 1988 to recognize former Board Member and Chair Ellamae Doyle’s years of outstanding service. Four Fairfax Master Naturalists were recognized during the November 2018 ceremony:

• Marilyn Schroeder, Elly Doyle Park Service Award
• Tom Blackburn, Outstanding Volunteer, Riverbend Park
• Shannon Dart, Outstanding Volunteer, Huntley Meadows
• Bob Dinse, Outstanding Volunteer, Hidden Oaks

Congratulations, Marilyn, Tom, Shannon, and Bob!

ARMN Celebrates 10 Years Serving Community and Launches Facebook Page

By Kasha Helget, VMN-Arlington Regional Chapter

The Arlington Regional Master Naturalists group just finished its 10th year as a Virginia Master Naturalist chapter, and over 70 members celebrated the milestone at the Annual Meeting in December.

President Marion Jordan highlighted ARMN’s past achievements, present efforts, and plans for future activities. This included an acknowledgment of the various projects on which members have donated thousands of hours during the decade. Among these are stewardship activities (such as invasive plant removals from regional parks and public lands, stream cleanups, and native plant nursery work); education and outreach programs (including public events and instructional programs, nature center support, work with children inside and outside of the classroom, and school gardens); and citizen science (such as stream water monitoring, bird counts, tree, plant, and insect surveys, and more recently, bioblitzes and other surveys that use internet-based iNaturalist, eBird, and GPS tools to track plant, animals, and restoration efforts).

For the future, Jordan stressed the priority of expanding ARMN’s outreach to include more members of the community with events such as “pop-up parks” (to provide nature mini-presentations to passers-by both in parks and elsewhere), as well as more structured outreach to a variety of organizations and citizens.

The ARMN members also submitted their own reflections on their past and present involvements in the organization, and how they looked forward to continued participation during the next decade.

Active membership in ARMN has grown to over 175 individuals whose contributions have multiplied throughout the years. Just in 2018, members reported over 15,000 hours of work in support of the natural environment locally and throughout Virginia!

The ARMN organization has also been honored during its ten years by awards from the National Park Service and Arlington County, and individual members have been honored for their efforts in supporting Arlington’s natural environment.

ARMN has recently launched the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists
Facebook page to engage members of the general public about local natural events, photos, discussion topics, or other items of interest in our natural world. Anyone can join by applying for inclusion in the group. We hope to see YOU participate there, too!

Over the past 17 years the enclosed two acres of our “north pasture” has served as a teacher for our family in meadow management, with all lessons learned through observation and modification of mowing cycles to support the natural carpeting of the hillsides with a glorious show of introduced and native flowering plants. In early May, Oxeye Daisies blanket the slopes, in June the Dandelions take their turn, and in early fall another round of Dandelions and the more approved-of native plant, Common Yarrow, finish the season.

Just a few feet across the dirt road that runs along the ridge line, a variety of completely different nonnative plant species provide evidence of early British settlers to the area: edible Yellow Hops Clover and Rabbit’s Foot Clover carpet the southern facing slope in the early spring, and sometimes again in late summer. 

The eight acre farm we live on in Toano, Virginia, has been cultivated, hunted and explored for centuries by colonists and for millennia by Native Americans of the Powhatan Nation. Our double-digging of the first garden beds in 2003 revealed such a treasure of bulky 17th century German pottery, broken porcelain and medicine bottles, we happily skipped down Route 60 to Colonial Williamsburg’s archeology department and showed them our haul. 

They were not impressed. “You can’t stick a shovel in the ground around here without finding these sorts of things. Call us when you find brick,” they said. 

Why is it important to understand the habitat this county record-setting animal preferred? Because we did not realize that in tending a meadow of self-planted, naturalized and native plants, we were also creating and tending a habitat for a “secretive” and therefore rarely seen Eastern Slender Glass Lizard.

When I knelt down to examine the poor animal that I accidentally hit with my riding mower this past fall, NPR’s Sunday jazz show was playing in my ears through protective headphones. What I saw in the grass appeared to be a perfect music staff: rows of horizontal black lines separating bright, white spaces. I turned over the animal to see if it was injured or dying, but it was missing its head, probably from popping-up to check out the approaching rumbling. The blades are always set at the maximum height of 4 ½ inches, so I was surprised it could lift its head that high, and sad.

I grew sadder as I marveled at the second music staff running along the length of the opposite side of its body: two lateral music staffs extended from neck to tail separated by an unusual glossy, bronze color bisected by a black, middorsal stripe. Back in the house, none of my field guides, or online websites, showed a haute couture snake sporting a set of music staffs. Hmm…  a “Write Your Own Song Snake,” I mused, before emailing the Virginia Herpetological Society, VHS, with my photos and a request for help in identifying the animal.

“Wow! How cool is that!” came the reply a few hours later from a group of herpetologists. “The animal is an Eastern Slender Glass Lizard. These are legless lizards. Your discovery represents the first observation of this species in James City County.”  The team pointed me to a page on the Virginia Herpetological Society’s website to formally document the “County Record” as a Field Note to be published in the VHS’ bi-annual journal, Catesbeiana. (You can find instructions for this process here.)

Not only was the VHS team as enthusiastic about the find as I was, Paul Sattler, PhD, editor of Catesbeiana, answered my questions about the legless lizard on the phone. As a newly graduated master naturalist (from the Historic Rivers Chapter in 2018), I was deeply grateful for their replies and instructions.

Why was the animal in the north pasture? Why would it be a county record? Why aren’t there many around? The Eastern Slender Glass Lizard, Ophisaurus attenuates longicaudus, is secretive and seldom seen “because they stay in abandoned rodent burrows and under mats of dead grass and other decomposing plant materials.” O. attenuates are “always associated with grassy areas,” but, “Once old field succession reaches the stage where pine and hardwood trees shade the ground, glass lizards decline in numbers,” stated the VHS website.

The website explained that the historical decline of the glass lizard population is attributed to the lack of grassland habitat due to both successional changes and direct habitat loss. Its preferred prey species – grasshoppers – have also declined from overuse of pesticides. 

As a testament to the glass lizard’s former notoriety, a substantial body of folklore exists around their ability to autotomize their tails. Believing the glass lizard to be a snake, folklore tales claim the broken pieces will grow back together after sunset and form a complete “snake” again. A series of notes in the Martinsville Daily Bulletin in September 1967 describe just such an incident, and the people involved claimed they saw the pieces reassembling. 

It’s easy to see how anyone could mistake the glass lizard for a snake. However, legless lizard
s differ from snakes because they have eyelids (can blink), external ears and eat smaller, more frequent meals than snakes.

As part of its conservation of Virginia’s native, wild herpetofauna, and specifically the glass lizard, the VHS recommends that, “Observations of any kind should be reported,” and that, “Any consideration of long-term management for this species must include the maintenance of grassland habitat.” 

And this is why official county records are important to conservation efforts, explained Sattler in a phone call. “We have to tell the state what we found and where and how many every year. The state enters all of that information into the database at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. They keep a record for each county and have for decades. For James City County, there has never been a glass lizard reported. This is the first one. That’s why it is a new county record.”

Dr. Sattler graciously eased my conscience about hitting the beautiful legless lizard and offered a little kudos on meadow management. “Because you’ve maintained the habitat, they have a safe place to live. It’s great you hit the one you did so you know that they are there. It’s great that you have the photo and video of where you found it,” he said.

The Eastern Slender Glass Lizard James City County Record was published as an official Field Note in the Fall 2018 issue of Catesbeiana this past December. My original Sunday jazz inspired name for the animal, the Write Your Own Song Snake, will remain an inside joke in our family, continuing the glass lizard’s long folklore tradition. I promise to turn down the headphone volume and keep an eye out for our new meadow resident this year.