Noor Fatima                                                                                        Seminar 3

BioBlitz Essay

I was in shift D for BioBlitz at Freshkills Park on Staten Island, which was on Sunday, August 30th. For shift D, we had to arrive at Staten Island at 6:00 am as there would be a shuttle bus to take all the Macaulay students to the park. So I took the 5:25 am ferry to get to Staten Island and after about half an hour I reached my destination. When I came outside, I saw a shuttle bus waiting for us. There was also a line of students who were collecting their BioBlitz shirts and hats. After we all received our shirts, we got on the bus and it left for Freshkills Park shortly thereafter. There was a man on our bus who works at the park; he gave us maps of the Freshkills Park and told us a little about the park. Out of curiosity, the day before I was looking up some information regarding the Freshkills Park since I have never heard about it prior to this trip. After some online digging, I learned that “from 2001 to 2006, the City of New York, led by the Department of City Planning, conducted a master planning process to turn the now closed Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island into a world class park. At 2200 acres-almost three times the size of Central Park-New York’s Freshkills Park will be one of the most ambitious public projects in the world, combining state of the art ecological restoration techniques with extraordinary settings for recreation, public art, and facilities for many sports and programs that are unusual in the city” (web). I was quite excited to learn about this project and was looking forward to see how it actually looks. After a little while, our shuttle bus stopped at a nice looking place where there was a table set up and a lady waiting for us. When we got off the bus and stood around the table, the lady gave us a prep talk and introduced us to our tour guide as we were about to begin our tour of the Freshkills Park. So I grabbed a bottle of water, put on some bug spray and followed the tour guide with the rest of my group. I was immensely happy that the sun was up and I would not have to walk in the dark. We were walking along a narrow trail that was full of clattering leaves, fallen logs, bushes, twigs, pine cones and all sort of stuff. We saw the tracks of raccoon but we did not see any raccoons. After a while of walking, we stopped and our tour guide introduced us to some trees and herbs. One of the herbs had a really nice minty smell to it. We also saw an invasive species of plant named Japanese knotweed and some Yellow toadflax flowers and Marsh fleabane, which were really beautiful. Also he pointed to the leaves of two different kinds of trees and taught us the differences of dicot and monocot leaves. Afterwards he introduced us to some more plants and tested us to see if we could tell what kind of leaves they had. He gave us two books to look at, which had list of all different kind of plants, leaves and their structures. With the help of the book, we were able to identify some plants and leaves correctly, which was quite fun. Even though I don’t consider myself as quite an outdoor type of person, I have to say that I have enjoyed this trip to Freshkills Park very much. I would love to come back again when the park is finally completed and see its progress.

Link to the web: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/fkl/fkl_index.shtml