A Saturday at Dionondehowa

How about a whole day pulling up bushes with the Environmental Club? Does that sound ecological? I was surprised, but it is. Uprooting invasive undergrowth helps the native species to grow, because of all the space, water and other supplies those plants take over. They impede the natural development of native vegetal and animal species.

Geoffrey Ovington explained all of this to us, when he took us into the forest to clean it. He and his wife Bonnie Hogg have took care of the Dionondehowa Wildlife Sanctuary and School since 1991 when the 175 acres of the sanctuary were purchased with the aim to protect the New Yorker wild life there in Shushan, Washington County, NY.

Geoffrey and Bonnie dedicate their lives to the sanctuary. They live there and work in it as much as possible. 12 Union Students dedicated our whole Saturday (April, 29th) to drive up to Dionondehowa, put ourselves at Geoffrey’s and Bonnie’s disposal and help in whatever they need. So, we ended up uprooting bushes.

John Levene ’07 was in charge of the trip. He organized the trip through the Environmental Club and drove the van from Ozone House to Shushan. This is the third time that Union students go there to help Bonnie and Geoffrey. The first time was around this season last year; when some guys who lived in Ozone House decided to go. After that, in the past fall the Environmental Club organized the second trip.

Levene explained that the main reason to go to Dionondehowa is to help maintaining the place: “They are entirely funded and sustained through volunteer work and we are one of the biggest groups to go in there and help them out with our clean up methods”. That is what we were doing. New York forests are invaded with three different kind of foreign undergrowth that kill new born native species which impedes the regeneration of the forest. That is why we were pulling out bushes, to bring the place back to a fully natural environment.

At the same time, we wanted to get away from the city. “It is a very peaceful place, one of the few places where you can go and hear nothing but the sounds of the outdoors. [We] were talking about how serene it was and how it was the longest we had gone in a long time without hearing a police siren or fire truck zoomed by”, Levene said.

Dionondehowa is the Indian name of the place, and it means that the stream that goes through the sanctuary “opens the doors for them”. Who are them? Nobody knows for sure, but last Saturday it meant for us.