The following are excerpts from the Fall 2015 edition of Innsbrook property owners Kathleen Kremer and Richard McFall’s newsletter on living in harmony with nature and wildlife at Innsbrook.

The Falling Leaves of Fall

With so many different tree types in our forests, it’s not always easy to identify each tree by staring upward at summer foliage. It becomes much easier when the leaves start to turn and fall. The young maples turn bright yellow and red several weeks before the elder oaks turn their leaves to bronze, rust and gold.

At Innsbrook, we typically enjoy two, if not three, waves of fall color bursts with local peaks separated by about 10 days.

Photo by Bob Wombacher

Our Dear Deer of Innsbrook

With the fall season, our plentiful deer are very active. The fawns born in the spring have all lost their spots, but are still seen with their family. If you see a deer crossing the road in front of you, the chances are there is one or more following! Be ever so careful for them and yourself.

Photo by Cynthia Bowers

Is Innsbrook a Regional Wildlife Corridor?

This guest article comes from Innsbrook property owner and Missouri Master Naturalist Allison Volk.

First of all, what is a wildlife corridor? According to conservationcorridor.org, “Corridors are habitats that are typically long relative to their width, and they connect fragmented patches of habitat. They can vary greatly in size, shape and composition. The main goal of corridors is to facilitate movement of individuals, through both dispersal and migration. By linking populations throughout the landscape, there is a lower chance for extinction and greater support for species richness.”

Photo by Ed McCabe

When thinking about this description, the answer may be “yes”, Innsbrook is acting as a type of corridor simply because of our lifestyle and location to natural areas that are already established in our part of Missouri. If you look at this Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) map, you will see that there are protected areas in all directions from Innsbrook: Reifsnider State Forest, Weldon Spring Conservation Area and Babler State Park, to name a few.

In the group’s next newsletter, Allison will take a look at how all these corridors work together and all that Innsbrook has done to help native species thrive.

New Phenology Page

Phenology is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life. Some plants and animals use the hours of daylight to guide their activity, others use temperature. Keeping a nature journal of the seasonal activity around your property is a fun way to get the entire family involved in slowing down enough to watch the planet change around us. We’ve started keeping track of certain annual milestones in nature at Innsbrook: the first wooly caterpillar predicting the winter; when geese start gathering for practice flights; the first and last bluebird clutches. We just added an Innsbrook Phenology Log page to our website, where we hope to collect observations from others. To keep it simple, we’ll focus on the months of March and October.

Photo by Bob Keefe

Reminder About Bush Honeysuckle

Fall is an excellent time to eradicate invasive bush honeysuckle on your Innsbrook property because it is easy to spot with red berries and green leaves that are the last to fall. Methods of control and identification can be found on the MDC website.

Missouri Department of Conservation photo

Closing Nature Quote

-Innsbrook property owners Richard McFall and Kathleen Kremer