Take a Winter Road Trip with ACRES

Thanks to member and volunteer support, ACRES offers many places to explore throughout our region. Each preserve is unique, featuring diverse landscapes. If you’re looking for some new-to-you trails, why not make a day of it? In this winter edition of our road trip series, we’re sending you to Steuben County to enjoy some cold ...

Capturing Changing Seasons

Local artist Gwen Gutwein has gifted ACRES with four oil paintings depicting the changing seasons at Mackel Nature Preserve in Allen County’s Cedar Creek Corridor. The paintings capture the confluence of Little Cedar Creek into Cedar Creek in the distance. Gutwein, an ACRES member, created these works over the past year. “ACRES is such an ...

Winter Work: What does our land management team do in the cold season?

As snow begins to fall, the ACRES land management crew gets ready to curl up with hot chocolate around the office fireplace where they will enter hibernation, a state of deep sleep maintained until early spring… ah…just kidding. The Land Management crew is hard at work during winter treating non-native invasive plants, managing properties and ...

Winter Solstice 2019: Staff Outing

For staff development, relationship building … and fun! …  the ACRES staff enjoys seasonal outings for each equinox or solstice. We aim to stay close to the land and the communities we serve, so we take these days out, closing the office and hitting the road. We meet regional partners, businesses, educators, farmers, or other ...

The long view: glimpsing forever, one day at a time

Dear friends, Since ACRES protects land forever, I often engage in conversations envisioning what natural areas will look like during the course of forever. We think about how much bigger trees will be in a hundred years, how some lakes will become bogs in a thousand years, how rivers will move. We wonder what plants and animals ...

Snow Magic

from the Back Page A snippet from ACRES’ members-only Quarterly Winter 2016 | Vol. 55-No. 4 “I think this is the throne room,” whispers my seven-year-old companion, peering into a small clump of trees. She’s keeping a sharp eye out for the snow queen. Tree limbs droop under the weight of sparkling snow, bowing gracefully ...

Janet Canino on protecting land as a family: “How can we afford to wait any longer?”

Have you seen ACRES’ new video on protecting land? If so, then you’ve “met” a couple members of the Canino family and discovered their passion for the preserves. Janet Canino shares more about what protecting places with ACRES means—they are now life members. Why do you protect land with ACRES? ”‘If not now, when? If ...

Birch Boots

Savoring Soundscapes: Take a Listening Walk

The heart of winter: She is listening… The frozen air is transparent, smooth and brittle; it rings like a knifeblade against bone. The sound of her breath, as it freezes, is a soft murmuring, like cloth on cloth. The muffled wingbeats of a snowy owl rise and fall, reverberating down long corridors of dream, deep ...

Being in Winter | A two part love story

Nancy: My first glimpse of the world came during an Indiana blizzard blowing a foot of fresh snow over the ground. I have felt at home in the winter landscape ever since. Although Mother Nature feigns sleep at this time of year, undercover she is alive with activity. She beckons into her wondrous, quiet world ...