The Winchester Star. Monday April 20, 2015

Glen Swiggart and Margaret Guthrie take a close look at river insects in a specimen jar during a program Sunday afternoon at Shenandoah University’s Campus at Cool Spring Battlefield in eastern Clarke County. (Photo by Scott Mason/The Winchester Star)

Nature abounds at SU’s Shenandoah River campus By Raya Zimmerman BERRYVILLE

Great blue herons, bald eagles and water insects were just a sampling of what Shenandoah University students showed to the public on Sunday at the university’s Shenandoah River Campus at Cool Spring Battlefield.

As a part of an undergraduate environmental studies program, students interpreted natural features on the Civil War battlefield, located along the Shenandoah River off Harry Byrd Highway (Va. 7) in eastern Clarke County. In more recent years, the property was the site of National Golf Course.

Students oversaw eight stations that were set up along a roughly 2.5- mile walking trail.

Visitors tour the river campus, where Shenandoah University students offered a program on Sunday about the 195-acre property. The river campus is open to the public year-round dawn to dusk.

At “The Pond Life” station, freshman Hayden Bauserman said he caught bugs in a pond on the property, including glass shrimp, a fishing spider and a water spider, and displayed them in jars.

“A lot of people have liked the damselfly,” Bauserman said. “It looks like their tails are split into three parts, but it’s really their gills. They’re related to dragonflies.”

He also said people were amazed to learn that the seeds on cattails are the female part of the plant, and the male part is the upper stock, which holds male pollen. “I’ve learned more about nature in this semester than I have in my whole life,” he added.

At the “Shenandoah River” station, junior Sydney Vonada talked about how there are a lot of man-made chemicals in the river, from products such as paint. “The chemicals can be found in the fatty cells of fish,” she said, advising not to eat certain kinds of fish.

She also said that many people were surprised to learn that the river flows north, just like the Nile River. SU hasn’t been able to do a lot of research on the Shenandoah River yet since it acquired the property only recently, she said.

After the golf course closed in 2012, SU acquired the 195-acre river campus in April 2013, thanks to a public-private partnership between the state, the Civil War Trust and SU. Under terms of a conservation easement, SU manages the property to protect its natural and historic features.

The Battle of Cool Spring took place on the property on July 17-18, 1864. It was a prelude to the final Shenandoah Valley Campaign of the Civil War, with Confederate troops holding back Union forces that were pursuing them across the Shenandoah River at Cool Spring.

Several groups of people biked and walked around the stations under an overcast sky on Sunday.

“I’ve lived in the area for 37 years and watched this property transition from a golf course to what it is now,” said Margaret Guthrie, who was visiting the different stations. “I have just been thrilled to see everything [SU] has done to marshal it back to a natural setting.”

Woodward Bousquet, professor of environmental studies and biology at SU, said students in his Cool Spring program are receiving hands-on experience that they’ll be able to transfer to their professional careers.

“I want to help them not only feel competent, but also confident,” he said. “A lot of jobs in their fields require them to share their knowledge.”

If members of the public were lucky enough, they saw a bald eagle through a scope at the “Great Blue Heron” station. “We think they’re nesting right now,” freshman Kimberlyn Abel said as she pointed to a tree across the Shenandoah River.

People could look through a different scope to see the herons, which have long, dagger-like beaks used for catching fish.

Ashley Landes, a senior at SU who was helping supervise on Sunday afternoon, said university students travel to the river campus to do different kinds of research, year-round.

Youth group organizations have also been invited to use the campus, she said.

— Contact Raya Zimmerman at [email protected]