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Presented in partnership YOUR ENVIRONMENT
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Taking a deep look into nature
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Boy Scout Chris Kozinski helps Brian Sepot, assistant superintendent at Longshore Club Park in Westport, Conn., construct an osprey nesting platform for the course. Photo by D. Rackliffe |
Editor’s note: Inside Your Environment periodically presents information being featured or archived on The Environmental Institute for Golf Web site. For more about this month’s topic, visit www.eifg.org.
Albert Einstein has been credited with saying, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” It’s particularly sage advice for superintendents, for whom looking into nature is almost a job requirement.
Taking that point of view allows them insight on properly managing the landscape and its varied components, including in-play and out-of-play areas, helps them with matters of sustainability and enables them to use their resources wisely and professionally. By understanding their environment, native habitats and wildlife, superintendents often can make improvements that enhance golf’s “green space.”
A good example of this can be found at Longshore Club Park in Westport, Conn. The maintenance staff at this 18-hole municipal facility, led by CGCS Dan E. Rackliffe, a 29-year GCSAA member, continuously evaluates the environment as well as opportunities for environmental stewardship and outreach communication at the course.
Brian Sepot, the assistant superintendent at Longshore Club Park and a nine-year member of GCSAA, authored a case study on some of the club’s efforts for The Environmental Institute for Golf’s Web site (www.eifg.org), called “Longshore Club Park’s Bird Nests Reach Higher Levels.” The case study is currently available with the Edge database and will be the Green Links featured case study in June.
“Each season, we try to add low-maintenance, naturalized areas to habit different species of wildlife . . . In addition, the course is bordered by Long Island Sound and a tidal estuary, Grey’s Creek, which is habitat for avian predators, like osprey, whose diet includes fish,” Sepot wrote. “Osprey populations were once declining, but their numbers are now increasing in part by the creation of man-made nesting structures. So, we decided to place an osprey nesting platform along the shoreline of the golf course to attract ospreys.”
At Longshore Club Park, that look into nature paid off for Rackliffe and Sepot. “By the end of 2008, ospreys used the nesting platform to nest and rear two young fledglings,” Sepot wrote in the case study. “This project was a good example of engaging the community and other business with the facility’s environmental stewardship efforts. These efforts are now part of our ongoing environmental awareness and education efforts.”
You can make a difference on the golf course with careful and concentrated evaluation, planning, implementation and reviews. Superintendents who make a difference would understand the words of Leonardo da Vinci: “It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
GreenTGolf is a new international event dedicated to environmentally friendly approaches to golf course design, construction and management. Held Nov. 26-28 at The Mines Resort City in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the event is developed for course designers, suppliers, contractors and consultants and wraps up with a closing pro-am tournament. For more information visit www.greentgolf.com. Golfers are more likely than the general U.S. public to blame environmental problems associated with golf courses on the real estate surrounding them, according to a recent survey from Golf Digest Publications. The results showed that 38 percent of golfers versus 59 percent of U.S. adults agreed that water consumption for golf courses is an issue that needs close government or corporate regulation, while 76 percent of golfers and 56 percent of adults agreed that new golf courses do not cause as big an environmental threat as the real estate developments that usually accompany them. |
