The Dahlem Environmental Education Center

06/20/2026

06/20/2026

🦅🦅🦅
National American Eagle Day, June 20th

06/19/2026

There is one camper spot available for day camp next week. June 22-26 M-F 8:30-11:30am for ages 5 to 9 years old. Register by this Sunday 6/21 if you are interest. https://www.dahlemcenter.org/adventure-camp/

We will be learning about frogs, turtles, fossils, birds & binoculars, honeybees, Michigan symbols, and more!

Our summer day camp offered to children ages 3 to 12 years old is based outdoors, so the day is spent in the forest, fields, ponds and stream on Dahlem’s 300 acres of beautiful property.

06/19/2026

You only know me as two weeks of light in June. I worked toward those two weeks for the better part of two years.

I'm a firefly. Before I was the flash over your lawn, I was something you'd never recognize — a soft, segmented larva living down in your soil and leaf litter, glowing faintly in the dark where no one was watching.

And I wasn't idle down there. I'm a hunter. All that time, I tracked the slugs and snails and soft grubs moving through the damp, followed their slime trails, and cleared them out one by one. The "pests" you fight in the garden all summer? My whole childhood was eating them. The healthier your soil, the more leaf litter you leave, the longer you let the grass grow at the edges — the more of us you raised without ever knowing it.

Then this month, after all that time in the dark, I climbed up and changed. I traded the soil for the air. And now I have almost no time left at all.

The light you see is me looking for a mate, blinking a code only my own species answers. Each kind of firefly has its own rhythm — a long slow pulse, a quick double, a drifting J low over the grass. I get a couple of weeks to find the right answer in the dark. That's it.

Two things end me early: a spotless yard with no damp corners for my young, and a porch light or a lawn chemical that drowns out my signal or kills my larvae before they ever glow.

So if you want more of me next June, the work happens now — underground, in the dark, where you'll never see it.

Leave a wild corner. Kill the lights. The flash you love started two years ago in the soil you almost cleaned up.

06/17/2026

You saw me on the warm stones and screamed. I was the best pest control you had.

You found me sunning on your garden wall. Someone went for a shovel. I tried to leave — they were faster.

I am a common garter snake, and I was working for you. The slugs that shred your hostas, the grubs chewing your roots, the beetles and cutworms in the vegetable beds — I hunt all of them, every day, for free.

Look at me before you decide what I am. Three yellow stripes running the length of an olive-brown body. Round pupils. A narrow head no wider than my neck. No fangs. No venom that can hurt you. I am one of the most harmless animals in your entire yard.

When something startles me I might release a little musk, or bluff with a raised head. That is the whole arsenal. I have nothing else, and I never needed anything else.

Leave me the stone wall and the leaf piles. I will keep the garden from being eaten alive.

06/13/2026

"During Community Impact Day here at the Dahlem Center, we started out working in what we call our “bug field”. We do conservation work on the property to conserve the natural habitats that we have, and one of the things we really have to wrestle with is invasive species. Invasive species are non-native and usually harmful in some way—either harmful to people or harmful to the natural habitat and species. In this case, the volunteers helped us remove two invasive species: garlic mustard and bittersweet.

These invasives crowd out our native species. The garlic mustard can easily take over a big area and shade out native species, and the bittersweet is a vine that will climb up the trees and choke them out. You can see them dangling on the tree behind us—those are all bittersweet vines. They can get pretty big and thick, and once they get up into the canopy, they shade out the tree, strangle it, and then the tree will die. It's pervasive. Once you've spotted it, you will not be able to unsee it. You'll see it everywhere.

So our Impact Day volunteers helped us remove those two invasive species in the bug field, and then went to the north side of the property to our ecology farm and did some maintenance there before the gardening season really gets underway.

We were super excited to have the help that we did.

The Dahlem Center offers Jackson a place where people can connect with nature. We're available to anyone who wants to come out, go for a hike, learn a little bit more about the environment or the wildlife that calls it home, and how people are connected to the environment.

We wanted to be a part of Impact Day for two reasons. One, we wanted to have volunteers here helping us achieve some of our conservation goals and demonstrate why it's so important to manage invasive species that are impacting our native habitats. The other was to offer a different way to connect with nature by getting hands-on and doing something that really makes a difference. I think that helps raise awareness about what we have here at the Dahlem Center, as well as why it's so important to maintain our natural environment.

We're super excited to have been part of Communit

06/13/2026

Way to go, Hannah!! Thank you for all you do for Dahlem.

"During Community Impact Day here at the Dahlem Center, we started out working in what we call our “bug field”. We do conservation work on the property to conserve the natural habitats that we have, and one of the things we really have to wrestle with is invasive species. Invasive species are non-native and usually harmful in some way—either harmful to people or harmful to the natural habitat and species. In this case, the volunteers helped us remove two invasive species: garlic mustard and bittersweet.

These invasives crowd out our native species. The garlic mustard can easily take over a big area and shade out native species, and the bittersweet is a vine that will climb up the trees and choke them out. You can see them dangling on the tree behind us—those are all bittersweet vines. They can get pretty big and thick, and once they get up into the canopy, they shade out the tree, strangle it, and then the tree will die. It's pervasive. Once you've spotted it, you will not be able to unsee it. You'll see it everywhere.

So our Impact Day volunteers helped us remove those two invasive species in the bug field, and then went to the north side of the property to our ecology farm and did some maintenance there before the gardening season really gets underway.

We were super excited to have the help that we did.

The Dahlem Center offers Jackson a place where people can connect with nature. We're available to anyone who wants to come out, go for a hike, learn a little bit more about the environment or the wildlife that calls it home, and how people are connected to the environment.

We wanted to be a part of Impact Day for two reasons. One, we wanted to have volunteers here helping us achieve some of our conservation goals and demonstrate why it's so important to manage invasive species that are impacting our native habitats. The other was to offer a different way to connect with nature by getting hands-on and doing something that really makes a difference. I think that helps raise awareness about what we have here at the Dahlem Center, as well as why it's so important to maintain our natural environment.

We're super excited to have been part of Community Impact Day and to offer this opportunity."

—Hannah Schauer, Dahlem Conservancy

06/13/2026

She left him lying alone in the open grass — and it was the most protective thing she could do.

A doe doesn't keep her newborn fawn at her side. In his earliest days, she keeps her distance on purpose.

The reason is brutal and beautiful. She is large, warm, and full of scent — exactly what a coyote or a loose dog follows. He is born almost odorless, his spotted coat scattering him into the dapple of leaves and grass. So the safest place for him is wherever she is not.

She returns only at the quiet edges of the day — dawn and dusk — and only for minutes: long enough to nurse him and to lick him clean so that not even his scent gives him away. Then she leaves again, drawing every danger away from the spot where he lies.

And he holds up his end. When something approaches, he doesn't run — he can't yet. He presses flat, tucks his head, lets his own heartbeat fall, and vanishes into the grass while the world walks past.

This is why a fawn curled alone in the yard is almost never an orphan. He is exactly where his mother meant to leave him, doing exactly what she needs him to do. She is closer than you think, waiting for the yard to empty so she can come back.

🦌 If you find one
- Leave him where he lies — don't move him, feed him, or wait beside him
- Keep dogs and children well away so the doe will return
- Touching him won't make her abandon him — but a person standing nearby will keep her away
- Still no sign of her after a full day? Then call a licensed wildlife rehabilitator

He looks abandoned because he is supposed to. The empty grass around him is the whole plan.