The upcoming annual Earth Day celebration at Bradford Woods Reserve offers an opportunity for parents to bring their children into the outdoors and learn a love of nature, says Ward Allebach, a former longtime president of the Bradford Woods Conservancy.
“The whole idea is to try to bring the community together and get outdoors, learn a little bit about nature and why you should care about the woods in your community,” he said.
The event will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 26 at the reserve, 156 Bradford Road. Admission is free, and a free picnic lunch will be served from noon to 1 p.m.
The conservancy celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2024. It formed in 1994 to raise money to buy the former commercial nursery that became the 4.5-acre reserve.
“It’s a taste of nature in the middle of a developed area,” Allebach said. “We consider it to be a hidden jewel in the middle of a lot of development around us.”
The Earth Day event goes back to 2009.
“Bradford Woods is a wooded community, and most properties have some slice of the woods,” Allebach said. “Understanding how to take care of the woods is not easy for most people. We try to educate people in the community about invasive species, the importance of native species and how to attract wildlife.”
Activity tables will include a monarch station, nature arts and crafts, rock painting, the Bradford Woods Conservancy, Animal Friends, stormwater management and the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania.
There will be a giveaway of about 500 native plants, part of the conservancy’s five-year campaign to give away and plant 5,000 native trees, shrubs and plants by the end of 2026, Allebach said.
Gabi Hughes, an environmental educator with the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania, will conduct a presentation on birds of prey from 11 a.m. to noon. She expects to bring one of the society’s birds of prey ambassadors, an American kestrel or an Eastern screech owl, two species found in Western Pennsylvania.
This will be Hughes’ first time at the Earth Day event. The birds reside at Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve in Fox Chapel, the headquarters of the local Audubon Society.
The kestrel is a small falcon that hunts for small animals in meadows and fields mainly by sight. The screech owl is common to local parks and neighborhoods, but many people don’t realize they are nearby because they are nocturnal.
“We’ll talk about the types of adaptations these birds have to live and be successful in their habitat, and how we can help them by providing things like native plants in our habitat to help them and the prey that they depend on to survive,” she said.
For details about the Earth Day event, call 724-272-4400.