At Dunes summer camp, kids plant to create pollination sites for bees, butterflies
With a mission to get his hands dirty, Harrison Grove hopped on a shovel trying to drive it into the ground.
On his first day of summer camp at the Indiana Dunes, officials put him and other campers to work helping to plant native grasses and plants in a half-acre lot outside the Dunes Learning Center in Chesterton.
“I think it’s coming along great,” said Harrison, 9, of Oak Park, Ill. “The problem is you just have to watch your step.”
It is part of the Club Youth Camp Landscape Restoration Project, a joint effort between the National Park Service, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and the Northern Indiana Public Service Co. to create pollination sites for bees, butterflies and other insects.
Under the restoration plan, the 100 acres NIPSCO owns north and west of the property also will be used to expand the footprint of the Dunes’ Learning Center’s outdoor classroom — where native plants and wildflowers will be added.
The effort is being funded through a $50,000 donation from the NiSource Foundation, NIPSCO’s charitable arm. It also donated the plants and will help coordinate the project.
Up to 20 different types of native grasses, sedges and wildflowers will be planted there including Blue Oats, Blue Indigo and false sunflowers.
Other volunteers on Monday included camp counselors, National Park Service personnel and NIPSCO employees.
“It’s amazing to me how fast (kids) switch gears,” said Sandi Weindling, of the Dunes Learning Center. “They get off the bus. They suddenly are free to be kids and they just dive right in. It takes no time at all for them to flip that switch.”
The hope is to turn various areas into a native rain garden and a butterfly garden, said Chief of Resource Management Dan Plath.
“Pretty much the food that we eat needs pollination,” Plath said, “and because of a number of different factors, populations of native bees as well as domestic bees have crashed in the last 10 years or so.”
“It’s part of their natural life cycle, so this type of native plants ... are things that kind of foster that,” he said.
The Dunes Learning Center is a 63-acre site that once held a summer camp run by U.S. Steel Gary Works.
The National Park Service purchased the land in 1977 and established the Dunes Learning Center in 1998.
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