Lake Merritt Observatory Youth Activities -Winter/Spring 

Exciting news from Lake Merritt Observatory (STEM Activities for Youth), one of the projects approved by the Rotary Nature Center core committee, continuing activities in the spring:

  • Water quality testing
  • Exploring the Lake’s aquatic community with iNaturalist
  • Underwater robotic vehicle expeditions (with OpenROV)
  • Science careers in our community

Volunteer Cleanup Sat, Jan 5th

Katie Noonan will be leading an Adopt-A-Spot cleanup Saturday January 5th, 2019 from 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Volunteers needed. Please join, help cleanup before the Feb 16th Grand Opening.

Check out the new paint job on the building and you might get a chance to peek inside (if the windows in the garden are not papered over at least.)

Audubon RNC Winter/Spring Classes

Exciting news from Golden Gate Audubon, they will be offering three courses at the Rotary Nature Center starting in January on into the Spring. Courses include:

  • Introduction to the Wintering Birds of Lake Merritt
  • Bird as Icon in Nature & Culture: Black-Crowned Night Heron
  • Nature Journaling in the Heart of Oakland (Winter thru Spring)
  • Discover Nesting Colonial Water Birds in Oakland

More info can be found on the GGAS website.

Rotary Nature Center – opening soon!

Karis Griffin announced a grand opening celebration for the Rotary Nature Center this coming February 16th, 2019. A Saturday from 1-3:30pm.

Join us – RSVP here on Facebook to let us know you are coming. (If you don’t do Facebook — which I can understand — please put it in your calendar! )

Over the past year, the city has been working to clean the facility up — with the guidance of Karis and her “core team” Alan Briskin, C.J. Hirschfield, Jennie Gerard, and James Robinson. If you’ve been by the building recently, you’ll notice it has a fresh coat of paint. On the inside, they’ve also repainted, and are laying out new floors. They are also building an interior restroom, and a door out to the butterfly garden, among other things.

Community for Lake Merritt has been biding its time, and this past December our board met with the Core group (plus Nicholas Williams the head of OPRYD, and Ken Lupoff head of OPF), to discuss how our group help the Rotary Nature Center once it has opened.

We at Community for Lake Merritt are excited that the Nature Center will be soon open again and are committed to helping any way we can to help its success — as well as the programs announced in 2018. We are hoping to also help facilitate the involvement of a much larger community.

There’s still plenty of things to be done, and open questions, but it’s very exciting to be at the stage where the Nature Center will soon be open and functioning again.

Measure DD: Interpretive Signs at the Lake

I have been going to the advisory committee meetings for Measure DD for a few years now. This is representatives of various groups and communities who meet with the Measure DD project manager to discuss the progress of various projects and to give advice and direction on what should or should not be pushed for.

One small project that had escaped my attention — that came up in the most recent of meetings — was the design of 6 interpretive signs. These would be distributed about the lake – but two were meant for the Rotary Nature Center area.

Members of the committee rightly pointed out that the signs ought to be multi-lingual, and that additional content could be placed on the web. Especially, if (as described to us) the intent was to help get across the message of not feeding the birds, and good more generally given the diversity of Oakland.

The lack of signs around the lake has always been a bit surprising, and Community at Lake Merritt had been looking at working on signs of our own, so it’s good to know this has been thought about.

It is nice to know a little bit of funding has ended up near the Rotary Nature Center — but I do wish I could rewind the clock to get the Center listed as one of the projects in Measure DD.

The project had been stalled because it lost both a designer and a project manager. It recently got a new project manager with a designer still needed to be found.

Oakland Capital Improvement Program

We are looking at participating in Oakland’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP) June meetings.

The meetings are meant for gathering feedback on priorities and process: how to evaluate what projects should go forward. It’s a little unclear how the meetings are meant to work, and what feedback they are asking for. It does not seem like they want to hear about individual projects per se.

They are also seeking community input through an online survey for those who can’t attend. It is a short <5 minute survey.

Events are June 20th (eve) and on two Saturdays June 23 and 30th.