About 540 people enjoyed exploring new outdoor skills at Get Outdoors! Community Day on June 8 at Reinstein Woods.

Thank you to the Towns of Amherst and Cheektowaga Youth & Recreation Departments, New York State Parks Interpretive Office, Niagara Frontier Search & Rescue Team, DEC Forest Ranger Kennedy, and all our volunteers for making a fun day!

Pictures by staff and Abby Mandris.

Friends of Reinstein Woods is hiring a Summer Day Camp Director for Kids in the Woods summer day camp. Applications are due by December 19, 2018. You can view the full job announcement here.

About 2,300 people braved extreme heat to celebrate at the 18th Annual Reinstein Woods Fall Festival.  While most festival-goers came from Erie and Niagara counties, there were visitors from as far away as Rochester, Syracuse, the Adirondacks, Florida, Tennessee, and even France!

Mama Earth’s interactive music shows provided entertainment throughout the day. The festival area extended out to Flattail Lake, where attendees watched drone and search and rescue demonstrations. To go with the “Sustainable Earth” theme, volunteers at two Waste Centers collected trash from the event, diverting as much as possible into recycling and compost. We collected about 100 pounds of household batteries to be recycled and many pounds of other recyclables and organic wastes that otherwise would have gone to a landfill. Friends of Reinstein also purchased a carbon offset to reduce the festivals’ carbon footprint even further. To learn more visit www.footprintnetwork.org.

Special thanks to M&T Bank for sponsoring the event and providing a reusable bag to the first 500 families attending the event!

Thanks to everyone that made the 18^th Annual Fall Festival a success, including the Cheektowaga Police Department, Lexington Co-op, Mayer Brothers, Nussbaumer & Clarke, Inc., Paula’s Donuts, Paths, Peaks and Paddles, and all of our volunteers and exhibitors.

More than 90 volunteers helped care for Reinstein Woods on the first Saturday in May as part of I Love My Park Day.

These volunteers:

• planted 50 trees,
• repaired 2 trails,
• collected more than 20 bags of garbage and invasive species,
• removed a “new” patch of invasives we found late last fall,
• disassembled a large survival shelter that was an attractive nuisance,
• protected a few dozen trees from beavers by repairing existing wire enclosures,
• spread woodchips on and improved the nature play area, and cleaned our outdoor turtle enclosure.

Friends of Reinstein Woods provided pizza lunch for all the participants.

We are grateful to groups from Geico, Fiserv, Excelsior Conservation Corps, Depew High School Leo Club, Boy Scout Troop 554,  and Cub Scout Packs 451 and 619 who helped alongside individual volunteers. We hope to see everyone again next year!

Members of Friends of Reinstein Woods enjoyed lunch together with a special presentation by Hawk Creek Wildlife Center earlier this month. Guests saw animals such as a striped skunk, porcupine, opossum, red-tailed hawk, screech owl, and turkey vulture during this engaging presentation. The younger ones even got to feed the porcupine carrots on a stick! The afternoon concluded with a visit from Santa. This event is an example of the great member-only programs we offer. See a list of our upcoming Member – Only Programs here.

Photos Courtesy of Henry Ciesla and Mike Adriaansen

Friends of Reinstein Woods is hiring a Summer Day Camp Director for 2018. Please see the attached  announcement below.

Summer Camp Director

Summer is not officially over until the Autumn Equinox arrives at 4:02 p.m. on September 22. We know the days get shorter until the winter Solstice – but let’s not think about the “s” word and just enjoy the upcoming palette of color that nature so easily paints for us!

Reinstein Woods will certainly be a hot spot this fall as activities abound to get us outdoors. Our annual Fall Festival is by far our most attended event and has something for all ages to enjoy. I encourage you to attend – it truly showcases Reinstein Woods and all it has to offer.

Friends members can tour the Erie County Saw mill (who knew we had one!) on Saturday September 30. Also, remember that our annual Friends of Reinstein Woods membership meeting is Tuesday, October 17 where you can meet board members and socialize with other members. If you are wondering how the Friends group interacts with NYSDEC both financially and in its day to day operations, this meeting will most likely answer your questions. Buffalo Audubon’s Mark Carra will entertain as John J. Audubon. I encourage members to attend, and if you’re not a member, you can join that evening.

Lastly, our annual art, wine & cheese show Nature’s Gathering takes place Saturday, November 11 at Knights of Columbus on Union Road in Cheektowaga.

I would like to thank everyone for their generous contributions over the past year as the Friends closes its fiscal year in October. Whether you donated to an appeal, bought plants from the Native Plant Sale, or volunteered, you made a difference. I would also like to personally thank the board of directors, volunteers and community partners who attended meetings to begin the process of developing an updated strategic plan. This is an exciting process that will steer the future growth of Friends of Reinstein Woods. We will elaborate more on this plan at the annual membership meeting in October.

Hope to see you soon at the Woods!

Enjoy and Respect Nature,

Terry Boyle

We would like to share some news with all members of Friends of Reinstein Woods! Many of you may already know of this news, and some of its impacts are already being seen around the preserve, but we feel it deserves some special coverage.

In 2015, a member of the Friends of Reinstein Woods graciously left us a large and unexpected gift as part of her estate. Dr. Carolyn Tasa was a Friends member since 2009. She worked in our community as a professor of Anthropology and Psychology at ECC for several years. She was a lover of animals and nature, and her special gift to us has and will allow us to further our mission.

This generous gift came as quite a surprise. The Friends of Reinstein Woods board of directors met to decide how best to use these funds that were given to us all. We felt so grateful to know that another person loved this place as much as we all do, and she took action on that feeling to plan this extraordinary gift.

Some of the improvements that have been made with Carolyn’s gift include:

• Acquiring new equipment for the “Day in the Life of the Buffalo River,” a field experience for more than 300 students annually,
• Acquiring new taxidermy mounts, and protect existing mounts from moth infestations with custom-built enclosures for the mounts most frequently used in education programs,
• Providing public Wifi for visitors and for use in programs, such as the recently held “Nature Tech” spring break series for kids,
• Improving our education programs by purchasing insect nets, skulls, and a display board,
• Increasing our operational efficiency through new shelving units to hold snowshoes and education program supplies, an updated computer for the office manager and a laptop for the naturalist interns, and
• Replacing a broken refrigerator and freezer to store items used for Friends’ events and fundraisers.

The donation is also supporting our current strategic planning process, enabling us to strengthen the long-term health of the organization.  The remaining majority of the gift has been invested wisely by our finance committee to provide future income for the Friends and support future needs.

If you would like more information about making a planned gift to Reinstein Woods, please contact Stefanie Ecker at (716) 432-0397. Gifts do not have to be large to be meaningful, and a planned gift can be a great option for many of us.

-Stefanie Ecker, VP of Friends of Reinstein Woods