Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "The bards sublime/Whose distant footsteps echo/Through the Corridors of Time." Nice thought, but we have broken the land, have severed too much the corridors of both Space and Time.

Time to stand up for corridors! Not the house-bound sort used by humans, but those found on the land--floored by plants, fungi, microbes and detritus--that permit wildlife to move from one ecological region to another.

The corridor concept, long important to biologists and conservationists, is in the news: a new documentary in the TV series NOVA tells of conservationists busily planning wildlife corridors between national parks. The most ambitious project is to construct a corridor between Yellowstone Park and northern Canada. The primary goal is to provide a safer highway for grizzly bear movement, which should reduce the inbreeding that is a threat to any isolated group within a species. Obviously, many other organisms also will benefit.

Corridors have long been a big deal for conservation organizations, e.g., the Kansas Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy. Such organizations are happiest whenever a new land acquisition abuts an area of already preserved habitat.

The larger the contiguously preserved area the better, to, among other benefits, better serve those species that require space farther from an "edge" than is allowed by many current forest and prairie land practices. An extreme example is the presumed extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, which seemingly required very large unbroken stretches of southern riverine forests. Human development broke up those once extensive forests.

At MLH, we are blessed with a broad band of land bearing trees, shrubs, and grasses--a corridor--between our Bayer Pond and the larger K-State pond a bit to the north.  In one sense, because of this relatively safe wildlife highway, the K-State pond zone is a biological extension of our Natural Area.

Numerous types of plants and small animals spend their entire lives in this corridor. Some species of migratory birds choose it for nesting. Just yesterday I watched, among other species, a Carolina wren hunting for insects.

Thus, whenever you are nature watching in our Natural Area, also pay attention to the "north forty," including our corridor. Trees and brush make viewing a matter of much neck stretching, but what you see there on ground, tree, or water just might recently have been in MLH territory. Wild organisms don't pay much attention to human-made boundary lines.