Wildlife meshes with farm life at evolving Sunnyside conservancy
From a distance, it looks like a large puddle, likely a remnant of a recent rain, shadowed by a copse of trees. A branch lies partly submerged. Nothing remarkable.
But, as Nick Lapham approaches the water, with a quickening step, it’s clear that there is more here. Much more.
At water’s edge, he points down, and there before us is another world. So many wood frog tadpoles. Not as visible, but also here in abundance, are young spotted salamanders. This is no puddle, Lapham explains. It’s a vernal pool, a place where life begins for hundreds, maybe thousands of amphibians.
A few years ago, he had a depression in the ground here dug out. It’s now a centerpiece of a natural habitat taking shape, a section of wet forest Lapham wants to fill in with more suitable trees, such as swamp white oaks and black hawthorns. The idea is to help nurture a mix of flora and fauna that supports one another, and truly fits together.
“You can almost look at it as a palette, right?” suggests Lapham. “To be on private land and have the flexibility to just think in creative ways about what these different blocks of habitat could potentially look like, or what species you might be trying to manage for, well, for me, that’s what makes it fun.”
Nature as therapy
Lapham’s vision of evolving Sunnyside Farm & Conservancy, off Harris Hollow Road, into both a natural laboratory and an assortment of preserves is the latest chapter for a historic slice of Rappahannock land.
For more than 200 years, the property was farmed by multiple generations of the Wood family, and it’s where the county’s first apple orchard took root. Then in 1995, roughly half of the 1,000-acre farm was purchased by David Cole, a retired AOL executive who spent a lot of money restoring the worn farmland into a certified organic agricultural operation.
Owner Nick Lapham and biologist Jennifer Servis standing at the edge of the vernal pool with Lapham’s dog, Tsavo. (Photo/Ireland Hayes)
He, in turn, sold it to Lapham, his wife Gardiner, and other family members in 2006. Lapham was then a senior fellow with the World Wildlife Fund who was seriously involved in conservation. The original plan was to carry on Cole’s endeavor, scaling it back a bit to focus on growing vegetables and fruit and selling them at farmers’ markets.
Still, Lapham knew there was so much more to explore and learn about the woodlands and hills around their home. Sadly, it was a family tragedy in 2008 that moved him to view those surroundings in a profoundly personal way. Two years after Lapham’s father died while they were fishing together, his and Gardiner’s four-year-old son Henry, the oldest of their four children, died of an epileptic seizure in his sleep.
The couple was devastated. She threw herself into becoming an expert on epilepsy. He quit his job and withdrew to the farm.
“I spent an inordinate amount of time here,” Nick Lapham remembered. “I would go sit for hours at different parts of the property. Reconnecting with all of this was therapeutic for me. I thought about the fragility of life and how quickly things can change.”
That caused him to reassess the role he could play with all the life around him.
“I found great satisfaction in being able to do little things here, and see nature respond almost like you’re a parent,” he said. “You plant the right habitat, you do the right things, and then things develop in ways you can’t possibly imagine.
“Some of what you do can be empowering. Some can be distressing. But that’s the best you can do, that’s what is within your control. So I became really interested in the idea of bringing life back to this place, almost in relation to what happened to our son. That became my obsession,” he said.
Nick Lapham, owner of Sunnyside Farm. (Photo/Ireland Hayes)
Producing nature
Over time, Lapham began seeing his role at Sunnyside differently, that, in a sense, he wasn’t just producing crops, he was producing nature. That may sound high-minded. He acknowledges that. He also concedes that he’s heard any number of times that he should essentially let nature do its thing. But the notion that the natural world somehow moves along a separate track is a fallacy, he said.
“I mean this property has been influenced by people for 1,000 years. Take Shenandoah National Park. There’s no virgin forest there. It’s been logged multiple times,” he noted. “So the idea of ‘let it be wild,’ well, in an age of climate change and invasive species, there isn’t a square inch of land on the planet that hasn’t already been affected by people.”
Lapham, who is president of a family philanthropic foundation, also sees that meshing of wildlife and farm life every day through the cameras that have been set up all over Sunnyside. There are 21 now, along trails, in boxes where birds nest. And that has enabled Lapham and others to see bears bathing in an aged farm cistern, barn owls feeding babies in their nest in an old silo, a mother fox and her young hanging out near a barn that predators would avoid.
“So it isn’t like this is wilderness and this is human,” he said. ”It’s really interesting to see how wildlife has evolved to use what’s here, but also how the heritage of this place is almost now being repurposed.”
Biologist Jennifer Servis wades through a pond to check on and record a nest in one of the farm’s bird boxes. (Photo/Ireland Hayes)
A landscape laboratory
But as much as Lapham gets excited about watching all that’s happening around him, his focus has moved beyond observation to science.
“We put out boxes for bluebirds. It’s nice to have bluebirds, everyone loves bluebirds,” he said. “But is there a functional role bluebirds play in helping to manage the pest populations in the growing fields?”
A Smithsonian researcher has been gathering relevant data on their feeding habits and where they range. “The idea,” he said, “is to try to put real science around whether or not these birds provide pest control. That flows off the tongue easily. But is it a real thing?”
Two parent bluebirds were found dead, lying atop their chicks in the nest. Lapham wanted to know why. A necropsy was done and determined they had died of heat stroke.
“So what did that mean,” he said. “And how do we think about what that might mean longer term. Was that a proverbial canary in the coal mine? So, yes, we have these boxes for birds, but now we think about what data we should collect from them.”
The transformation of Sunnyside into more of a natural laboratory took a big leap forward when Lapham hired Jennifer Servis, who has a double major in conservation biology and art history. She worked at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as its conservation director, earlier this year.
Jennifer Servis, biologist at Sunnyside Farm, stands holding her waders and a handmade camera pole that she just used to check on a bird box in the middle of the pond. (Photo/Ireland Hayes)
“I’ve learned that working the land and fostering biodiversity can be in conflict,” she said. “Maybe you can do some of that on the side if you know what you’re doing and you’re interested in conservation.
“But what definitely drew me to Sunnyside was the opposite narrative here. We’re nature first and foremost,” she said.
The goal, said Lapham, is to get a better sense of how all the plants and animals at Sunnyside are using the land and affecting one another and the habitats there. And, how that can change the way the property is managed.
“How do we think about how the forest here will look in 30 years?” he said. “What happens if we just let it go? Do we try to direct it toward a certain future?”
Sharing the awe
All are questions relevant to Lapham’s notion of viewing what’s being done at Sunnyside as a “nature” product. In his mind, putting out nest boxes in various locations, building vernal pools, growing certain cover crops are all part of that.
But he also sees value in sharing both what they learn and what can be seen on a daily basis on this 450-acre slice of the Rappahannock landscape.
In line with his belief that Sunnyside is now really a “nature product,” he has launched a subscription service. For $14 a month, subscribers can see regular blogs from Lapham, Servis and guest scientists and experts, habitat management tutorials, species trackers of tagged animals, and access to footage captured on the many trail cameras, plus two livestream cameras of the barn owl family in the silo and a woodchuck den.
Subscriptions are available at sunnysideconservancy.com/subscribe
Nick Lapham holding an eastern newt, one of the many species that call the farm home. (Photo/Ireland Hayes)
Ideally, Lapham hopes that Sunnyside and its audience can deal with challenges like pest control and invasive species together. “This wouldn’t just be about the techniques we use in managing invasives,” he said. “It would also deal with how you think about invasives in a world where the climate is changing, and species are adapting.”
But there’s also the more visceral experience of watching bears lounging in a cistern or a barn owl feeding its babies. That sense of awe, said Lapham, is something that doesn’t fade.
“I’ve learned that nature, even in the species we see every day and frequently take for granted, has almost unlimited potential to surprise, educate, entertain and inspire wonder … an underrated emotion otherwise in short supply these days,” he said.
