From left. Kathy Stewart, Susan Laume and Dr. Karin Lehnigk after the 2024 caterpillar count where Laume was presented with the surprise “Bugs and Hisses” sign from a group of volunteers for her years of working with the team.
Susan Laume just received the Virginia Cooperative Extension Master Naturalist Volunteer of the Year Award for 2024. When she isn’t digging out the grass from a parking lot island and filling it with dirt and mulch to create a pollinator garden, she might be working on the plan for her next osprey platform at a local park or holding her weekly meeting with her park volunteer team to determine which trails need maintenance.
The award presentation by Zoom on Jan. 23 highlighted her 350 hours of service and her 324 sign ups by other volunteers in the last two years as well as her inspired “lead by example” style. Kathy Stewart, who nominated Laume for the award says, “Susan’s breath and depth of activities is astonishing. She puts in the time and the work. She is my inspiration and mentor.”
Laume traces her avid interest in environmental and conservation issues back to her childhood growing up on a farm in southeastern rural Pennsylvania. “We had plenty of room to roam the fields; it was an idyllic childhood in a lot of ways.” This interest got pushed to the background with a full time job but when she stopped work full time and added a dog to her life a few years ago things turned around.
“I was on nature trails a couple of hours a day walking my dog. On one of my walks in Laurel Hill Park I met a man in the bushes with a bucket. The next week I saw him again in 80 degree plus weather pushing a full-size lawn mower, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh this guy’s great but he shouldn’t be doing it all by himself; maybe I could help.’” So she organized a group of volunteers which morphed into a Fairfax initiative to establish park volunteer teams. “We got the Elly Doyle Park Service award that year which is the biggest park authority award.”
In 2021 Laume led the effort to turn the HOA common space where she lives into a meadow. “It really started out as an economic thing; we were paying landscaping to mow for years and then invasive vines started to fill the space, and we had to pay more and more and no one was using it.”
Laume says she suggested they stop mowing the common space and formed a working group. “It was a hard sell with the neighbors who thought the overgrowth would look bad.” She says they planted 57 trees, a lot of natives and surrounded them with protective cages, mostly to keep the deer away. Then in 2023 they became aware of a couple of grants. The first from Audubon allowed them to get rid of invasives and the second from the state allowed them to plant 16 more trees and shrubs. “We added a mulched pathway and put up some signs about the native plants.”
Of all her efforts Laume says her heart project is the Memorial Dog bench. “Our trail buddies used to walk together with our dogs. One puppy died young, and we came up with the idea of a bench.“ She said they got five people together to pay for the bench and planted some dogwoods and redbuds since there was a red dog in the mix. “It is in a nice spot at the conjunction of trails.”
Laume is currently looking forward to March when the ospreys will migrate back. “A few years ago one of the park managers decided they may need to take down the pole at the old Nike site in the park where a nesting pair of ospreys had been for several years, and they wanted to find an alternative site but couldn’t find any Boy Scouts to take it on as a project.”
Since Laume was thinking that taking down the pole would eliminate the osprey nesting site, she stepped in with her trail buddies and found an alternative site in Laurel Hill Park. One of the group found a plan to build an osprey platform, and Laume enlisted the park maintenance crew who came with a tractor and a Bobcat with a bucket to install the new osprey platform. While it had worked this time, “It was a method we didn’t want to use again because it wasn’t safe,” Laume remembers.
Later on they found two abandoned utility poles and Laume thought, “Wow, we could do a couple more since there are breeding osprey at Occoquan and South County High School who are having chicks, the chicks will need nesting areas.” This time Dominion was willing to donate two of their poles instead, and when the ground was just right and not too wet in October 2023, two additional nesting platforms were installed.
Laume has held classes for participatory science projects for kids, written dozens of articles on conservation for local newspapers, led trash pick up efforts and invasive plant removal, led caterpillar counts and butterfly/dragonfly surveys. Now she is thinking about her next project and waiting for the ospreys to return home.
Susan Laume is an award-winning writer with the Connection Newspapers. So is Shirley Ruhe.