For decades, the bathrooms at Powdermill Nature Reserve's education center were an inconvenience -- the small facilities were rarely without long lines, and the outdoor entrances made for uncomfortable waits on cold winter days.
The toilets take center stage in the $5 million expansion at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's scientific outpost in Westmoreland County. The Powdermill Nature Reserve in Rector plans to open its "green" educational complex in October and recently gave the Tribune-Review a tour.
The expansion adds 10,300 square feet to its old 3,200-square-foot building and is expected to increase visits from 12,000 people a year to 18,000. It will include an energy-efficient heating system, large windows for natural light, sustainable building materials and Western Pennsylvania's first "marsh machine" -- an ecological wastewater treatment system.
"We really needed new bathrooms," said David Smith, director of the nature reserve. "And we're so close to the stream, so we didn't want to do a septic system or anything that could have a negative impact. Hence the marsh machine."
Tanks and pipes will convey wastewater to various plants growing in contained marshes. Bacteria growing in the roots of the plants purify the water over several days. The water will then go to the center's 15-foot-long indoor stream populated with plants and aquatic animals native to Western Pennsylvania.
Right now, the nature center's single exhibit is its taxidermy collection of stuffed animals displayed in glass cases. The living stream and other interactive exhibits planned for the expanded center will help convey the excitement of nature, Smith said.
"We're trying to stay away from what I not-very-reverently call 'dead birds on sticks,'" Smith said.
The expansion will house traveling exhibit space to complement the exhibit du jour at its Pittsburgh parent museum -- for example, when Dinosaurs in Their Time opens at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in November, Powdermill would like to feature a smaller-scale dinosaur exhibit.
"We want to offer some more educational programming for people in Westmoreland County," Smith said. "That's a way we can bring the Carnegie Museum of Natural History here."
In addition to the expansion, Powdermill researchers are embarking on ambitious projects that will be shared with visitors.
Mike Lanzone, assistant field ornithology projects coordinator, recently finished building an acoustics room to record migratory calls from captured birds. The room houses 14 small boxes outfitted with microphones. When birds are caught for banding, they spend two minutes in the boxes chirping into the microphones.
Eventually, Lanzone hopes to collect enough recordings to create a comprehensive audio library of bird calls. Then a larger microphone outside could capture the sounds of birds flying overhead, and those sounds could be cross-referenced against the library, allowing researchers to know what type and how many birds are flying overhead.
If it works, microphones could be scattered throughout the region and alert ornithologists to declines in bird populations, which can indicate larger environmental problems such as habitat destruction.
"Someday in the future, hopefully, you'd be able to type your ZIP code into the computer and see what birds just flew over your house," Lanzone said.
Powdermill is using a mapping system to organize information about the plants and animals in its 2,200 acres. Researchers are noting the location of trees and tracking the spread of invasive plants, such as garlic mustard and multiflora rose.
With all this information stored in computer programs, Powdermill can get accurate data on the long-term effects of different management techniques, said Tricia Miller, manager of the mapping system.
"It's an incredibly powerful tool, especially for ecology and land management," she said. "What we're doing is creating an archive of the ecology at Powdermill."
Senior scientist
The Powdermill Nature Reserve has hired Andrew Mack, an ecologist with 20 years' experience working in Papua New Guinea, as its senior scientist.
Originally from Lancaster, Mack went to Papua New Guinea in 1987 to study tropical rain forests. While there, he built a research station and founded a training program for conservationists. He studied cassowary birds -- which are 6 feet tall and will attack if cornered -- and discovered a new species of mahogany canopy tree that since has been named for him: Aglaia mackiana.
It was his interest in natural conservation that drew Mack away from the rain forest and back to Pennsylvania.
"In Papua New Guinea, we have about 70 percent of the old growth, original forest still intact," he said. "But when I would come back to North America and fly all the way across the country, I would see very little original forest. You begin to re-evaluate where the real conservation issues are."
At Powdermill, Mack plans to study the area's vegetation and threats, such as acid rain and invasive insects, as well as help supervise other scientific and educational programs.
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