by Allison Vaughn

In July, several members of CAS met with the City of Columbia, the USFWS, and the Missouri River Bird Observatory to begin the process of designating Columbia as a Bird City, USA. CAS decided that our role in this process which requires a lot of legwork would be to seek Dark Sky Certification for Rock Bridge Memorial and Finger Lakes SPs. A Missouri Master Naturalist from the Booneslick Chapter has been taking Sky Quality Measurement readings at Rock Bridge, park staff at Finger Lakes SP are taking measurements there, and they have been weighing in as very good for seeking this designation for the parks. Working with our October speaker, Vayu Gokhale, Physics and Astronomy professor for Truman State, on the Dark Sky designation process, we have decided to seek Dark Sky Park certification for RBMSP rather than Urban Dark Sky Place certification. Apparently Rock Bridge Memorial SP is a pretty dark sky place, which is encouraging!

Columbia is a shoo-in for the Bird City application with all of our tree canopy and native plants, but the Dark Sky certification takes a couple of years to complete. CAS has a small subcommittee working on this. If interested in joining the subcommittee, contact Allison at allisonjv at yahoo.com.