Belle Isle Park in Detroit is home to a new giant "nature megaphone."
High school kids lined up to cut the red ribbon to officially open the 10-foot wooden megaphone. They built it which is pretty ambitious considering the advanced carpentry needed to make it.
“Carpentry is my passion. I like the fact that you can take what a lot of people consider to be nothing and make it in to something,” Naim Rashawd, one of the high school carpenters who worked on the megaphone through a project coordinated by Detroit-based Atlantic Impact.
“To be able to do things like that and work on things like that, it’s a real pleasure for me,” he said with a smile.
The megaphone is designed to amplify the sounds of nature near it. Placed next to the Belle Isle Nature Center, it's on a platform in a rare wet-mesic flatwoods forest. Basically it’s a wooded marshy area that develops ephemeral wetlands in the spring which then dry up over the summer.
Brandon Kreher is the development and partnership manager with Atlantic Impact. He said building the nature megaphone took several groups working together to get it from design to installation.
“Communicating with the people at Michigan Tech, people at the Nature Center here, the DNR (Michigan Department of Natural Resources). Really, getting everything in space, there were a lot of moving parts.”
Among them were engineering issues such as making sure the varnish on the megaphone would not leach into the ephemeral wetlands.
“We wanted to make sure that the megaphone wouldn’t sink into the marsh so we had to engineer the platform over here,” Kreher added.
Figuring out which end was the listening end of the megaphone wasn't exactly intuitive. Someone had to clue me in.
You don’t sit at one end or the other, I was told. You get inside the megaphone where the ambient sound is amplified.
I clambered in, but conditions were not great. I did hear a bird, but I also heard people who were there for the ribbon-cutting talking. Then there was the helicopter overhead.
Another one of the high school students who worked on the megaphone, Nyla Higgins, said she had not seen it since it was still in the wood shop.
“It’s just amazing. And all the nature around it. It just sticks out so much. It’s like a very vibrant brown against all this green. I just like how it looks.”
She said she’ll be back in a couple of days with her family to hear the sounds of nature for herself when it might not be quite as busy.
Amy Greene is the director of the Belle Isle Nature Center. She said it’s nice to know that kids visiting the megaphone will be inspired thanks to the hard work of other young people.
“We have a way to connect people to the land around them and to feel belonging in that experience through this really rich sensory opportunity. It’s fully immersive,” she said.
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources manages Belle Isle State Park and had a part in bringing the megaphone to fruition.
The DNR’s Amanda Treadwell said the megaphone fits well with the agency’s mission: it gives people a chance to enjoy nature.
“The megaphone is a good opportunity to do that. You sit, pause, listen to the wildlife, the sounds of the park. And hopefully that’s something people can take with them when they’re out and about during their day.”
When asked when would be a good time to visit the nature megaphone she said you will hear different sounds all through the day.
“The morning is a nice quiet time here in the park. And you really are coming out here for a Zen moment, I’d recommend then. This is on a deer path. You might see the mom and baby deer walking right by you,” she said with a laugh.
While certain birds and animals will be active all day, the best time in any natural area is in the morning, as Treadwell suggests, and then just before dusk.
By the way, she was right about the deer. During my visit I saw a doe and then later a small buck with velvet antlers. They were close because the deer are accustomed to seeing people walking in the park.
