By Rob Hedelt
with contributions from Kevin Howe
Ask Katharina Bergdoll about the precise moment in her young life when she connected with nature, and a slightly puzzled look appears on a face that’s as elegant as it is engaging.
“I can’t remember one particular moment, because there wasn’t a time I ever felt disconnected, even from my youngest childhood,” she says with a smile. She was simply happy to be outside climbing trees in the mature hardwood forest in Charles City with her two brothers and fishing in the nearby Guns Run Creek.
In time, a desire to save land like that took deep root.
“I have always felt it important to preserve nature when so much of what industry and mankind does is antithetical to nature,” said Bergdoll, who now lives in a cozy home in Hague in Westmoreland County.
While that house is surrounded by organic gardens, there’s a spot just a mile or two away where Bergdoll has made a deeper commitment to her beliefs.
It’s a 37-acre tract she owns that’s a mix of mature poplar, oak, and hickory, extensive marsh and wetlands and 1,350 feet of frontage on Newton’s Mill Pond, all of which is protected by a riparian buffer – a 100-foot wide border of undisturbed land that helps ensure clean water.
The tract is protected from future development or disturbance because she put a conservation easement on the property with The Northern Neck Land Conservancy.
Bergdoll doesn’t have to worry that the otters she delights in seeing on a trail camera at the pond will have their home taken by development.
That’s because the prohibition on development goes on in perpetuity, even if the land is sold.
The no-nonsense naturalist has lived in different parts of Virginia: 12 years in Matthews, more in Gloucester County, and 20 years in Richmond. She also took breaks from city dwelling on a farmlet in Charlotte County she acquired as a weekend escape.
Bergdoll is an accomplished, classically trained working artist, but she notes that the paintings she created after training at the Art Students League of New York and then the National Academy of Design’s School of Fine Art couldn’t alone support her.
She filled the gap by serially buying a house, fixing it up herself and renting it, eventually selling it to get ahead.
After her long stay in Richmond, what the artist really wanted was to get back to the country. She contacted realtor George English in the Northern Neck and described the sort of property she was looking to buy: old forest with hardwoods, some open fields, slightly rolling land with a pond; like the idyllic spot of her childhood.
“Newton’s Pond was the first place he took me to see, and I told him we didn’t need to go any further,” she said.
There was one unique thing she brought to the property: a cottage from the land she’d owned in Charlotte County, built by a freed slave named Joseph Holmes after the Civil War.
The cabin, with touches inside like wainscoting and beaded board believed to be added by a cabinet-making friend of Holmes, was something Bergdoll cared enough to bring with her, and she feared the new owners of that property would tear it down.
Instead, she got movers to bring it to Newton’s Pond, sawing the back of the cottage off to transport it. Now she lives in Hague, but a critical part of most days is taking her beloved dog Sydney for a walk on the Newton’s Pond property.
“I just like to walk in the woods,” she said. “You’ll see anything there: a deer or a fox. More frogs so far this year than all of last year. I document them all with [the] iNaturalist [citizen science app]. I see the otters in a little stream through the swamp, where it’s been deepened by beavers that dug a channel so they can swim in winter.”
She added, “I have trail camera footage of three otters on the other side of the stream. They come up and look around, then flow into the stream and swim up it. I watched one eat a yellow-breasted sunfish. It went up to the far side of the pond and sat there like it was eating a pancake, just chewing away on the fish.”
Bergdoll said that on one recent morning, she’d seen a turkey in the field, thinking it may be nesting. She’s come across a couple of painted turtles laying eggs, as well as some box turtles in a different spot.
She sees all sorts of slinky reptiles: “Kingsnakes, black racers, rat snakes, and hog-nosed snakes, which are wonderful but hard to see because they are so shy,” she said. “I’ve only seen two copperheads the whole time I’ve been here.”
Asked about getting swarmed by mosquitoes by the pond on summer evenings, she strongly said she doesn’t.
“The ecosystem is so balanced, with so many dragonflies eating the mosquito larvae, if I sit out in the evening, there is not a mosquito anywhere.”
Bergdoll, who was trained as a Master Naturalist by the Northern Neck chapter and has done research and improvement projects with that group, said she hasn’t done much to change her 37 acres.
“I’ve planted nut trees and fruit trees there,” she said. “The pecan trees started from nuts I got and grew in pots. I planted them the year before last and all of them sprouted. One day the turkeys can all eat pecans.”
The artist who calls her style “representational, inspired by nature,” favors landscapes and says she’s done plenty of those on her dream property.
But she’s also been struck by scenes viewed during travels hither and yon.
“I’d see beautiful scenes I’d die to paint, and sometimes I did,” she said. “But often there just wasn’t time. I’ve sort of retired from painting now” though she still has some of her favorites gracing the walls of her home. A number of her works are also for sale for the valued price equivalent of a donation at the Northern Neck Land Conservancy office in Warsaw.
Bergdoll is recognized as a valuable and capable naturalist in the regional conservation community. She has been actively involved with three citizen science projects at Bay View, the Northern Neck Land Conservancy’s ‘ambassador’ property.
The first project is a multiyear survey of flora and fauna. This is a Northern Neck Master Naturalist undertaking in which member volunteers visit the property and record the birds, animals, insects and plants they see. The observations are entered into a database on the website iNaturalist. This website gathers records of observations from professional scientists as well as amateur naturalists and contains over 230 million records from around the globe. Katherina has been the leading observer of flora and fauna at Bay View.
A second project, which started this year, is a survey of Diamondback Terrapins – a declining species of turtle that lives only in estuaries. The Virginia Dept of Wildlife Resources sponsors an annual “Diamondback Dash” and Katherina, with two associate naturalists, recently kayaked the Bay View waters and spotted three Terrapins.
Bergdoll is also involved in a butterfly survey each spring and fall. The survey, which is now in its fourth year locally, is supported by the North American Butterfly Association. Its purpose is to study long term trends in butterfly populations. Katherina has been involved with a team of naturalists whose study areas include Northern Neck Land Conservancy’s Bay View.
Katharina Bergdoll is not the only individual in the Northern Neck and Essex County who cares deeply about the natural world and who is willing to take action to protect it.
The regional conservation community is gathering at Northern Neck Land Conservancy’s annual Boots and Barbecue event on October 4th at historic Wheatland and Saunders Wharf in Essex County. Boots and Barbecue is a celebration of all the things that drive the organization’s commitment to protecting farmlands, woodlands and wetlands in our region. Each year the event is held in one of the five Northern Neck counties or Essex on the Middle Peninsula – and always on an acreage that is permanently protected by a conservation easement. It is an afternoon of live music, fried oysters, delicious BBQ, fascinating exhibits, demonstrations and more.
Everyone can join in conserving the region’s lands, water, economies and culture. Visit nnconserve.org to learn more about creating a conservation easement, making a donation and other ways to become involved with the Northern Neck Land Conservancy.
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