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The Dragon Run snakes some 40 miles through Essex, King and Queen, Middlesex and Gloucester Counties and is Virginia’s cleanest and best-preserved blackwater stream.
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Local Scoop paddlers Lisa Shivers, Morgan Sanders and Chris Jones.
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Dragon Run volunteers Andrea Mitman, Janice Moore, Mason Washington, Davis Rhoades and Teta Kain.
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Janice Moore pushes off for the morning paddle on the Dragon Run.
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The Dragon Run is an important Virginia natural asset.
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FODR paddle crew members Janice Moore and Andrea Mitman are working on the Beaver Dam Gate so volunteers and paddlers may pass through.
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FODR paddle crew members Andrea Mitman and Janice Moore.
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Janice Moore paddles by Beaver Dam Gate with a helping hand from Andrea Mitman.
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FODR volunteer Andrea Mitman stands by as Janice Moore paddles to the other side of the dam.
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Pictured at left in the yellow vest is Teta Kain who is known as the volunteer Empress of the Dragon for her unflagging love of and devotion to Dragon Run.
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FODR paddle crew members Mason Washington and Andrea Mitman.
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A close-up of Blue-fronted Dancer Damselflies.
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Volunteer Teta Kain is pictured above sharing her Dragon Run insights with paddlers.
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The Local Scoop Team gently paddle their kayaks during the last leg of their journey on the Dragon.
However, as stated by the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States lacks a national framework for identifying and classifying such streams, making these vital ecosystems difficult to protect. Luckily, Friends of the Dragon Run, a nonprofit organization founded in the mid-1980s by Middle Peninsula locals, has stepped in to preserve the Dragon Run for the public to enjoy.
Davis Rhodes, a founding member, says local Scout leader and Gloucester pharmacist Jimmy Morgan; his father, Dr. Loren Morgan; and his brother, Harvey, developed the idea for a conservation group in 1985.
“Jimmy was my post advisor in the Explorer Scouts. We used to paddle the Dragon Run because it was an opportunity to get out into nature,” says Rhodes. “He got the idea of forming a conservation group and circulated the idea with a number of his friends. I was fortunate enough to be one of them.”
After assembling a fledgling group—30 in all—they brainstormed ways to preserve the waterway and its adjacent land while kicking names to call themselves, like Dragon Savers.
“We settled on Friends of Dragon Run as a less aggressive-sounding name,” recalls Rhodes.
Today, Rhodes and Harvey Morgan are the only remaining original members on the board. Some have retired or moved out of the region. Others have passed away. The organization now runs with a board of 13 to 19 members. Their work is part preservation and part education, the latter performed in real-time with kayak tours on the Dragon Run. Many of its members found their way on the board after paddling the Dragon themselves.
Jeff Wright, president of the board, is a certified Virginia Master Naturalist who began volunteering on Dragon Run a half-decade ago. Since then, he’s been involved in one capacity or another in helping preserve the waterway.
“I’ve been a member of the [Friends of] Dragon Run for five or six years now. I’ve been the paddle master for the last three. I set up the paddles, work on the crew training and everything else. I’m hooked. I love to go out and do property monitoring, bird and insect census for different environmental groups. The Dragon is truly a treasure,” he says.
Avian expert Teta Kain, who’s been actively involved with the Dragon Run since 1993, was recruited by then-board member William Hester who needed assistance identifying birds on the Dragon.
“He needed a bird study, and someone said, ‘Well, we know somebody named Teta Kain that just moved up here, and she knows birds.’ So, he called me and asked if I would want to do any kind of surveys on birds on the Dragon,” she says.
After agreeing to conduct the surveys, she arranged to provide monthly reports “on birds, butterflies, moths, anything I could identify,” she says.
A friend told former board president Janice Moore about Kain’s affinity for nature and knowledge of birds and wildlife on the Dragon, leading Moore to her first paddle.
“A friend of mine heard about the paddles and Teta Kain and said we should go,” she says.
From that point on, she was captivated.
“It was a beautiful, amazing place. I’d never been anywhere like that. I had been in a kayak before, but usually on open water or a substantial creek or maybe a lake, but nothing, nothing like the Dragon Run. It’s a magical place,” Moore says.
The Effort of Preservation
One method of preserving a wetland ecosystem like the Dragon Run is to acquire the surrounding land to further push the boundaries away from the ecosystem. This is known as a conservation easement, “a voluntary, legal agreement that permanently limits uses of the land in order to protect its conservation values…for future generations,” as stated by the National Conservation Easement Database.
Conservation easements protect land at lower cost, provide valuable tax benefits on donated land and keep land in private ownership. The first land acquisition by Friends of the Dragon Run came by way of a 203-acre donation from area resident Louise McKenna who, upon transitioning into assisted living, wanted to make sure that the land was protected. Since then, Friends of the Dragon Run has accumulated about 650 acres along the Dragon under conservation easements, giving them authority over surrounding land.
“Ownership guarantees that we’d be able to control what happens on the property. Our objective is to monitor it and make sure that it’s undisturbed and is allowed to continue as nature would allow without interruption from man,” Rhodes says.
While human interference can be prevented across much of the land and water preserved by Friends of the Dragon Run, its nature trails are people-friendly and require volunteer help to maintain.
“[We] clear obstructions for our water trail when we’re doing a paddle, so if you’re taking people out you can stay safe and avoid all those situations,” says Moore, citing numerous beaver lodges and dams that inhabit the waterway.
Years ago, member Gordon Page designed throughway gates within the Dragon Run to ensure a smoother paddle that allowed natural habitats to go undisturbed by kayak tours.
“We put the gates in only when we’re going to use the Dragon and only on the path that we’re going to use. Otherwise, we let the beavers do their thing. [They] have a lot to do with keeping the Dragon as pristine as it is,” says Moore.
That purity touted by Moore is a point of pride for the organization. A 1976 study spearheaded by The Nature Conservancy and commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution deemed the Dragon Run to be the second-most ecologically significant waterway within the Chesapeake Bay watershed—a drainage basin encompassing waterways in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and the District of Columbia, each flowing back into the Chesapeake Bay. Zekiah Swamp in La Plata, Maryland, was cited as the most significant.
“The Dragon is truly a treasure,” says Kain. “It’s hugely important for science, for keeping water clean, supports a lot of our industries in agriculture and forestry too. In Virginia, it’s part of a natural heritage we should applaud having.”
Getting Involved
The work done by Friends of the Dragon Run is largely supported by two forces: volunteers and donors. Getting involved in environmental volunteering is a means of leaving a legacy of responsible land and water stewardship for many and as a way of gaining valuable work experience for young people interested in conservation. For
Friends of the Dragon Run, some of the greatest needs for volunteers are in helping with the upkeep of the adjacent land and nature trails surrounding the waterway, but other adventurous opportunities exist.
“In terms of the land, we maintain our trails and put together volunteer work crews to go out and clear the trails,” Moore says, who encourages people who wish to volunteer at the Dragon Run to visit its website to see which opportunities are available and what might be of interest.
“We have a lot of information on our website. [You can] pick up trash along the roads and bridges across Dragon Run for a few hours on a Saturday morning each quarter or serve on the paddle or logistics crew for three or more trips.”
For those who wish to support Friends of the Dragon Run monetarily, donations can be made securely online at dragonrun.org, or mailed to the organization’s Gloucester post office box.
Donations help with land maintenance, property rehabilitation projects, new kayaks for paddle tours and operational expenses.
“We do have to pay taxes on the property—real estate taxes —and we use the money for that. There are things required to maintain the health of the forest or the property. We’ve bought some gates to close off intrusion into areas that are being rehabilitated, so there are some other expenses,” Rhodes says.
“A lot of people will donate a kayak to us, but it’s usually a large one, so we sell the kayaks and buy other kayaks that are the right length, but also have the right construction and can be used on the Dragon,” Moore says.
Garnering Interest
Much of the group’s outreach into the community and surrounding areas is done by word of mouth or as a result of media attention “from people who have written articles about Teta,” according to Moore and resulting in public-speaking opportunities from that exposure.
“Groups like the Master Naturalists and Master Gardeners and the Audubon Society, all those groups invite Teta to make a program presentation, and it’s usually about the Dragon.”
Kain’s expertise on the animal and bird species, as well as the flora and fauna in and along the Dragon Run, are well known and have exposed the Dragon Run to new groups and the general public. Kain says she’s identified “at least 125 species of birds” on the Dragon Run.
“I’ve put together programs about the Dragon, which included birds and animals and plants and night scenes as a show that I’ve given to many groups for many years,” Kain says, stating she’s done some 600 programs over the last 30 years
And of course, the paddle is the biggest draw. The three paddle seasons—spring, summer and fall—attract people from across Virginia and the mid-Atlantic.
“We get paddlers from not just Virginia, but people come down from Maryland, D.C. and different parts of the country to participate in our paddle seasons every year … so there’s a great opportunity for us to attract new members,” Kain says.
“We have one young man who comes from Baltimore…and in the spring paddle season, he usually comes twice, because we have different birds that arrive at different months and he’s a birdwatcher,” Moore adds.
“We have somebody who comes from Pennsylvania, and we have people from Northern Virginia. We had a lot of people from Williamsburg and also from the Charlottesville area. Some come for the day and some also have weekend places down here where they’ll stay and paddle on the weekends. It surprises me because those are pretty good drives.”
Outdoor Laboratory
One of the strategic goals of the Friends of Dragon Run is to use the ecosystem to teach real-time ecological preservation education to youth within area school systems.
“I think it’s hugely important,” says Wright. “I remember when I was in the Boy Scouts planting trees. I’ve gone back to some of those areas in Pennsylvania and other places. I have seen the magnificent forests that resulted from those efforts. We were pretty happy to get some school groups out on the Dragon Run in the last two or three years. It really ties into their science education.
“Biodiversity is an exceptionally important thing in this day and age, especially with changes in our environment. When youth learn that early on, it’s a catalyst for making a lifelong commitment, I believe, to helping protect nature.”
Moore, who spearheaded this effort toward school involvement, agrees. A few years ago, the head of Aylett Country Day School in Bruington, Virginia, paddled the Dragon and “just fell in love with [it],” recalls Moore. She inquired of Moore about having kids at her school paddle the Dragon. Not long after, a Boy Scout troop asked to paddle the Dragon. The proof of concept was there, and the idea took shape. Moore took it to the board, who approved it, but left one caveat: groups provide their own liability insurance.
“We want every school-age child in the watershed counties—Essex, Matthews, Gloucester, Middlesex—to paddle the Dragon at least one time before they graduate from high school. Then, they will fall in love with it, and when it’s their turn to take care of it, they will,” she says.
She believes more schools will get on board as they find ways to align their academic calendars with the Friends of Dragon Run’s paddling seasons.
“We had students from Aylett Country Day School two years ago, a couple from Middlesex High School and two groups from Aylett Country Day School in 2021. They came in their own school bus. It was a fun trip.”
She fondly remembers one trip when the Aylett Country Day School science teacher turned the outing into a full-on classroom.
“The teacher prepared ahead of time and made checklists of all the things they could see on the Dragon. He asked every student to spot a specific kind of flower and a plant and a kind of dragonfly or damselfly or butterfly,” she recalled. “He even had a little competition going between the morning group and the afternoon group, Team A and Team B. He was so clever about it.
“If we can do that kind of thing with other school groups and get that kind of enthusiasm going and get the kids involved, then they will learn to love the Dragon, and they’ll preserve it.”