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Natural History - Bird Species Ellanor C. Lawrence Park falls within the Piedmont geologic province, which stretches south-westward from New York City to Alabama. Upon arrival in this region nearly 300 years ago, European settlers cleared the forested land and converted it for agricultural use. Within the last 100 years much of this region has been abandoned as farmland, largely due to the decrease in soil quality from intensive farming practices. Where development has not moved in to replace farms, natural succession has led to reforestation. The Killdeer Bird is featured in one of our Naturalist Corner Nature Pages. Bird Finder Searcheable database of all the birds recorded in our major parks. Ellanor C. Lawrence Park is a prime example of this succession. Once a working farm, ECLP was a gift from David Lawrence in honor of his wife, Ellanor. Now totaling over 650 acres, the park encompasses several different stages of forest succession, offering a variety of different habitats for wildlife. These include open meadows, an eastern red cedar thicket, mixed deciduous-conifer forest, maturing hardwood forest, several stream valleys, and a pond. It is this diversity that provides for the 133 species of birds that have been documented in the park*.   We've come up with a list of birds that we're very interested in. These 16 birds are indicator species - or the presence of each bird can tell us something about what is going on in the environment. *You must have the Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 (or newer) installed on your computer to view and print this file.