For 25 years, Gamiing Nature Centre — located east of Lindsay and south of Bobcaygeon on the shores of Pigeon Lake — has been a welcoming place to connect with nature through camps, workshops, trails, and exploration.
Even all these years later, landowner and volunteer executive director Mieke Schipper never tires of seeing guests enjoy the 100 acres of wetlands, forest, wildlife and landscapes the property has to offer.
“The enthusiasm of people walking the trails continues to be one of the most amazing things,” she says when looking back on the past 25 years. “We have nowhere that says ‘Don’t touch’ or ‘Don’t enter’, so people who want to run off the trails and explore can do that and have their own fun — and it’s fun for us to watch.”
And yet for Schipper, who recently turned 80 years old, the journey to creating the donation-run education centre started long before its opening. When she purchased the land with her family in 1986 after selling a property down the road, Gamiing Nature Centre was nothing more than a “pretty nasty” abandoned farm and farmhouse that had plans to be developed.
Having immigrated from the environmentally conscious Netherlands, where conservation was “very much a part of my upbringing,” Schipper was determined to bring some biodiversity back to the land. She began by taking samples of the soil to determine the plant life that would be best suited to the environment and planted hundreds of spruce and pine trees.
“I thought it would take 20 to 30 years, but it was actually quite a bit sooner because the minute it started growing, the birds would come and bring seeds from somewhere else,” Schipper recalls. “The whole natural succession started happening quite quickly. It has been a fascinating process to watch it happening.”
Schipper raised horses and sheep on the farmland until eventually transforming the property into the environmental education centre that stands today. Originally called Gamiing Centre for Sustainable Lakeshore Living, the name comes from the Ojibwe (Anishinaabemowin) word for “at the shore” — both reflecting the property’s close proximity to Pigeon Lake and recognizing the original inhabitants of the area.
“I’m a settler and a quite recent one, so that was for me to honour people who lived there before,” Schipper says. “I have a need to acknowledge that and to honour that.”
Long before it was open to the public, Schipper wanted the property to be put into a land trust to protect it from development in the future. As there wasn’t a land conservation organization in the region, she connected with environmental lawyer Ian Attridge to help form the Kawartha Heritage Conservatory, a not-for-profit organization incorporated in 2001. Now known as the Kawartha Land Trust, the charitable organization currently protects 33 properties in the Kawarthas region representing more than 5,300 acres of diverse land.
In 2017, the Schipper family formed a conservation easement agreement with Kawartha Land Trust to protect the property in perpetuity. The easement protects the natural heritage features of 77 acres of the Schipper property, including the area that has been designated by the province of Ontario as an Area of Natural and Scientific Interest and a Provincially Significant Wetland. Several species at risk, including the Least Bittern and the Blanding’s Turtle, are living throughout 30 acres of wetland on the Schipper property.
The first thing Schipper did to welcome the public to learn from the land was to establish more than seven kilometres of recreational trails ranging in difficulty. Upon opening the property to the public, she noticed immediately there were two ways people used the trails: children would run as fast as they could to get through it, while adults would converse with each other the whole way. To encourage visitors to notice their surroundings, including some of the more than 180 species of flora and fauna that now thrive on the land, she created “trail bingo” cards.
“We want you to come here and observe, so we had to come up with something tangible to make that happen,” Schipper says, noting that it proved to be a success right from the beginning. “Parents loved it, and they didn’t even realize what they were missing.”
In accordance with the educational centre’s original name, the very first workshops were centred around preserving and maintaining the 1,200 feet of undeveloped shoreline on Pigeon Lake. Schipper compares her efforts to make visitors understand the importance of leaving trees and shrubs to grow near shorelines, rather than replacing them with grass, as “almost becoming a religion.”
“The grass has very tiny roots and the lake will just chew that up,” says Schipper, adding that Gamiing Nature Centre continues to host those workshops today. “I still do them because it’s something that I so wholeheartedly believe in.”
Over the next two decades, Gamiing added more and more workshops, including artisan ones like the popular greenwood carving lessons led by Curve Lake master carver Jon Wager. Other repeat workshops, including wellness-based workshops like yoga and nature-based trail walks focused on birding or mushroom foraging, are typically led by passionate community members who want to share their knowledge with the community.
Gamiing, which has added the The Hayloft Reception Venue and the Discovery Shack in the past decade for more learning opportunities, has always made children’s education a priority by offering March Break camps, a forest school, and summer camps. From kayaking and trail hikes to storytelling and fire-building, the educational offerings extend well beyond learning about conservation efforts.
“In the forest, people ask ‘How you can learn? How can you do math?'” Schipper says. “Well, you can count trees or learn all the history there is here. It doesn’t matter what you can come up with. Everything can be done outside and learned outside, and I find it amazing that the kids who come here are so happy and can’t wait to come back.”
Young adults also have plenty of opportunity to learn, with many students coming from Fleming College’s Lindsay campus to participate in co-op placements and courses on the property.
“They’re all so engaged, wanting to make the world a better place, which is why they’re studying there anyway,” Schipper says. “I’ll always enjoy seeing the people who come here.”
There will be lots of fun and educational opportunities in February when Gamiing Nature Centre hosts its annual Family Day celebrations called Winterlude on Monday, February 19 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. With admission by donation, the full day of family fun includes kick-sledding, snowshoeing, a scavenger hunt, an obstacle course, hot chocolate, and more.
For more information or to make a donation to the Gamiing Nature Centre, visit www.gamiing.org or following Gamiing on Facebook and Instagram.
