The sun has yet to rise, and the stillness of the early morning provides a mystic aura as farmers begin to bring their cows and sheep onto the landscape.

For Rachelle McKnight, another day of research in the mountainsides of Bulgaria has begun.

McKnight, a third-year graduate student earning her master’s degree in landscape architecture at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, spent this summer in Nanovitsa, Bulgaria, a small town in the eastern Rhodope Mountains. There, she worked with the ReWilding Europe program to conduct a home range and habitat survey of the region’s Konik horses.

Prior to her studies at SUNY-ESF, McKnight earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a double minor in horticulture and fine arts from Western Kentucky University. She chose to study landscape architecture to combine her love for design and horticulture.

“My whole life, I’ve had horses, ridden horses and been around horses. I thought it’d be really interesting,” said McKnight, a Kentucky native, of the chance to study Koniks.

Each day, McKnight spent six hours on the 2,000-acre ridge where the horses roamed. The previously abandoned land had been repopulated with wild horses by ReWilding Europe in an effort to restore a natural balance and promote biodiversity. McKnight’s role was to identify vegetation and take note of how the horses used the landscape, where they spent most of their time and where they found shelter.

A typical morning began at 4:30 when McKnight would make the one-hour drive from her apartment to the ridge.

“It got so hot so early, but it was so beautiful as we drove up to the ridge,” McKnight said of her early mornings.

As a time-saving mechanism, she would often sleep in a tent on the ridge. This was not without repercussions. She said the horses would often break into her tent, steal her sleeping bag and scatter her belongings. She was surprised at how curious the horses were about people, she said, and that the horses wanted to be around people all the time.

“Every time we would go to get into the car, they would surround it and start licking the windows; they were troublemakers for sure,” she said.

The opportunity to be a student researcher in Bulgaria arose when McKnight received funding from the Fink Career Fellowship, and she jumped on board. The fellowship provides financial support for SUNY-ESF students to attend conferences and internships, and the use of the funding is entirely up to the student, said Casey Duffy, a career advisor at SUNY-ESF.

“It provides the opportunity for students to gain experience in a way that is truly student-driven and independently-shaped,” Duffy added.

McKnight said she misses the horses, but what she took away from her experience in Bulgaria is the significant work the Bulgarian people are doing to move forward from the country’s communist history. She added that it was inspiring to see Bulgaria “value the beauty of the landscape and their culture.”

She captured the country’s natural beauty in a series of sketches and videos by using skills she picked up in a multimedia course in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications last spring.

McKnight’s data collection includes the identification of 211 plants, and she has since returned to the United States. She is now interpreting the greater vegetation composition of the land along with how the horses are using the landscape and producing maps and booklets that will serve as resources to students who replicate her research in the future.

Published on October 25, 2015 at 9:52 pm

Contact Taylor: tnwatson@syr.edu