Behind the Parks: Meet Chrissy at Highbanks

Chrissy Hoff
Senior Naturalist, Highbanks

Hometown and Background

I’m from a small town in northern Ohio. I have always been interested in animals, especially wildlife. I have an enduring memory of an elementary school day when a visiting educator brought in some education animals to our classroom. We were all able to touch the animals and learn fascinating things about them, and I recall thinking “When I grow up, I want to work with animals.” I thought I would have to work for a zoo. I didn’t know that being a naturalist was a job.

I attended Ohio University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in biology, with a minor in environmental science. During my fourth year I interned at Brukner Nature Center in Troy, Ohio. My internship involved wildlife rehabilitation of injured and orphaned animals, caring for the ambassador animals, such as bobcats, foxes and skunks, a variety of raptors, like bald eagles, red-tailed hawks and owls, and many other species of birds. I loved the work there, and I must have made a good impression as an intern, because after I graduated from Ohio University I returned to Brukner Nature Center as a full-time naturalist.

I had a great time working there. It was ideal preparation for a future Metro Parks naturalist. Brukner Nature Center is a private non-profit organization, funded mostly by family memberships and program fees. After a couple of years I was promoted to the position of director of education and I ran the education programs and also managed the center’s volunteers. One of my favorite activities was our regular overnight programs for kids at an 1804 log house, usually with a maximum of 24 kids.

Although I was very happy at Brukner Nature Center, my boyfriend, Chad, lived in Columbus and eventually we decided it made sense for me to look for another position nearer the city. A mutual friend had set us up on a blind date in 2001, just a week before September 11. Chad, who I married later, was close friends with a Metro Parks naturalist, Alli Shaw. They had been in the same fraternity at OSU. Alli mentioned to him that there was an opening coming up for a naturalist position at Highbanks Metro Park. When the position was advertised, I had made my resume ready and applied and was granted an interview, and then offered the job. I started my new position as a naturalist at Highbanks in August 2002.

What I do at Metro Parks and what I love most about it

Coincidently, Glacier Ridge Metro Park opened just a month after I started at Highbanks. Five years later, a hub naturalist position opened up at Glacier Ridge and I interviewed and was promoted to this new job. I worked at Glacier Ridge for 11 years. Eventually, Homestead Metro Park opened and was added under the management of Glacier Ridge, which offered new and different opportunities to engage the public.

There were a lot of organizational and departmental changes happening in 2018, and all park naturalists were informally interviewed about where they saw themselves in the organization and where they would like to be. I remember telling my interviewer, the then Resource Manager John Watts, that I was very happy where I was, but if ever the senior naturalist position at Highbanks were to open up, then he could certainly count on me being interested in that. And almost incredulously, just a few weeks later the then senior naturalist at Highbanks moved to a management position at Metro Parks Headquarters. Following interviews, I moved to what is now my current position, senior naturalist at Highbanks.

As I’ve progressed in my career, from naturalist to hub naturalist and to senior naturalist, in addition to programming I’ve taken on a much larger administrative role, as well as the privilege of mentoring and supervising other employees and volunteers. Mentoring the next generation of naturalists and helping them along on their own career paths is one of the great pleasures of my role. I still get to perform and enjoy the main naturalist responsibilities, such as planning and leading public programs and taking care of our ambassador animals. I love teaching kids about our animals. Currently, on Highbanks’ animal staff, we have box turtles, a river cooter, which is a kind of water turtle, various amphibians, like our gray tree frog, a Jefferson salamander and a toad, plus a gray rat snake. Allowing kids the opportunity to see them up close and actually touch the animals reminds me very much of that happy time in my own childhood when animals were brought to our classroom.

One of the elements of my job that I love most is participating in biotic surveys, to better understand our local ecosystems. The vernal pool surveys are my favorite. I’d be there at the vernal pools every day if I could, discovering all the different animals that utilize these seasonal bodies of water in our park. I also enjoy my involvement with the bluebird monitoring program and sharing our data with Nest Watch by Cornell, which monitors the use of nests across the country and provides researchers with invaluable data about bird populations in different areas. We have our own login to the system and share our data on the cavity nesting birds at Highbanks. Our bluebird nests are not used solely by bluebirds, but also by many other cavity nesting birds such as tree swallows, house wrens and Carolina chickadees.

From the middle of May to the end of July, a fun project for our volunteers is hand-feeding the hummingbirds. This is one of the hottest tickets in our sign-up for volunteers. All of our volunteers love to do it. A volunteer sits in a chair outside the nature center and close by the pollinator garden, holding a hummingbird feeder in their hands. They have to sit perfectly still, for about 20 minutes at a time, and the reward is the closest possible interaction between hummingbird and human. We record the number of hummingbird visitors to the human-held feeder, how many male birds and female birds participate in each session, and we also record observational data about bird behavior. We have one male bird, in particular, that loves to feed at the human-held feeder and will chase other birds away. The ultimate goal is for the hummingbirds to be comfortable enough with the process that eventually we can invite visitors to sit in the chair and enjoy the same experience as the volunteers.

My favorite Metro Parks activity

We’re big on hiking in my family. All three of us, that’s me, Chad and our 13-year old daughter, Olivia, enjoy long walks in the parks. In particular, we enjoy going to Clear Creek, to get away from crowds and enjoy absolute quiet and solitude on the forest trails. We also like creeking, just being in the water and also exploring to see what aquatic life we can find.

My favorite Metro Parks story that includes a positive visitor interaction

While I was working at Glacier Ridge, a woman approached me one day and told me that her son had written about me in one of his school assignments. His class had been asked to write an essay about the person they most admired. The mom thought her son would have chosen a sports star, as he was very into sports, but it seems I had made a more lasting impression on him. He had come to one of my vernal pool programs, and I had asked him if he would like to help me pull one of the salamander traps, so that we could see how many salamanders were in it and estimate how many might be in the vernal pool altogether. The boy wrote positively about my job and indicated that he wanted to do something similar when he grew up. It made me realize that what I do can have a great impact on young people’s lives and gave me a great sense of satisfaction. I know that the boy went on to college to study in the sciences.

Traveling – places I’ve been, places I’d love to go

We love the rugged beauty of northern Michigan. Chad is an arborist, and Olivia is following our love of science and the fauna and flora of our world. We went to Sleeping Bear Dunes one year, a national park on the shores of Lake Michigan, with towering sand dunes and miles of beautiful sandy beaches. Another year, we went to the Petoskey area, to go fossil hunting. I found a wonderful specimen of a horn coral, about a foot long. These coral animals went extinct about 250 million years ago, during the Permian Extinction.

Both these vacations were to locations on the Michigan Lower Peninsula. This summer we’re headed for our first trip to the Upper Peninsula, which has different ecosystems and many more conifers. My main aim is to see a live porcupine. I hope I have better luck with the porcupine than I did with my aim to see a live black bear on a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains one year. It was a beautiful place, and we kept running into people who told us they had seen a black bear nearby by. We did get to see very fresh bear scat, but never a bear.

Other places I’d love to go would be out west, to go to Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountains, and also to the Galapagos Islands to study its incredible wildlife.

Fun facts about me and my family

1. Our crazy animals! We have two German short-haired pointers at home, which are energetic bird dogs and highly active. Olivia, she loves to keep fish, mostly guppies. But we’re also inundated with rescue animals, and some of them are crazy, very crazy, for central Ohio. The craziest has got to be our anole, which is a lizard that has no business being in Columbus, but it’s settled in right at home with us. Our neighbors have a house in Florida, and they brought back a bunch of plants to Ohio, which they kept in their sun room. They didn’t know that an anole had laid eggs in one of these plants. And guess what, soon enough they became proud owners of a bright-green lizard. They had no idea how to best care for it, so we did what we do, we took on another weird pet. We’ve set up a special tank for it, with the right heat and humidity to mimic its natural environment. We also have an ornate wood turtle from Costa Rica, which also requires special food, UVA lighting and excessive heat.

2. Please don’t bring in the clowns! As a kid I got invited out of the audience to go down to the circus ring at the Ringling Brothers Circus in Cleveland. Invited isn’t quite the right word. It felt more like an abduction! My mom let me go, thinking how great it would be for me. But my hand was taken by a clown, and I was really scared. There I was, about six or seven years old, crying my eyes out because I thought this very scary-looking clown was stealing me away from my mom. Up close, with all that paint on their faces, clowns are terrifying! At least, I thought so. I’ve always hated clowns, ever since.

3. A cultural exchange! The favorite place I’ve ever been is Trinidad, in the Caribbean. I was sent there for a cultural exchange when I worked at the Brukner Nature Center. It was a working holiday, you might say. I stayed at the Asa Wright Nature Center and I was there to study their hummingbirds, bats and other rainforest animals. Of the animals I saw and studied there, one of my favorites was the tent-making bats. They get their name from their habit of making tent-like roosts from giant fan-shaped leafs. They’re very cute-looking animals, with four white stripes on their brown faces.

I also had a daily and unwanted interaction with a four-foot-long tegu, a scary-looking lizard that would sit outside my door every morning. Nearly every morning, I had to wait for it to eventually shuffle off somewhere else before I could leave my dorm room and get to work.

I learned a valuable lesson while on that trip, which is to never leave your backpack on the floor of the rainforest. I made that mistake. When I picked up my backpack the next morning and strapped it across my back, I was wracked with sudden shooting pains. A long line of army ants had settled on my backpack and they have a crazy and very painful bite. I had scars all over my arm for weeks after. Trinidad itself is beautiful. It’s one of the two islands from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, the most southernmost island nation in the Caribbean, just north of Venezuela on the South American mainland.

My favorite food and dessert

I love food trucks, always have. There’s something about their changing menus and special ingredients that makes them more interesting to me than any traditional restaurant. I especially like the Pitabilities Food Trucks, with their Greek and Mediterranean dishes, which have fantastic gyros and lots of very different pizzas. There are also some terrific Mexican food trucks in and around Columbus that serve great tacos. I especially like a good salmon taco, medium spicy to bring out the flavor of the salmon, and with lots of veggies. For dessert, I like anything with lemon, such as lemon meringue pie, and especially lemon custard.

My favorite entertainment

I love binge-watching TV shows. A show I’ve really enjoyed watching recently is This is Us, on Netflix, which is a family drama about a set of triplets and their folks. The show can often switch abruptly from current to past to future, which is fine for me, as I watch it as a dedicated fan. But Chad will sometimes come and go into the room where I’m watching and see that the kids have suddenly become adults, or the adults have suddenly become kids, and he gets exasperated at all the temporal changes! I also like watching historical shows, such as Bridgerton and Outlander, as well as political shows like Madame Secretary and The West Wing.

I also love live theater. With a group of other park naturalists, I have a season pass for Broadway in Columbus. Some of the great shows I’ve been to include the fabulous Hamilton, and the recent and equally excellent Six, about the six wives of Henry the Eighth. Most of the shows are musicals but occasionally there are straight plays. We recently went to a great production of To Kill a Mockingbird.

I enjoy reading nature books and, as a family, we go out to quite a few Columbus Blue Jackets games. For a lot of years, we made sure we got tickets to their New Year’s Eve games, when they did spectacular pre-game shows with fireworks on the ice.

Why I love working at Metro Parks

Working at Metro Parks presents us with a wide variety of learning experiences. Recently, we had a couple of maintenance staff ask if they could come out to see what we do at a snake survey we organized at the park. They had a great time and learned so much about what we do. Likewise, as naturalists, we have opportunities to observe or even participate in activities led by our resource management staff. I’d like to participate in a prairie burn in the future, and also help out with electrofishing activities to research the current aquatic life in our rivers and creeks.

Chrissy Hoff was talking to Communications Coordinator, Virginia Gordon

What Highbanks Manager, Matt Kaderly, says about Chrissy

“Chrissy’s unwavering commitment to interpretive education is illustrated by the ongoing development of the programs she creates, as well as shown by the continued growth and development of the staff she oversees. Chrissy’s leadership makes a significant impact on others and her enthusiasm for interpretation is contagious. Chrissy’s a storyteller who can engage and captivate an audience; and the synergy Chrissy creates just may be the secret ingredient to Metro Parks’ vision statement of ‘Changing Lives Naturally…'”