Singer Lake Bog

City of Green, Summit County
344 acres

Singer Lake basin and its surrounding hills is one of the most significant natural areas remaining in Ohio. Museum inventories conducted at Singer Lake from 1989 through 1991 documented that Singer Lake was a significant natural area in Ohio. The three-year Museum survey added 17 plants to the number known in the basin prior to the Museum's first field trip.

Singer Lake harbors the largest leatherleaf bog in Ohio. Thirty-nine plants on the 2006-07 Ohio Rare Plant List of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, occur at Singer Lake and most of the rare plants are within the leatherleaf bogs. In addition to more than 50 acres of leatherleaf bog, the basin has a five-acre deep kettle lake surrounded by tamarack, cranberries and sphagnum. Other wetland communities in the basin are buttonbush shrub swamp, blueberry/huckleberry shrub swamps, pond lily marshes and aquatic beds.

Several of the rare plant discoveries at Singer Lake by the Museum had not previously been reported for Summit County. Two of the Summit County records, sharp-glumed manna grass and northern St. John's-wort, were listed as Extirpated from Ohio when they were found at Singer Lake. The first Ohio occurrence of male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas) was discovered at Singer Lake in 2000. Northern Michigan and Niagara Falls are the closest known occurrences. Museum staff also found the largest Ohio population of the State-Endangered small cranberry within Singer Lake basin. The basin has huge populations of the more common large cranberry. In 2005, during a hike organized for the Northeast Ohio Naturalists (NEON), Museum staff and volunteers found two more rare plants at Singer Lake, Appalachian sedge (Carex appalachica) and rose pogonia (Pogonia ophioglossoides).

On their first visit to Singer Lake in 1989, Botany Department staff collected a moth, day-flying geometrid moth (Epelis truncataria), that was later identified as the first collected in Ohio. One of the food plants for the caterpillar stage of the rare moth is cranberry. The large cranberry population may also support a rare butterfly, the bog copper. No population of bog copper is known to occur in Ohio, but they may occur at Singer Lake because bog copper caterpillars feed exclusively on cranberry.

Sixty-seven (67) dragonflies and damselflies have been found with the basin. Three of the dragonflies are very rare in Ohio. Prior to the discovery of racket-tailed emerald (Dorocordulia libera) at Singer Lake Bog, it was last reported in Ohio in 1924 from Lake Kelso, Geauga County. On June 1, 2000, two more rare dragonflies were found at Singer Lake. The State-Endangered elfin skimmer (Nannothemis bella) occurs at one other site in Ohio, Cedar Bog in southwestern Ohio. The chalk-fronted corporal (Libellula julia) was reported for Portage County one hundred years ago and also is only known from one other site in Ohio, Mud Lake Bog in Williams County.