Sanctuary News

by Tom Costello

Our volunteers contribute a significant amount of time and effort to restoring and enhancing wildlife habitat in our sanctuaries. Recent grants from the City of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) and from the Metro Nature in Neighborhoods Restoration Program (Metro) will allow us to supplement those efforts with 40-50 days of EnviroCorps field teams in the coming year. (EnviroCorps teams, administered by the Northwest Service Academy, are field teams of 8-10 people who work exclusively on environmental restoration and education programs for 6-12 months). A grant form Toyota and National Audubon will also allow us to organize six large scale restoration projects over the coming year.

The grants form BES and Metro are also allowing us to explore innovative ways to manage storm-water from our facilities that will benefit wildlife habitat and improve water quality. The next time you come to the Nature Store be sure to take a look at our new rain barrels. We will be using the water to keep our native plants for sale from getting too thirsty. Soon, we will be working on a flow through planter, a kind of constructed mini-wetland, to handle water from other downspouts.

It is our hope that this work will do more than simply improve the habitat value of our sanctuaries. We are also hoping to serve as a demonstration site where visitors can learn more about what they can do to restore and enhance habitat in their own back yards. It is not enough to have beautiful natural areas to enjoy wildlife. Our wildlife populations need continuous corridors of greenspace and habitat to ensure a healthy and robust population.

To that end we have begun to offer a Backyard Habitat Enhancement Workshop to promote and facilitate the enhancement of wildlife habitat in each and every yard. I conducted the first of these workshops to a group of approximately 25 people in the Sabin Neighborhood on May 31. We had a great discussion on habitat restoration in a variety of contexts, from wild-lands to densely developed urban areas. We then focused on restoration techniques for urban and residential properties, created our own nature-scaping plan for a residential lot, and did a planting demonstration with native plants.

If you are interested in organizing a restoration workshop in your neighborhood, please contact me at: tcostello@audubonportland.org. There is also a wealth of information available on the web, if you are interested in learning more about what you can do in your own yard to enhance habitat and improve water quality:

To learn more about neighborhood restoration techniques:
http://www.audubon.org/bird/at_home/neighborhood/index.html

To learn more about natural landscaping for wildlife:
http://www.plantnative.org/how_benefits.htm

To learn more about sustainable storm-water management techniques:
http://www.portlandonline.com/bes/index.cfm?c=43110