Have you ever been to Pigeon Point Park? The trail we walked in the video clip above is just a small part of this hidden treasure next to Cooper Elementary School in northeast West Seattle. Tomorrow, it’s one of the places on the WS “east side” that will get special attention during Green Delridge Day — plenty of time for you to participate before settling in for the Seahawks game. The Pigeon Point Park event is the first-ever work party there for the Nature Consortium, whose restoration-project staffers Mark Tomkiewicz and Elizabeth McDonald gave us a mini-tour (much of which we videotaped):
The park has many clearings — it was a farm and pasture long ago, Pigeon Point Neighborhood Council leader Pete Spalding tells WSB. Here, Mark from the Nature Consortium shows us just one reason the cleanup will help, and what’s there for the environmental-restoration work to build on:
To help with tomorrow’s work party, you don’t have to be super-strong, or even experienced in restoration work. If you’re not up to helping them remove invasive plants, maybe you can help pass out coffee and cookies. If you are – you might wonder what’s done to keep invasives from returning:
The Nature Consortium, which is headquartered at Youngstown Arts Center, has a special focus on the West Duwamish Greenbelt, of which Pigeon Point Park is a part. Though the greenbelt has many human-determined divisions, they look at it as one great stretch of greenery – and at Pigeon Point, they point out, there are areas that could be managed as wetlands:
And once they’ve taken care of a few areas not far from the park’s entrance, they hope to move further in – to areas like this one, where trees are their priority but meadows matter too – listen closely to hear the birds that sang nonstop during our visit:
To join in the Nature Consortium’s Pigeon Point Park work party tomorrow, just show up at the park’s entrance on the south end of the Cooper Elementary parking lot – look for the yellow gate. Here’s a map. Work will be under way from 10 am-2 pm. If you can’t make it tomorrow, they plan one work party a month at Pigeon Point; the Nature Consortium has a variety of other programs too, including some involving students at local schools (such as The Earth Project at Cooper, right next to the park); you can read more about the group on its website.
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