Service begins

The end of this week has been unusually warm and sunny in Washington, so my fellow Sea Mar patient navigator and I joined the Clark County Parks and Recreation department for some good ol' environmental clean-up and community service. Early on Saturday morning we drove 20 minutes North of Vancouver to La Center Bottoms Stewardship site that protects a wetlands area full of interesting migratory birds. This effort was in conjunction with the SOLV's Beach and Riverside Clean-up initiative. SOLV is a local non-profit agency that tries to encourage local individuals, groups and businesses to go out and volunteer their time to work on restoring natural habitats and provide environmental education. It's been around since 1969 and does some pretty neat work all over Oregon and Southern Washington parks and rivers. In other words, it's everything you ever thought that living in Oregon is like.


Volunteers of all ages came out to help out with the project.

What we did on Saturday was removing plastic tree protectors that were put up a while ago around tree saplings. Some of these trees grew, and some didn't, but the many plastic tree protects were put up in order to deter beavers, deer and other animals from eating or otherwise destroying the young trees. From what I understood, when the wetlands flood due to the rain Washington gets over the winter months these plastic tree protects can potentially come out of the ground, off the trees and float out into the waterways. These fairly large pieces of plastic and debris can then harm wildlife by trapping unsuspecting birds and animals, or when they try and eat it.

So, for 2-3 hours we were out there in dewy wetlands, getting soaked all the way to our bones (I was really glad that it was actually really sunny wand warm yesterday!), removing the plastic covers as was necessary. We were handed plastic bags, knives, shovels, gloves, and told - "Go out, and find them!". For the first 30 minutes or so I had no idea what I was even looking for, and how to find these tubes. The leaders said "just listen for a crunch", but wandering in knee high "dry" (as dry as it can be in the wetlands) grass meant that everything was crunchy! So, it was an adventure for sure. In the end, I figured it out, and even got some sort of a system, because they were set a pretty regular distance apart and in a well-organized pattern.


This is what we were looking for. Can you spot the tube?



Afterward Elisa helped the other program coordinator cook up some delicious hot dogs. So we even got a free lunch!

It was a pretty cool event, and I am very glad that we got to do it. The weather was great, the work was interesting, and as fun as manual labor can be. We are on our way to building a better relationship with the AmeriCorps members that work with the Clark County Parks and Recreation, and perhaps we will do more events with them, or with SOLV in the future.