photo credit: Janet Kessler

Recently, we attended a meeting where we were given a beautiful pamphlet regarding the Feathered Friends of Glen Canyon Park. It pictured 45 species of birds that have been sighted in the park (including flyovers). And it said:

“Willows that line the creek host nesting chickadees, warblers, woodpeckers and sparrows; they also offer food and shelter for other animals. Native trees like hillside oaks support many species passing through in spring and fall. Non-native eucalyptus trees have hosted nesting Great Horned Owls and Red-tailed Hawks for may years, while migrant tanagers, orioles, and warblers sing from their highest reaches every spring.”

It was doubly ironic, then, that habitat destruction seems to be the plan for Glen Canyon Park. Only a few days earlier,  The SNRAMP’s contractors were using chainsaws and work-crews to hack through the habitat that has been so useful to birds and coyotes and other creatures that live in Glen Canyon Park.

Said an observer who sent us the pictures below:

“Yesterday volunteers were “building and expanding a butterfly habitat” — more of the willows are down. They told me: “there are other willows the coyotes can use.” What they don’t seem to understand is that the coyotes and raccoons and birds need not just some willows, but entire thickets where they can hide.”

“… NAP people are in the thicket in the very back part of the park which no one uses — it has been a dense and impenetrable thicket for decades. Six of them with big gas-run chain saws are sawing through that growth “creating a buffer so that they can take out the ‘invasive’ ivy so that “native plants can grow.” Again, this is our wildlife habitat. There goes another section of our wilderness.”

The plan seems to be to destroy habitat that wildlife is already using, in an attempt to create a different habitat for wildlife that isn’t there.

In this case, the NAP had contracted Shelterbelt Builders (which also does a lot of the pesticide application for SF Rec and Park) to chainsaw out the habitat.

Our tax dollars at work.