Rick:

Hello, and welcome to Northwest Philly Neighbors.

I'm Rick Mohr, and my guest is Keith Russell.

For most of his life, he's been fascinated by birds and lived here in Philly, which we learn is actually a rich city for wildlife, both in its wild places and in unexpected industrial places.

We'll hear how, on a lark, he got some friends together for a citywide bird census that's now continued for 33 years, and how their data convinced the water department to save and reopen a beautiful wild reservoir in a poor neighborhood.

And we'll hear how his passion for birding, along with, surprisingly enough, the financial crisis, allowed restoring a fantastic giant meadow at the edge of the city.

Keith has helped connect people with nature for decades all over the city, and you'll be drawn in like I was by his easy-going enthusiasm and deep knowledge.

So you've been interested in birds since you were a kid. Was there a person that helped you get interested and kind of paved your way? You mentioned Joe Cadbury.

Keith Russell:

You know, I really didn't have anyone that I can think of that was the person who initiated the interest.

It was there in like second grade and I don't know where it came from.

Joe Cadbury was a well-known birder.

He lived around the corner and my parents thought it would be helpful to find somebody that was interested in birds.

He was so nice.

He taught science at Germantown Friends School.

He mentored a lot of young kids that were interested in birds over the years.

It was quite a list.

I would call him up and ask him questions.

And some of the things that I think of right now that I used to ask him were really kind of kid things that I'm sure he sat there and had to have a lot of patience to deal with.

But, you know, I was, I don't know, eight years old or something.

But he took me out to places that, you know, he would go look at birds at in Delaware, in New Jersey, places that were exotic to me.

Rick:

It must have been exciting to go off on a trip with a grown up.

Keith Russell:

Oh, it was so exciting.

I couldn't wait to go.

Because these were places that had water and you were on the coast.

You know, it was very different from Philadelphia.

So that was a really key thing, I think, to have a mentor as a child if you're interested in something that isn't, you know, what a lot of people know about.

You want to connect with other people.

So that was great to connect with that community.

And he connected me to the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, which is our main bird club in Philadelphia.

He was a quiet person.

He did a lot of listening and was very nurturing.

And so I guess I think of things like that that he did to enable other people to be their best selves.

And that was something that was meaningful to me.

Rick:

Such a gift to listen.

Keith Russell:

It's not something everybody has the ability to do as well as, you know, someone like him.

He was influential in a lot of people's lives, you know, who were interested in birds.

And of course, hundreds or thousands of students that he taught.

And he was the science teacher for the entire lower school.

So it's a lot of kids over a period of probably 30 years.

Rick:

Yeah.

Well, so between then and now, you've learned tons about birds in urban Philly.

Why is Philadelphia an important place to study birds?

Keith Russell:

Well, Philly is the fifth largest city in the country now.

And it's also one of the greenest big cities.

It's an incredible place in terms of the amount of natural habitat that we have.

And neighborhoods like Mount Airy, although they're heavily populated, they're also heavily populated with green, with trees.

So we've got a huge amount of open space in the city, which just makes it a very amenable place for a lot of different types of wildlife.

You don't have to necessarily go travel way far outside of the city to find all kinds of wildlife.

When I grew up, most of the things that I learned about birds, I learned looking at birds in my backyard or walking to Carpenter's Woods or other places that were within walking distance of where we were living.

And that's not something that you can necessarily do in a lot of other cities.

I mean, New York has Central Park, but there are vast sections of Manhattan where there's really not much natural habitat or other boroughs in New York.

And I think the same is true for lots of places like Toronto and Los Angeles and Chicago and Miami.

They have some parks, but there's nothing like what we have.

What we have is a wilderness park.

You can literally find yourself in sections of the park and not know where you are.

Or, you know, it looks like you're in the middle of the Adirondacks or something like that.

I think that's one of the main reasons why I was able to get so interested in birds.

And I think also the location of the city in southeastern Pennsylvania, we are at a very good place in terms of the variety of species that occur here.

Some from the south, some from the north, and we're also fairly close to the coast.

And we can get species that are more often found in mountains.

And we have, you know, rivers, we have marshes, we have Piedmont, we have coastal plain.

It's a variety of different habitats.

So all of that variety of habitats gives you a variety of different bird species.

It's rather unique, the city of Philadelphia, in having so much to offer in terms of wildlife.

Rick:

So in 1987, you started the Midwinter Bird Count.

Could you say a little bit about what happens and why it's important?

Keith Russell:

Sure.

Every year, the National Audubon Society has conducted what are called Christmas Bird Counts.

And they've been doing this ever since 1900 or so.

And this is basically a way of monitoring bird populations in the winter.

And people go out once a year in a particular spot, and they have an area that they're going to monitor, and they divide that area up and have different people monitoring different parts of the area.

They count all the birds that they can find in each area, and then they add up all the numbers for the entire circle.

They have been done since the beginning of the 20th century, but we didn't have one that covered the city of Philadelphia.

We have some that cover some sections of the city, but I thought that it would be helpful to have a winter bird count in the city of Philadelphia that just covered places that are inside the city limits.

And one of the main reasons for this was the fact that a lot of people in the 1980s and before didn't think that Philadelphia was that great of a place for birds.

A lot of birders would go to New Jersey or outside of the city to look for birds.

Some of the reasons were they thought the city was unsafe, they just didn't know that there were birds in certain parts of the park, that they might enjoy looking at.

It just didn't have as much of a reputation.

There were certain places like John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge and Carpenter's Woods as part of Fairmount Park, and maybe one or two other places that were fairly popular, but they were vast areas of the city that were not visited very much for birds.

And I thought, gee, that doesn't seem right.

You know, I'm looking at birds in these places and finding lots of stuff.

So I thought...

Rick:

Yeah, like, hey!

Keith Russell:

Yeah.

So naïve me, I thought, well, maybe we could start a winter bird census that's like a Christmas bird count, but we don't include any areas that are outside of the city limits because then and now we still have Christmas bird counts that cover parts of the suburbs and parts of the city.

But when people look at the results, they probably thought, oh, it's mainly outside of the city, so those birds, those good birds weren't from the city.

So by just covering the city, there would be no question as to where those birds were coming from.

So we started doing this in early January, and I asked some friends who were wonderful, and we had about 17 people in 1987 that participated, and we divided up the city into various areas, and we didn't cover everything, but we covered a lot of nice areas.

Rick:

When you said naïve me, what did you mean by that?

Keith Russell:

I was just dreaming.

I didn't have any idea what this would involve or how it might grow or what it might turn into.

I had never done anything like this before, so I really didn't know what was involved.

I just had a dream.

And if it hadn't been for these wonderful people that were willing to come out and do the census, it would never have happened.

So it really is a testament to all the wonderful people that have been participating in the census.

Rick:

Also, who you were, that they would stand up to join you.

Keith Russell:

Well, I guess I have a certain type of personality that allowed me to invite people when they didn't turn around.

But I had a lot to learn, and there were a lot of mistakes that I made early on, and I look at the results and some of the things that I did back then, and I just want to cover my head.

But everybody has to learn.

And fortunately, I didn't do anything that was so bad that we never were able to recover from.

But anyway, it grew, and we are still doing it today, 33 years later.

So we now have like 90 participants a year, and we cover a much larger percentage of the city.

And one of the things that I'm really proud of is the fact that places like Roosevelt Park in South Philadelphia, which was a site of the United States Sesquicentennial Celebration, was famous for that.

But it wasn't being visited by people for birds.

And now it's one of the most popular places to bird in the city.

And it's like, that is fabulous.

I did that.

Well, the birders that participated really are the ones who did it.

But I really am proud that it had happened and that the census contributed so much to that.

And there are other places in the city that have become much better birded as well.

Some of them are not parks.

Some of them are just areas that are privately owned.

I think the most significant outcome from the census in terms of conservation has been the East Park Reservoir in North Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion.

That is now the site of the Discovery Center, which is run by Audubon, Pennsylvania and Outward Bound.

And the reason that happened is because of the birds that were there that we were counting during the census every year.

And because we were finding significant birds there, the Water Department decided to save that area and not basically wipe it off the map and turn it into something else.

They were going to basically take much of that reservoir in the 90s and get rid of the water, fill it in, and maybe turn it into ball fields or who knows what else could have happened with that area.

Rick:

So what happened there?

Did you get wind of this and go down and talk to somebody?

How did that all play out?

Keith Russell:

In 1996, we did find out that the Water Department had planned to take this reservoir or part of this reservoir.

Rick:

Which had been closed for how long?

Keith Russell:

It was probably in the 60s.

So the first time I went there was in the mid-80s because I had seen records from early in the 20th century when the reservoir was accessible to the public and people had gone there and reported various water birds.

And I thought, gee, this is right in the middle of the city.

It's got all this water.

I wonder if the birds are still there.

So I went and asked permission.

I was working at the Academy of Natural Sciences and they let me come in and look around.

And so in 1987, when we started the midwinter census, we included the reservoir in the census.

And we were covering it every year and getting, you know, really good numbers of birds that are hard to find anywhere else in the city because that's a unique habitat.

It's a really big body of water, not a little stream or even a river.

It's just a quiet, deep body of water.

And there were particular birds that like that particular habitat.

And so in 1996, we had about 10 years of data about the bird life there.

So our letter was drafted.

It was signed by me and two other people associated with the Academy of Natural Sciences.

And the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club.

We sent it to the water department.

They had already started making changes to the reservoir, draining out the water.

They were just going to get rid of the whole thing.

To our shock, they said they'd like to meet with us.

And after they did, they said they would stop draining the reservoir and let it stay the way it was because of the value it had to birds.

They had no idea.

So the data from the census was critical in providing them with that information.

And then in the early 2000s, Audubon was in the business then of creating new centers, Audubon centers.

And they were particularly interested then in creating them in urban areas because they had traditionally not been in urban areas.

So the area around the reservoir was an area that Audubon had an interest in.

And because of the birds that had been discovered there, they settled finally on the reservoir as a place to build a center.

So by that time, I was actually working for Audubon, Pennsylvania.

Started in 2006.

And one of the first things I was asked to do was to go to Strawberry Mansion, which is where the reservoir is, and begin creating programming.

Even though we had no building to operate from, that would be in anticipation of our opening a center there because people needed to know who we were and what we were about.

And that's something that takes time.

So we started then.

It was two years later that we found out that the Outward Bound Organization was looking for a new home.

They had been operating from a small building in Fairmount Park, in East Park, in the Lemon Hill area.

And they really had outgrown that, and they needed to find a new place to headquarter.

And when we found that out, we had a meeting with them and said, we're trying to build a center in the same part of the park that you're currently headquartered in.

Would you be interested in doing this collaboratively?

And they were excited, and we from then started working together.

And so that was 2008, and then in the fall of last year, 2018, 10 years later, we actually finished the project.

So these things take time.

It's amazing.

Sometimes you have these visions, but the work that needs to be put to achieve these things can really be slow and painstaking.

And there were times during this period where lots of people were doubtful that the project would ever get done.

But a lot of people did a lot of really heavy lifting and made this happen.

And a lot of people gave a lot of money.

I think the vision of this was something that excited a lot of people.

And now it's a reality.

So it's great to see it from the beginning to this, you know, where we are right now.

Yeah.

Rick:

Well, and it has these different communities that it serves.

There's the Audubon and the Outward Bound and the Strawberry Mansion.

How's that balancing act going, do you think?

Keith Russell:

I think it's going well.

We would like to fine tune it.

And that takes time.

We only have been open for almost a year.

So this is the first time that Audubon has had a center in Philadelphia.

As we have people come into the building, we learn more about how people interact with the center.

And it takes some of that to really get your programming right.

So we're learning a lot and it's only been a year.

But we've got good visitorship.

I think all of us would like to be able to create more programming for the neighborhood of Strawberry Mansion and Brewerytown.

Rick:

When you first went there to do programming in the neighborhood, what kind of things did you do?

Keith Russell:

Well, when I first started, I was able to contact an organization called the East Park Revitalization Alliance, which still exists.

And they were fantastic.

So I was able to connect with, I think it was a fifth grade class at the Blaine Elementary School and start doing programming with them, taking kids out of the classroom and doing walks in the park, because it was all within walking distance of the school.

That would not have been possible if they hadn't already had a relationship established with that school and that class.

We actually did some field trips to Center City, went to the Academy of Natural Sciences and saw things behind the scenes, as well as walks in the park and scavenger hunts and, you know, how to use binoculars and other things, simple things to expose kids to birds and to nature, which were not currently part of what they were doing.

And then in 2008, we started a program with Fairmount Park called Discover Fairmount Park in Your Neighborhood.

And it was just a program for Strawberry Mansion residents.

One of the very first things we did was we organized a tour of some of the historic homes from the 1700s that are preserved in East Park that are right there that most residents from Strawberry Mansion have never gone into.

They seen them or passed by them.

They didn't visit them.

So we sort of wanted to get them into the park.

So there were people coming in to those houses that had never been in them before, which the people who run those houses were very glad to finally have that happen.

We had, of course, bird walks at the reservoir.

We had plant identification walks.

There was a holiday wreath making activity that happened every year.

Every year between November and Christmas.

I remember one day during Mother's Day, we had a Mother's Day promenade.

Mothers could come out and wear their fancy hats and so on.

That was at the reservoir.

So those are just some of the types of programs that we came up with that we thought would be interesting and also be able to take place in the park so that people would cross over and start getting more familiar with and comfortable with the park.

It wasn't solely focused on birds because we didn't think that was necessarily the way to go about doing this type of program.

After that, our staffing in Philadelphia started to increase.

We tried to do work with some of the other schools in Strawberry Mansion, but by that time public schools were changing and charter schools were increasing and some of the other schools like Strawberry Mansion High we were trying to work with were basically losing ground to charter schools and it just didn't happen.

They had a lot of things on their mind and working with us didn't necessarily come to the top of the pile.

So it was a difficult time once we got around 2010 or 2011 to add more schools because a lot of the public schools that were left were really desperately trying to just stay alive, just stay alive.

But we did continue working pretty much up until we opened with Blaine School.

So that's sort of a summary of the type of work that we did in Strawberry Imagine.

There were other things, but those are some of the highlights.

Rick:

And those relationships that you built with people and organizations, I'm sure persist with the Discovery Center.

Keith Russell:

It's all about relationships.

You can't have a project like this unless you build those and they have to be built over a period of time.

People have to know you, they have to see you, they have to trust you.

And all the work that we put in, working with people, not coming in and saying this is what we're planning to do, but figuring it out in a way that made sense to the people that we were going to be ultimately building the Center for.

A lot of it is for the Strawberry Mansion residents, although it's there for everybody to use, but we have a special interest in making it particularly valuable to people who live within walking distance of the Center.

So that's always been one of the important goals of building this Center, is to make it meaningful to the residents of Strawberry Mansion.

Rick:

A couple steps back, we're talking about the Midwinter Bird Count.

Could you tell a story or two of a day of the Count that kind of gives a flavor of what it's like to be out there or shows why you love it?

Keith Russell:

Gee, it's been so many years.

We've had several, I don't know, five or six times when people have come out to do stories about the census, and some of the places that we take them are sort of out of the way and unusual.

Rick:

Like, for example?

Keith Russell:

Well, I know one place we've taken people several times is the Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant, which is one of our sewage treatment plants that treats wastewater from our homes and cleans it up before it's discharged back into the environment.

And it's a place that most people don't even know about, but it has habitat which is quite attractive to birds in the winter.

Rick:

So you're walking down there.

What do we see when we're walking down?

Keith Russell:

Well, it's surrounded by industry, and it's surrounded by ports with all these containers coming off of ships, and it's just really scrappy looking.

Rick:

On the Delaware?

Keith Russell:

On the Delaware River.

Yeah, it's right along the Delaware River.

And yet set back a little bit from there is this plant, and it's got some natural habitat, it's got a little pond, and then there's workings of the plant.

It's just a fascinating place because here you are in the middle of this sort of really industrialized part of the city, and you've got these birds that are, some of them pretty rare.

Like, for example?

Well, for example, we had a reporter with us in January this year, and we were at the plant, and we had, I know there were six species of warblers that we found at the plant.

It's unheard of to find five species of warblers at one location in this part of the country in the winter.

And here you are at this sort of industrialized area in this plant, and there's all these warblers popping up, and it's like, it's just crazy.

So it's kind of interesting to be there in a place that is so urban and see how birds are using some of these sites.

When we started off that morning, we were actually looking at some ducks on the river right across the street from the plant, and then all of a sudden someone calls ravens.

And we turn around and we hear ravens.

There's two ravens on a building that's right next to the parking lot that we're in.

And that's a bird that has been moving into the Piedmont and the coastal plain of Pennsylvania.

It used to be just a bird in the mountainous regions of Pennsylvania.

And there were ravens right there.

And that's another rare bird right there in this scrappy industrial place.

And we saw some interesting birds on the river, you know, water birds.

And then we go across the street and we're getting all these warblers.

And it's just like bird, bird heaven.

And here, all in this scrappy area.

Again, people would never have visited these areas in the past to look for birds.

But with the census happening every year, we're finding these birds.

And now that plant is a popular place for people to go to look for birds.

So I guess I'm always tickled when people come to do stories about the census.

And you can sort of highlight the fact that city areas that may not look pristine or have a whole lot of natural habitat, but they have certain characteristics that attract birds because birds learn to use urban habitats.

And the ravens are learning to use cities.

They're in the east, at least.

They use them in the west, and now they're learning to use cities in the east.

So to me, that's particularly fun.

Of course, going into places like Fairmount Park, you expect to see some birds there, but you don't always expect to see them in these really heavy industrialized portions of the city.

Rick:

So 33 years of collecting that data, what are some of the changes that you've seen?

Keith Russell:

Well, that's a long time, and there are a lot of changes that have occurred, and there are birds that did not exist in the city of Philadelphia in 1987 or the early 1990s that are now widespread, like the black vulture.

It's a southern bird that really wasn't known in Pennsylvania until maybe the late 80s, and its range very quickly moved north, and it became quite well established all throughout southeastern Pennsylvania by the early 2000s.

So it started to appear on the census in the 90s, and after a few years it was being seen every year, and the numbers just kept going up, up, up.

So we can make a nice graph over 33 years that shows this really steep rise.

You could also say a similar thing about the bald eagle.

The bald eagle, of course, it is our national bird.

Its numbers were vastly reduced throughout a lot of the latter part of the 20th century because of DDT and the effect that it had on its ability to lay viable eggs.

Of course, DDT affected the osprey, brown pelicans, other birds.

But the bald eagle, since DDT was banned in the 70s, and bald eagles had been better protected from shootings, etc., this bird has increased slowly.

And now we have several pairs that actually breed in the city.

And we're getting on the census 15-plus birds every year when in the 1980s and early 90s we got zero.

They were not being seen.

So that's another really huge turnaround.

It's very encouraging.

Peregrine falcon is a bird that has had a similar story.

It was affected by DDT.

And it has also rebounded.

And we're getting, you know, numbers of peregrines on the census each year as well.

So those are increases.

But we've also seen other species disappear.

The ring-necked pheasant was not a native bird to North America.

But it was a common bird in Philadelphia, I believe.

It was either the first census in 1987 or one of the early censuses.

We had 66 pheasants recorded in the city.

I mean, that was when we were only covering, you know, maybe 25% of the area that we're covering now.

I mean, we covered a lot of area, but we now have so many more people that we can cover the city much more thoroughly.

I suspect if we had had 90 people in 1987, we would have had maybe 150 pheasants.

It was such a common bird.

And that bird appeared to have become extinct in Philadelphia by the early 2000s.

So it's gone.

It's basically gone from most of southeastern Pennsylvania.

Although it's not a native species, it's kind of sad that this sort of nice game bird has disappeared.

And reasons for that, I'm not absolutely sure.

It may be a lot to do with predation from foxes and coyotes, which have increased during that time.

It definitely has also suffered from loss of habitat.

There's lots of stories of birds that have changed.

One of the more interesting things that's going on, I think, can be attributed to disease, specifically West Nile virus, which appeared on the scene in the end of the 1990s.

And people, of course, were very concerned about contracting West Nile virus, especially people who may be immunocompromised.

But it was a big deal then.

It's not really talked about now, but it continues to be a significant disease affecting birds.

So early in the 2000s, we saw real steep declines in the number of great horned owls.

Owls and crows are two groups of birds that are known to be particularly affected by this.

We also saw steep declines in a number of another raptor, the American kestrel.

And I think all of these happened then because of West Nile virus.

In fact, in 2000, it was three or four, our wintering crow population declined by maybe 95%.

It was a really dramatic decline.

And I think that was West Nile virus.

We recorded X number of American crows and fish crows during the census.

And then there was a big blizzard around Presidents Day that year.

And after that, the crows were just gone.

And we have not recorded anything close to those numbers since.

But the crow population for both species has slowly been going back up.

So birds that are resistant or somehow not as affected by this disease are reproducing and their populations are coming up.

So crows are now much more numerous than they were, but we're not getting thousands of crows during the winter.

If you didn't have 33 years of data, some of these things wouldn't be quite so clear.

But I think that that story and the story with the kestrel and the great horn owl and some other species is probably due to West Nile Virus.

So those are just some highlights of some things that have happened.

Rick:

Well, so you played a big role in the restoration of Houston Meadow in the Wissahickon.

I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit.

Can you describe what that was like when you first saw it?

Keith Russell:

Well, when I was growing up, one of the neighbors on our block who happened to also be interested in birds took their kids and some kids from our family to Houston Meadow to fly kites.

I had never heard of it before, didn't know anything about it.

And it was just this big open space with all this grass, no trees.

And it was sort of kite flying heaven.

I don't remember the next time I went there, but it was probably sometime in the early 70s.

And I would go there on the bus or the trolley, the 23 trolley then, and just walk to Houston Meadow.

And it was a long walk to get there.

It wasn't a place that was well used by a lot of people because it was so isolated and hard to get to.

So I started going there, especially in the summer, because there were so many interesting birds there.

Birds like chestnut-sided warblers and yellow-breasted chats.

There were pheasants, broadwing hawks, all breeding there.

And these are birds that are not easy to find during the breeding season.

It just had an enormous variety of interesting breeding birds.

Loads of field sparrows and eastern towhees.

It's this beautiful, beautiful place.

Rick:

So how does a meadow persist in the middle of the woods?

And why did it change?

Keith Russell:

Well, it used to be extensive, a lot more meadow than when I first saw it in, I guess, the 60s.

You know, it was the meadow was receding back in the early 60s and the 50s and 40s.

Much of the area in Roxborough was farm country or former farm country.

There was far fewer trees and forested areas.

So when I started going in the 70s more regularly just to look for birds, I noticed in the summer that quite often the grass would have all been burned.

And all you saw was charcoal sort of stubs.

Rick:

Just from a lightning strike or something.

Keith Russell:

Oh, I never saw it actually burning.

So I didn't know if it had been started by X or Y.

But it would always grow back quickly.

And I assumed that the burning was maintaining it as a grassland.

But it was also very poor sandy soil.

It was probably very rich with organic material.

So that sort of mitigated against things growing other than grasses.

And then sometime during the 90s, I believe, all that area was privately owned.

I didn't realize it was owned by the Houston family.

And they sold that area or they transferred some of it to the park and the rest of it they sold and it got developed into houses.

So maybe 25% of the area, 30% of the area was actually developed into houses.

And at that point, the fire stopped.

And the area started to be overtaken by other types of plants and trees in particular.

And by 2007, the amount of open grassland had shrunk down to a very small amount.

So that's when I was...

Rick:

To believe that there was actually a meadow fire in that recently, that just happened.

Keith Russell:

It might have been kids setting fires.

It might have been lightning, but the fires were pretty regular.

I think that was what was maintaining, helping to maintain that.

But I think once those houses came in, the area very quickly got switched to a young forest.

And it was very little meadow habitat.

So I was walking around up there one day with Tom Whitmer, who is a naturalist with Fairmount Park.

And we were talking about management of that area.

And he said, oh, we're trying to keep the meadow that is existing as meadow, which was meritorious.

They were doing that.

And then I said, well, Tom, did you know that this used to be like 50 acres of nothing but grasslands?

And it was just like the Wizard of Oz.

When Dorothy goes out of the woods and you see the Emerald City in the distance, and there's this huge field of poppies or something or I don't know what it is.

And it's just nothing but low vegetation.

And the vista that you saw was just nothing but grass everywhere.

Rick:

And he hadn't known that.

Keith Russell:

Tom did not know that.

And I also told him about all the different huge variety of bird species that used to nest there, a lot of which have disappeared.

So again, Tom was being very forward thinking and said, well, gee, let's see how we could maybe manage this area differently.

He was trying to simply maintain what was there to keep some variety.

But then he saw the area differently and thought maybe we can reclaim what it used to be.

So we put together a plan to, it was a reclamation plan.

That was what it was entitled, but to basically restore that area as a grassland meadow, which would require removing trees.

And we had no money, but we did get a little bit of money from the U.S. Forest and Wildlife Service, to do some signage and some initial work.

And then in 2008, the economy crashed and the government had all the stimulus money that they wanted to give out for shovel-ready projects.

And we had this plan all written up and the park also had some other projects that they wanted to do.

So they got quite a lot of money from the U.S. Forest Service because they had these shovel-ready projects.

And the cost of the Houston Meadow project was about a half a million dollars, all funded at that point.

Rick:

So the Meadow was saved by the recession.

Keith Russell:

That's a conclusion we can make.

That's very true.

And at that point, contractors were desperate for work.

So what they were asking to do projects was maybe half of what they would ask to do them today.

Their prices were much lower.

Today, the economy is different and they can charge much higher prices than they could then.

There were problems with that project.

Some people were upset with the fact that we were actually removing thousands of trees.

They thought that was not what nature intended and that we were basically ruining the area.

But nature itself, through fire, through storms, through pests, changes and beavers, it's a constant revolving door.

One habitat is replaced by another and then it goes back.

What we wanted to do was to maintain a balance of habitats within the park system.

And we thought that that would be the best place to sort of expand this meadow habitat back to what it used to be.

So that was our goal.

And during the project, not only were there people who were not happy with the project, but there was vandalism.

There were major pieces of machinery that were set on fire and it was, they were very expensive.

And so the park had to hire 24-hour guards to keep that from happening.

I don't know if it was done intentionally because people didn't like the project or it was just some vandals who wanted something to do.

But we put up bird boxes to try to attract bluebirds and people smashed the bird boxes repeatedly and they had to be replaced several times.

So these were some of the issues that we ran into during this project.

But eventually it all got done and I think it's been a success.

It would have just been a forested area now completely.

Rick:

I go catch butterflies there every summer and it's so beautiful.

Keith Russell:

Yeah, it's such a different habitat.

You don't find that much, you know, meadow habitat in one place, really practically anywhere else in the city.

At least that looks like that.

I mean, it's hilly and it's very wilderness-like.

And you just got a feeling there that your soul feels that you don't tend to feel in a lot of places, at least locally.

So it's a wonderful place, and I'm glad that it's not all forested now.

Rick:

Thanks, Keith.

Keith Russell:

Well, again, you know, these projects, it's a vision.

And we all, we have different visions, but the park was able to really provide much of the support to make this happen.

You know, I work for Audubon, Pennsylvania.

Most of the work that we do has to be done collaboratively with other people.

So this was basically Parks and Recreation, Audubon, and we had some help from the US.

Well, obviously, the U.S. Forest Service provided the major funding, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided some funding as well.

Rick:

So thank you.

Keith Russell:

I know that there are certain characteristics that sort of make me me.

There are visions I have of certain things, maybe the census was one of them, Houston Meadow was one of them, but you have information and you share that information with other people, and you come up with ideas.

And it's interesting, sometimes those ideas wind up catching fire in ways you just didn't think.

And the Discovery Center too, we never really in the beginning, when we were thinking of saving the reservoir, were totally imagining everything that's going on there today.

So sometimes one step leads to another step, which leads to another step, and if you don't take that first step, you never get to the others.

Rick:

So is there another one you have in mind that you'd love to see happen?

Keith Russell:

Well, I'm trying to finish a book on the birds of Philadelphia.

Once I retire, that will be my main goal.

I've been working on it, but I can't finish it while I'm still doing a job.

Rick:

Yeah, I hear you.

Keith Russell:

I'm not the type of person who can sit and carve out an hour and get a whole lot of writing done.

I have to sort of put all my books out, and that's all I'm thinking about for, you know, weeks at a time, and I can really burrow into it and really get some traction.

And so I think that the book that is finished will be better than the book that would have been finished ten years ago or five years ago.

And I certainly learned some things that I didn't understand five years ago, that, you know, change is constant, and a lot of things that happen are not necessarily final.

There are some birds that have declined drastically, and then in the last five or six years, they started to come back.

And, you know, it's like you never thought that would happen.

So things go up and down.

I mean, we went through a whole period in the 19th century where a lot of Pennsylvania was deforested.

And based on that, you might have thought that's the end for a whole lot of birds.

Look at the state now.

It's full of trees.

You know, it's come full circle back in that respect.

I have hope that even though there are environmental disasters going on now, that there will still be enough birds left to hopefully rebound once these things maybe are abated in the future.

And that's not something that you get from...

You need a long perspective to gain that hope.

There are a lot of things out there like climate change and birds hitting windows and things that are pretty dire.

Again, I'm hopeful that there will be enough birds left to sort of survive.

Like the crows going through West Nile virus locally, slowly they're coming back.

So you see these things and it gives you a little bit of a positive spirit about stuff, even though there's a lot of bad things going on.

You have to have that at some point or else, you know, it's like...

You feel you're just losing ground.

Rick:

With everything.

Well, Keith, thank you so much for sharing all your insights.

Keith Russell:

Well, thank you.

I appreciate, you know, your asking me to come.

Rick:

There are lots of interesting articles featuring Keith Russell linked in the show notes and on our website nwphillypodcast.net.

If you like the show, please tell one friend about it this week.

And if they're new to podcasts, our website has an easy on-ramp describing how they can listen in three taps.

I'm Rick Mohr.

Thanks for listening.

See you next time for more stories from Northwest Philly neighbors.