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PHILLY LOVE NOTES: John Heinz Wildlife Refuge
A love note to nature in the city.
PHILLY LOVE NOTES: John Heinz Wildlife Refuge
LOVE NOTE RECIPIENT: John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum
I AM: Christian Hunold, a full-time college professor and part-time wildlife photographer.
MY LOVE NOTE:
I was vaguely wondering what to do with myself when I eased out of competitive cycling in my early 40s. Then one day my partner, Jen, started going on walks in the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, that rather unremarkable stretch of woods and water alongside I-95 in Southwest Philadelphia, across from the airport. She brought back reports of wildlife large and small inhabiting a sort of wondrous oasis sandwiched between the highway and Darby Creek.
I’d never given the place much thought. I mean, how much “wildlife” could you hope to see in such a poorly situated nature preserve, where rush-hour traffic and roaring jets would seem to have the upper hand over nature’s more subtle sounds? Which animals in their right mind would want to live there, of all places?
Quite a lot, it turns out! I started tagging along on Jen’s walks and, at her urging, we soon bought some cameras. In no time at all we began to see these woods and wetlands with the eyes of the enthusiastic wildlife photographers that the refuge was teaching us to become. One of our first photo walks was spent under sunny skies in the company of several white-tailed does and their fawns in February 2009. We were charmed to no end and have been going back ever since.
We have photographed fox kits at their den, glimpsed something of the profoundly social lives of deer, and learned to name birds we had no idea existed, much less along the scrubby right-of-way of a buried pipeline. Mink raise their young on refuge grounds; river otters and beavers are regularly seen in Darby Creek and the refuge’s various lakes. Many Philadelphians know that the refuge is home to one of the city’s breeding pairs of bald eagles. The refuge is far from pristine, to be sure, but – thanks to the Clean Water Act and similar laws – it’s clean enough for top-of-the-food-chain predators to thrive there again.
Many older Philadelphians from the area recall Tinicum Marsh as a swamp where the bodies were buried, quite literally. An educational visitor center and ADA-compliant walkways are among the improvements effected by the Fish and Wildlife Service in the past 40 years. But the refuge always reminds you it’s a part of the city. Spring doesn’t just bring forth warblers, but also dudes taking nudie shots of “models” in the woods. Middle-aged birders from Mount Airy rub shoulders with Southwest Philly kids who ride their bikes around the refuge’s trails, raucously and without a care for middle-class ways of enjoying nature. Dog walkers pretend to leash their dogs when they see you coming down the path.
Clearly, the differences between a federal wildlife refuge and a neighborhood park often exist more on paper than on the ground. But we’re as happy here as in more remote wild places, perhaps even happier because we’ve learned how to be wildlife photographers here and because this improbable refuge has shown us that people and nonhuman nature can, under the right circumstances, coexist in an ever more urbanized world.
Have a favorite spot you'd like to write a love note to? Send it to the author at phillylovenotes@gmail.com or tweet her @phillylovenotes.
I agree completely with Christian Hunold's Love Note to the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge. I discovered it as well three years ago and every visit there is another great adventure in wildlife photography. What a marvelous gem to have right in the middle of Philadelphia.
Kitty Kono— Kitty Kono- I love this Love Note. I love John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge. I've seen deer swim across the creek, and gigantic turtles sunning themselves on the banks. I've never seen fox there. Makes me want to grab my camera and go now.— HughE
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