How do you choose the plants that you have put in?

The whole Burke Gilman Trail has been broken into segments by Seattle Parks with descriptors of the current status of vegetation. It also has a “plant palate” for each section designating what plants can be put in. FBG-SP follows the palate as described by Parks. You can see a map with sections and plant palates by going to Seattle Park’s web page and searching for the Burke Gilman Trail.

Removing blackberries is hard work, why don’t you use goats, a weed whacker
or maybe a D-10 caterpillar bulldozer?

Seattle Parks, whom we work under, does not allow us to use power tools or poison to remove invasive plants. So basically removal has to be done by hand.
Goats will work, but since they don’t eat the root bulb of the blackberry, you need to keep the goats on the property for several years until the bulb or root is starved out. This would be very expensive and since the goats eat everything, we would not be able to plant the area for years.
On the other hand, it is very satisfying for us volunteers to see sections cleared and we’ve done it!

I’ve picked blackberries down on the trail for years to make jam for my
family, why are you taking them all out? Can’t you leave some?

Himalayan Blackberries, as the name implies, did not exist in the North America until recently. Neither does English Ivy. Both plants are listed as a noxious plants by the state of Washington. They are not unlike Kudzu in the South. They rapidly take over any disturbed areas, “swamp out” native plants and with ivy will kill trees in various ways. Both plants spread very easily and leaving any will allow rapid spreading into cleared area.
As for eating berries from along the trail, we were concerned about herbicides that the railroads sprayed along the tracks before it became a bike trail in 1973. We were informed by a person from one of the local toxicology labs that given the time span the herbicides should be mostly gone. A bigger concern might be that the early trains using the tracks were coal burning engines. Burning coal releases heavy metals such as Cadmium, Lead, Thallium and Mercury. These metals bio-accumulate over time and can cause diseases from kidney disease to retardation. Thallium was once used as rat poison. It would be safer for your family to find your blackberries in a different area.

This summer we suddenly had rats all over my neighborhood even during the day,
is taking out the blackberries and ivy along the Burke Gilman the cause?

Well, yes and no! Removing blackberries and ivy does remove rat habitat and they then go and find new places to live. Along, the Burke Gilman we have seen signs of rats especially in the ivy, so we are a small part of the problem.
At the same time we were clearing the NE 60th St street end, crews started leveling the fields over at Magnuson Park to put in the new ball fields. This up-rooted large rat populations and they had no place to go except into the neighborhood. We have since found out that the same thing happened when they put in the Ronald McDonald House.

I want to help this project, but I’ve seen you working taking out the blackberries
and it is way too difficult for me to do. What can I do?

There are many ways to help along this section of the Burke Gilman. The simplest is to make a donation.

But even more important you could just be a good neighbor. Take a plastic bag along when you walk the trail and pick-up cans and bottles and report graffiti.

If you’d like to go abit further, become a Green Seattle Forest Steward. It might mean walking through different areas of of the site and removing a few blackberries or ivy that is trying to re-establish itself perhapsonce a month. Or notifying other stewards if and area needs a major maintenance clean up by a volunteer party.
We are also doing monthly bird counts along this section of the trail. If you are any level of a birder, you could help. Many eyes see more.
We’d love to have you! Contact us!

We’ve noticed bird houses and some tall pole like structures on the trail, what
are they?

If you’ve noticed our older planted areas are starting to fill in and grow. Over time they will provide very good habitat for many different birds. The blackberries and Ivy are only used by a few birds.
We’ve are putting up bird houses to provide living space for cavity nesters, the tall pole structures are called Rocket Bat Boxes and “might” provide housing for bats during the summer. Native plants provide good living space for many of our native animals and bird and that is one of the reasons we are doing the project – to provide habitat, especially for our declining bird population.

We’ve seen people or vagrants living down on the Bike trail, do you know anything about this?

We have found many places where people have “camped” along the trail and at the street end sites. There is usually a nest where they sleep surrounded by beer cans, stuff that may have been stolen out of the neighborhood and other garbage. We clean them up when we find them. We have noticed that they don’t seem to reappear in the areas that we have cleaned up, for whatever that is worth. Probably it is the clearing and the implied increased activity in the area that deters them.

When you were clearing out the street end at NE 60th, we saw lots of plastic bags
in and the blackberries. Have they just blown there?

No, unfortunately, one of the neighbors in the area appropriately picked up their
Dog’ Doo and rather than taken it home and disposing of it, they piched it into the
Blackberries and left it. We got to clean it up. The bigger problem with this is that animal poop bagged and thrown into the blackberries or just left eventually gets picked up with rain run off and into the storm sewers and eventually untreated into Puget Sound. The poop is full of E-coli, a bacteria that is now often infecting our shellfish beds and polluting our waterways. It is hard to believe that little things like this cause problems with Puget Sound, but most of the industries that polute the Sound are regulated. It is now us who are the problem by using chemical fertilizers, herbicides, dumping oil into storm drains and, yes, leaving our dog’s poop that is contributing to the problems. It is really down to US to clean up Puget Sound.

What is a Wildlife Tree?

A wildlife tree is a dead or dying tree that furnishes homes, food and maybe a perch for our native birds and wildlife. We used to call them snags, but wildlife tree fits the picture much better. Have you seen any of ours?