Native pollinators need more than native flowers, they need uninterrupted corridors and appropriate housing. Each native pollinator has a unique way of nesting, which can take place deep in a grass tuft or inside a particular hollow stem of a native plant. This is what drives the passion of Cathy Lucero, along with a group of Master Gardeners engaged in citizen science and volunteers connected through the Clallam Conservation District. They are working to create pollinator corridors and islands while also developing teams dedicated to supporting these areas for our native flora and fauna as they are first getting established.
Over the past four years, a stretch of Old Olympic has seen a transformation from being a noxious weed congested mess to a native plant restoration corridor. The list of contributors is long, and includes Cathy Lucero, the County’s noxious weed control coordinator and her team, Joe Reynolds and Todd Coward, plus Dave Allen, a nursery owner who specializes in Clallam’s native plants and supplies the diverse, native, locally sourced plant materials. Volunteers from Master Gardeners including Brick Ayola, Bruce Pape, Brenda Lasorsa, John Viada, Bev Hetrick, Peggy Goette, and Nancy Kohn, plus several others also donate their time to the project.
The corridor next to the Olympic Discovery Trail hosts thousands of native plants, with a focus on those that flower, such as: Nootka rose, snowberry, silky phacelia, strawberry, kinnikinnick, lupine, ocean spray, red flowering currant, Oregon grape, mock orange, ninebark, thimbleberry, asters, goldenrod, Oregon sunshine and many others. The vision is for low maintenance plants to fill out roadsides, reducing the need for mowing, while supporting native pollinator forage and habitat which once established, will not need supplemental irrigation.
Cathy shared that the pollinators often stay within a corridor when they have everything they need to thrive, including native plants that flower throughout their short lifetime. There is less risk of pollinators veering into traffic than one might think when they are foraging in a well-stocked road corridor. This smart project aims to reduce roadside maintenance, while preserving native plants and increasing biodiversity of pollinators. It’s a tremendous win economically and ecologically.
This mile long stretch used to be covered in thistle, an intense barrier for native pollinators. Cathy’s vision brought this project to light but seeing it realized has been dependent on an established relationship between the Clallam County Noxious Weed Board, Clallam County Master Gardeners and the County Road Department. That relationship began back in the spring of 2012, when staff from the Noxious Weed Program and Road Department, along with faculty from the Washington State University (WSU) Extension, established a joint steering committee to plan a sustainable management strategy to minimize the impacts of wild carrot on commercial carrot seed production in the Dungeness Valley. The steering committee members included three WSU Extension Master Gardener volunteers, who were involved in the entirety of the process, and who represented a larger group of volunteers participating in the project.
That collaboration informed and implemented the sustainable management strategy for wild carrot removal. It included observations and data from the Master Gardeners that demonstrated, in the case of wild carrot, that mowing was not an effective strategy for management along roadsides, and it actually contributed to spreading the weed. The Noxious Weed Program and Road Department determined that an existing policy prohibiting the use of herbicide on county rights-of-way, paired with lack of budget for hiring the large staff that would be required for hand-pulling, severely limited the ability of the County to manage wild carrot and other noxious weeds on the roadside.
Those Master Gardener volunteers had taken on the role of ‘Citizen Scientists’ to collect data, read the published article here . This was a tremendous step towards the County developing an effective and sustainable roadside noxious weed management program and creating the pollinator corridors that have been planted over the past several years, and identifying additional sites for the future. It was essential to manage noxious weeds using efficient and effective techniques to create the space to plant natives. It was also imperative to have multiple agencies and organizations working together to make these efforts doable.
The overpass at Deer Park is another major area included in the pollinator corridor project. The original construction was completed with erosion control matting that made vegetation establishment very difficult. Cathy Lucero saw the opportunity and along with the Master Gardeners and any volunteers willing to help, they are replanting the area with thousands of native plants in swaths. This will be a multi-year project, which is currently in year four. They continue to add diversity to this site as they monitor survival. This year, the native prickly pear cactus was added to the planting plan after other less drought tolerant plants failed to survive in the extraordinarily dry site.
While at the Agnew site, I met volunteer Laura Bullen who had heard about the volunteer opportunity through Clallam Conservation District (CCD). She was happy to contribute to the community in an outdoor setting; she had recently done tree planting with her young sons at the Elwha River, which she had also learned about through CCD. If you are interested in supporting projects such as these, contact the Weed Board, there is more to do at these projects, or you might look into the WSU Master Gardener Program and/or getting on the Clallam Conservation District’s Volunteer Opportunity Newsletter.
A sign which was made possible by the generous grant from the Olympic Peninsula Chapter of the Washington Native Plant Society was just inaugurated by the team, it is easily found along the Olympic Discovery Trail in Agnew, near Lewis Road. Simple and elegant, it draws the casual walker to stop and smell the flowers, view Mount Baker, and draw hope that our native pollinator’s will find a happy home where once there was none.