Assignment: Staff portrait, Bird Alliance of Oregon
Setting: 12.5 acre site of future Bird Alliance Wildlife Care Facility in NE Portland
Highlights: The Bird Alliance of Oregon, formerly the Portland Audubon Society, is an icon in the green legacy of Oregon. Its conservation programs span the entire state, but its main focus- on resolving human/animal conflict- zeros in on the rescue of injured wildlife. Nowhere is this conflict more dramatic than inside urban boundaries, where the idiom deer caught in headlights must be understood literally.
This November, Bird Alliance focused more tightly on the conflict by bringing its services, programs and philosophy literally into the heart of Portland’s urban environment.
In bidding on the site of an abandoned quarry in Northeast Portland, Bird Alliance committed itself to a new wildlife care facility deep inside the urban boundary, where many argue it is most needed. With 12.5 acres, the site was big enough to hold a new, larger care facility, and a lot more. The new facility had the potential to double the treatment and release of injured wildlife, compared to Alliance’s current Cornell Road facility near Forest Park. The Cornell Road location, the organization’s headquarters since the 1930’s, could no longer keep up with the growing demand. It was too small, hard to access with public transportation, and technologically outdated.
The new location, on 82nd Avenue in Portland’s East Side, promised better public access and with it, a larger volunteer base. Nearby McDaniel’s High School would offer students direct access to the Bird Alliance’s educational opportunities. The acreage itself, a brownfield-designated site, offered the possibility of a future habitat restored with native trees and plants, public trails through a green space, and a solar farm big enough to power the care center itself, as well as low income housing planned for the neighborhood.
This past September, with a bid on the property still pending, Bird Alliance organized an all-hands staff meeting at a retreat just a block away from the new site. Stuart Wells, Director of the Alliance, posed with nearly fifty staff members: volunteer coordinators, biologists, wildlife caregivers, veterinarians, development officers, educators, community outreach specialists, naturalists and accountants. Many were touring the site for the first time.
And many will one day be working there. Just two months after the photograph was taken, Stuart Wells signed the deed to the new site, opening up a new urban horizon for Bird Alliance of Oregon.
Get involved in Bird Alliance of Oregon: https://birdallianceoregon.org/
