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Beggars-Tick Wildlife Refuge

SE 111th at Springwater Corridor Trail

This small park features a wide variety of habitats including open water, shrub/scrub marsh, cattail/smartweed marsh, and forested wetland. The refuge also serves as a wintering spot for waterfowl. Alternate entrance at SE 111th just north of SE Foster.

Comments

What you now call Beggers Tick Wildlife Refuge, became my backyard in 1947 and was a place of wonder to my friends and I. During my growing years the marsh was pristine and was where we played, observed frogs, Killdeer and clouds of red wing blackbirds flitting from cattail to cattail. During the 1960's and through the 1970's, this sacred place was visited countless times in the dark of night by morons who dumped soiled mattresses, wrecked cars and any other garbage they were too lazy to deal with. Then came the shady contractors dumping tons of sheet rock and other things and then the great mystery dumper who put barrel after barrel of chemicals into the ground all along the shoreline facing 111th. As youngsters, we would throw lit matches on the ground and watch the blue, red and green flames that seeped from barrels and saturated the surface soil. On top of that, zoning evidently allowed light industry to build up on both sides of 111th practically from one end to the other between Foster and Harold st.
I doubt whether any serious investigation has ever been done regarding these toxins and guess what...they're still there in the ground - still rusting and leaking into the surrounding wetland. Has anyone wondered why there are no cattails? no frogs? no Killdeer?, no Red wings? no children. Sad but for the efforts of those who have helped to nurse the marsh back from a sure death.

randy mitchell 06/23/09 at 7:45 p.m.

I'm a wetland biologist from Oregon State University and I've visited Beggar's Tick marsh several times in the past 10 years, but would like to know more about it. I was there today surveying the vegetation and found thousands of Pacific treefrogs, killdeer, spotted sandpiper, a brood of mallards, and over a dozen other bird species. However, the vegetation diversity is much less than what I would expect from a wetland that size and type. I'm having some soil samples analyzed.

Paul Adamus 07/01/09 at 2:13 a.m.

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