Thank you for this email, Bud. That longer perspective is too often missing from the conversations about the impact of development decisions on nature. It sure makes me miss what I never actually had the possibility of experiencing myself...

Rob



--
Rob Huff ---------- Tacoma, WA
Author of Washington Disasters (Globe Pequot, 2006), Birding Washington (Falcon Publishing, 2004) and Insider's Guide to the Olympic Peninsula (Globe Pequot, 2001)
www.whiterabbits.com
On Mar 11, 2019, 12:56 PM -0700, Bud Anderson <falconresearch at gmail.com>, wrote:

> I began my hawkwatching career in the Kent Valley in the mid-sixties and lived on Frager Road for several years.

>

> Back then, it was all farmland that often flooded, that is until they turned the Green River into a drainage canal.

>

> In those days it was hawk heaven, you could find goshawks just south of Renton and gyrs around Kent with fair regularity, along with everything else. I still vividly remember seeing my first Black Merlin not far from the Smith Brothers dairy.

>

> Starting with the building of the Southcenter "supermall" and followed by the invention of rapidly constructed, tilt up concrete warehouses, an abundance of cheap farmland and eventually the huge Boeing facility, the valley was essentially destroyed for both wildlife and agriculture over the next two decades and I was happy to eventually move north to the Skagit.

>

> Ironically, I learned of a study written back in the 1930s, although I have never seen it, that recommended that the Kent Valley be preserved as farmland to provide Seattle with fresh produce and dairy to feed the burgeoning population of King County.

>

> Prophetic.

>

> But industry won that battle.

>

> The last time I returned there a year or so ago, I actually got lost and disoriented among the multitude of bland, rectilinear industrial concrete warehouses.

>

> I seldom hear about this massive loss of precious, irreplaceable habitat any more.

>

> But some of us still remember it as it was, a local treasure to be mourned.

>

>

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