I’d never given the place much thought. I mean, how much “wildlife” could you hope to see in such a poorly situated nature preserve, where rush-hour traffic and roaring jets would seem to have the upper hand over nature’s more subtle sounds? Which animals in their right mind would want to live there, of all places?Quite a lot, it turns out! I started tagging along on Jen’s walks and, at her urging, we soon bought some cameras. In no time at all we began to see these woods and wetlands with the eyes of the enthusiastic wildlife photographers that the refuge was teaching us to become. One of our first photo walks was spent under sunny skies in the company of several white-tailed does and their fawns in February 2009. We were charmed to no end and have been going back ever since.

We have photographed fox kits at their den, glimpsed something of the profoundly social lives of deer, and learned to name birds we had no idea existed, much less along the scrubby right-of-way of a buried pipeline. Mink raise their young on refuge grounds; river otters and beavers are regularly seen in Darby Creek and the refuge’s various lakes. Many Philadelphians know that the refuge is home to one of the city’s breeding pairs of bald eagles. The refuge is far from pristine, to be sure, but – thanks to the Clean Water Act and similar laws – it’s clean enough for top-of-the-food-chain predators to thrive there again.

Many older Philadelphians from the area recall Tinicum Marsh as a swamp where the bodies were buried, quite literally. An educational visitor center and ADA-compliant walkways are among the improvements effected by the Fish and Wildlife Service in the past 40 years. But the refuge always reminds you it’s a part of the city. Spring doesn’t just bring forth warblers, but also dudes taking nudie shots of “models” in the woods. Middle-aged birders from Mount Airy rub shoulders with Southwest Philly kids who ride their bikes around the refuge’s trails, raucously and without a care for middle-class ways of enjoying nature. Dog walkers pretend to leash their dogs when they see you coming down the path.

Clearly, the differences between a federal wildlife refuge and a neighborhood park often exist more on paper than on the ground. But we’re as happy here as in more remote wild places, perhaps even happier because we’ve learned how to be wildlife photographers here and because this improbable refuge has shown us that people and nonhuman nature can, under the right circumstances, coexist in an ever more urbanized world.

Tweet