The Kah Tai Lagoon Nature Park was treated to two weeks of environmentally-friendly care to kick off 2024, thanks to the city of Port Townsend, the Admiralty Audubon Society, and the Washington Conservation Corps.

Working for roughly 10 days starting Jan. 2, a crew of half a dozen WCC members removed invasive trees and weeds at Kah Tai — primarily the six-to-eight-inch invasive Lombardy poplar trees, adjacent to Chase Bank. Similar to what occurred last fall, felled trees were placed in neat piles on the ground, which then serve as habitat for native species as the wood decomposes.

Admiralty Audubon paid for the first abbreviated week of the year, while the city paid for the second. City parks staff remained onsite to monitor the WCC crew’s work and ensure proper signage and safety procedures were followed, according to Michael Todd, City of Port Townsend parks and recreation manager.

Rick Jahnke, president of Admiralty Audubon, was onsite Jan. 3 to watch and show his support for WCC crew supervisor Kristopher Clark and team, as they cleared out poplars to protect the Pacific madrone trees that Jahnke and fellow Audubon members previously planted.

“The poplars just crowd right in, so the madrones are still struggling,” Jahnke said.

Clark, who led another WCC crew last October, said poplar trees can grow as much as 12 feet in a single year, and it’s because of their significant rates of growth and reproduction, as well as their density of clustering, that native seedlings need to be defended from the invasive trees’ encroachment.

When asked why WCC crews don’t simply clear out all the existing poplars at Kah Tai, Clark said some of the standing poplars provide the sort of habitat that the WCC and Admiralty Audubon hope madrone trees will provide, once they’ve grown tall enough.

More practically, Clark admitted that WCC crews aren’t certified to cut down the larger poplars, and as the WCC members emphatically expressed to The Leader, they believe in going by the book.

Clark explained that each WCC team includes a supervisor (himself) and five members, three of whom worked with Clark in Kah Tai last October, and two of whom were new to working in this park but already plan to return for a second working party.

Clark noted that the Department of Ecology and AmeriCorps make such projects possible from the state  the WCC crew with meeting spaces and access to equipment.

Clark expressed his gratitude, and also cited examples of how their work has already changed things for the better, as he recalled seeing an owl hunt down mice it wouldn’t have spotted through the poplar cover before.

Not only do the WCC crew members take care not to fell invasive trees when it’s too windy, so as to avoid accidentally damaging any native seedlings when they fall, but they also exercise extreme caution in how they apply herbicide, to prevent felled poplars from growing back.

“We never spray herbicide, because that gives us less control,” Clark said. “Instead, we grind the stumps down to the ground, and carefully paint herbicide onto them. A handful of folks from the public have passed by, and asked why we were cutting down trees in the park, but as soon as they understood the trees were an invasive species, they were all for it.”