Autumn, Beggars-tick Wildlife Refuge

A few photos from Beggars-tick Wildlife Refuge, a Metro-run wetland area out in outer SE Portland. Metro's info page about the place insists you need to visit twice to really appreciate the place -- once in the winter, to get the full wetlands experience, and again in the summer, to experience the wildlife and plants and so forth. So naturally I showed up in autumn instead.

I parked at the south end, next to the Springwater Corridor trail, and wandered in for a look around. I didn't go all that far, actually; the wetland parts weren't completely wet yet, but they were muddy enough to convince me not to go any further. I think there must be another entrance somewhere further north that gives more access to the place. I haven't yet found a detailed map of the place showing trails and so forth, so I'm not 100% sure about that.

Also, it looked as though homeless people might be living in the refuge somewhere, and there weren't any other visitors at the time I was there, which gave me another reason not to wander blithely off into the underbrush.

The rather off-putting name of the place has a very prosaic explanation, as it turns out. A "Beggars-tick" is a type of plant, various species of the genus Bidens. It's considered an invasive weed in many parts of the world, but here it's a native plant. I didn't know what it looked like before I went, and I don't recall seeing anything that looked like it while I was there. So, in short, I don't have any photos of the refuge's eponymous plant. Sorry.

It seems the refuge hasn't been a refuge all that long, roughly 1992-93. Here's an interesting doc about the wetlands restoration project, from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

All in all, I'm not sure this was my most successful "expedition" ever. I just saw one corner of the place, and took some decent but rather generic fall photos that could be from anywhere. Oh, well. There's always next time, I guess.